Why Nepali workers are turning from the Gulf to Europe

For two decades the default destination for a Nepali worker leaving Tribhuvan International Airport was the Gulf or Malaysia, and it still is for most. But the direction of travel has changed at the margin, and the margin is where an employer sources. Europe took 25,697 Nepali labour approvals in FY 2021/22, 4.0 percent of the total. By FY 2024/25 the figure was 72,953, or 8.69 percent, a rise of roughly 184 percent in four years on Centre for the Study of Labour and Mobility and Department of Foreign Employment (DOFE) data. The Gulf still moves far larger numbers, but the worker preference inside the candidate pool has tilted toward Europe, and the reasons are structural, not seasonal. Three forces drive the shift, the wage gap, the conditions gap and the European shortage, and each one changes how a destination employer should open a Nepal corridor now.

The Gulf still dominates the count, but the share is moving

Read the destination data correctly before drawing the conclusion. The Gulf Cooperation Council states plus Malaysia accounted for 81.3 percent of new approvals in the Nepal Labour Migration Report 2024 (MoLESS), and the United Arab Emirates overtook Malaysia to sit at the top of the FY 2024/25 destination table. In the first two fiscal months of FY 2025/26 the UAE alone took 37,381 workers, a 41.4 percent share, on Nepal Rastra Bank figures (Table 26, 26 October 2025). So this is not an exodus from the Gulf.

What is moving is the composition. Over those same two months Saudi Arabia fell 15.7 percent to 11,923 and Qatar fell 3.1 percent to 8,340, while total outflow still rose 17.9 percent. Workers are not leaving the corridor, they are re-sorting inside it, away from the traditional Gulf construction destinations and toward the UAE at the top of the Gulf and toward Europe at the edges. For the European share specifically, the first eight months of FY 2024/25 ran 46 percent ahead of the prior year, 34,366 against 23,510, with Romania up 136.34 percent to 17,830. The trend is real and the candidate pool feels it. For the full corridor numbers see Nepal labour migration by the numbers.

The wage gap is the first reason, and it is large

A worker compares two contracts and the European one wins on the headline figure. The Qatari minimum basic salary for a domestic helper is QR 1,000, roughly USD 275 a month. Treat that as illustrative of the floor rather than a current quote for a tradesman, but the order of magnitude holds across low-grade Gulf work. Against it sits Croatia's gross statutory minimum of EUR 1,050 a month as of January 2026, about EUR 800 net, and Romania's gross minimum of EUR 795 a month, rising to EUR 849 from July 2026. Even at the statutory floor the European contract pays multiples of the Gulf basic salary, and skilled trades sit well above the floor.

Anchor on the statutory minimums, because they are the hard numbers. Trade-specific net wages from manpower consultancies, for instance EUR 1,100 to 1,500 net cited for Croatian bricklayers and welders, are indicative and should be read as a range, not a guarantee. The point for the worker is the same either way: the same welding skill, certified to the same ISO 9606 coupon, clears a materially higher contract wage in Zagreb than in Doha. The wage band by trade on the Croatian corridor is set out in Salary expectations for Nepal workers in Croatia.

Working conditions and the kafala question

The second reason is conditions, and here the evidence is partly settled and partly contested, so attribute it carefully. Saudi Arabia announced in June 2025 that it was ending the kafala sponsorship system that ties a worker's legal status to a single employer, a change affecting an estimated 13 million migrant workers (ImpACT International, medium confidence). The announcement is real, the practical effect on the ground is still being tested, and a Nepali candidate weighing destinations does not assume the change has fully landed.

Against that reform sit specific, recent reports of conditions on Gulf projects. A FairSquare report in May 2026 documented Nepali workers on Saudi Aramco's USD 21 billion Marjan Increment project working 12 to 14 hour days in temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius, with passport confiscation and faintings on site. Riyadh hit roughly 46 degrees Celsius in July 2024, among the hottest days recorded since 1940 (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre). A study of 186 infertile men in eastern Nepal found 46 percent were Gulf returnees, the single biggest risk factor in that sample (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, medium confidence). None of these is a Europe-wide guarantee of better conditions, but in the candidate's mental ledger they sit on the Gulf side of the comparison, against the European residence-permit and labour-rights frame on the other side.

