There is no benchmark to look up. We went looking for one and wrote down what we found in where the fractional numbers come from. The largest survey of independent executives in the world is 1% Middle East, and the salary guides everyone quotes measure full-time base pay.
So the number has to be built. Here is how.
Retainer, not day rate
Price the seat as a monthly retainer against agreed days.
A day rate does three things to the engagement, all of them bad. It moves the conversation to hours, which is the frame of an advisor rather than a leader. It shrinks the fee in exactly the months the seat is working well and needs fewer interventions. And it makes every extra hour a negotiation, so the leader either under-serves or works free.
A retainer says: this seat is yours for these days, this is what it costs, this is what it owns. That is the instrument being sold.
Keep a day rate in the contract as the unit for work beyond the agreed days. It is a settlement mechanism, not the headline.
Building the number
Three inputs.
The alternative. What does the company avoid. Cooper Fitch put a UAE CFO base at AED 61,000 to 92,000 a month in its 2025 guide, and base is one line of a package that also carries allowances, insurance, the visa, a search fee and end-of-service gratuity at 21 days of basic wage a year. That total is the ceiling the company is measuring you against.
The fraction. Two days a week is 40% of the seat's time and considerably more than 40% of its judgement, because a fractional leader arrives with the pattern already learned. The fraction is where the negotiation happens, and the honest answer is that it is not linear in either direction.
Your own cost base. The licence, the visa, medical cover, professional indemnity where the seat warrants it, an accountant, corporate tax at 9% above AED 375,000, and the weeks you are not billing. A leader who prices as though every week is billed will discover the gap in the first slow quarter.
The number that comes out of those three is a range, not a figure. Set the range, then hold it.
What sits inside the retainer, and what does not
Write all of this into the contract rather than discovering it in month four.
Inside. The agreed days. The leadership meeting. The board pack for your function. The team you direct. The diagnosis period at the start.
Outside. Travel beyond the agreed location. Work on a transaction, a fundraise or a due diligence exercise, which compresses months of work into weeks and should be priced separately. Any period that requires materially more days than contracted.
Naming the third one at the start is what stops an engagement quietly expanding until the leader is working four days for a two-day fee. It happens often, and it is usually nobody's fault.
Charge for the diagnosis
The first two or three weeks are the work. Access, interviews, reading the record, and a written diagnosis for the chief executive.
A leader who gives that away as a pitch has given away the most valuable output of the whole engagement and kept the least valuable. It also sets a frame that is hard to reverse: the leader who worked free for three weeks is being evaluated as a supplier.
If a company will not pay for a diagnosis, it is not ready to pay for the seat.
Renewal is the pricing event
Renewal, not the first contract, is where a fractional practice actually earns.
At the ninety-day review the scope and the fee reset together, and a leader whose metric moved is holding evidence rather than an argument. Heidrick's 2025 data across independent executives found 30% raised rates that year, 50% held them and 20% reduced them, so the market is steady rather than inflationary. That is global data, not Gulf data, and it should be read with the label on.
The stronger reason to be measured about increases is duration. In the same survey, 42% of engagements run beyond six months and 16% beyond a year, and among the most experienced independents 55% run engagements of twelve months or more. A relationship that runs three years at a fair number is worth more than one that runs eight months at a high one.
Publishing the number
A published band sets a ceiling with every future client. That is a real cost and it is why many senior leaders in this region decline to publish one.
It also removes an entire round of conversation with companies that were never going to reach your number, and it filters the enquiries you receive.
On Atlas the decision is yours and it is a switch on your own page: publish a band, or show on request. Your name and your mandates stay public either way, because a page nobody can read is worth nothing to the leader whose name is on it.