The contrast a worker draws is concrete:

• Legal status. A European work and residence permit attaches the worker's right to remain to a residence document, with family-route and renewal pathways that vary by member state, rather than to a single sponsor.
• Heat regime. The Gulf summer midday outdoor-work ban (Qatar bans outdoor work 10:00 to 15:30 from 1 June to 15 September) is itself an admission of the conditions European construction sites do not impose.
• Working hours. The 12 to 14 hour day documented on Gulf megaprojects sits against EU working-time rules, which a worker on a Romanian or Croatian permit can name even if enforcement varies.

The European shortage is doing the pulling

Worker preference would not matter if there were no demand to meet it. There is. The European Labour Authority's 2024 shortage report, published 27 June 2025, classified 430 occupations as in shortage in at least one member state, with welders, electricians, construction trades, healthcare and hospitality the most acute. This is the post-2022 blue-collar gap that has pulled South Asian labour into central and eastern Europe, and Nepal has filled a visible part of it.

The Romanian and Croatian numbers show the pull in operation. Romania held a 100,000 foreign-worker quota across 2022 to 2025, and Nepal is its single largest source at 20,636 workers, ahead of Sri Lanka at 16,115. Construction made up roughly 75,000 of Croatia's 2025 permits, 36.3 percent of the total, and Nepal supplied the largest share of that workforce. Croatia reported 35,635 Nepalis in active employment in early 2025, now its largest foreign workforce, having surpassed the Bosnian count (Croatian Employment Service, as reported). Romania led Europe with roughly 28,000 Nepali workers in FY 2024/25; Croatia stood at 14,240 in the most recent year, up from just 5 permits seven years earlier. The shortage is the demand, the wage gap is the incentive, and the two together explain why the European corridor has tripled.

What the shift does to your sourcing

The supply is real, and for an employer that is the good news. It is also the catch. The same shift that fills your shortlist is filling everyone else's, and the competition for the named-shortage trades is rising faster than the headcount. A welder certified 3G or 6G to ISO 9606, a steel fixer, a formwork carpenter, a CNC operator: these are the workers two Romanian sites and a Croatian one are all bidding for at the same time. The semi-skilled and unskilled pool is deep, but Nepal's migrant skill profile is 74.5 percent unskilled, 24 percent semi-skilled and only 1.5 percent skilled (MoLESS), so the certified-trade end of the pool is thin relative to demand and getting thinner.

Three practical consequences follow for a file you open now:

• Wage has to clear two floors, not one. The contract wage must clear the destination labour-market test and the DOFE Job Order minimum standard for the destination. A wage set at the Gulf reflex level will fail both, and on a rising market it will also lose the worker to a competing offer before mobilisation closes.
• Speed protects the shortlist. On a tightening trade pool, a roster held warm beats a cold search. The Werklist corridor benchmark is 95 to 120 days from signed demand letter to first shift, compressing to 50 to 70 days against a standby roster. The difference is a function of whether the certified welders are already trade-tested when your letter lands.
• The governance gap is real and you carry it. Nepal's European migration tripled almost entirely without bilateral agreements. Romania is the only concluded European pact (signed 6 October 2023, with Nepali sources also citing 2 October 2023, by Minister Sharat Singh Bhandari and Romanian Minister Simona Bucura-Oprescu). Croatia, the second-largest Nepali workforce in Europe, has no signed BLA. The protection a Romanian worker gets from a treaty, a Croatian worker gets only from the recruiter's standards and the contract. That is set out in Nepal bilateral labour agreements with Europe.

The employer-pays line holds either way

One point the wage comparison can obscure: the worker pays nothing toward the move on a Werklist file, in the Gulf or in Europe. Nepal's Free Visa Free Ticket policy, announced in 2015, obliges the foreign employer to bear visa and ticket, but it covers only seven destinations, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Malaysia, and the EU is not among them. For European placements the zero-cost obligation does not flow from that Nepali scheme. It flows from Werklist's IOM IRIS aligned model, which places the recruitment fee on the employer side regardless of destination, in line with the ILO fair-recruitment principles. Werklist's Kathmandu branch operates as Blusift Nepal, holds a DOFE recruitment licence, runs its own trade-testing, and works files through the DOFE office at Maharajgunj every week.

The structural shift is clear enough to plan around: the Gulf still moves the volume, Europe is taking a rising share, the wage and conditions gap explains the worker preference, and the European shortage explains the demand. The constraint is the certified-trade pool, and it is competitive. To scope your corridor against the live trade availability, send the brief, trade, certification level, headcount and destination, to the Kathmandu branch at /contact-companies, one business day to the corridor fit and the realistic mobilisation window.