The paper analyses and theorises the role of wages in global labour markets in the processes of class formation in the Gulf. It disaggregates the usual spatialisation of class in the Gulf into a division between a working-class foreigner and a capitalist-elite citizen. Using wages as an entry point, it shows how class intersects with the governance and regulation of Gulf labour in interesting ways. As feminist political economy teaches us, wages reflect how we value particular forms of work and also how the attribution of value is institutionalised through wages (Peterson 2003; Hoskyns and Rai 2007). A view of wages uncovers certain patterns of work and class formation and how these processes occur in global labour markets like those in the Gulf. With few exceptions (e.g. Hanieh 2011; Hashimi 2019; Kanna 2020), most scholarship on the Gulf fails to take class seriously, even considering the analysis of class irrelevant. This argument, dominant in rentier state literature, proposes that in some modes of production like rentier, redistributive states, very little production occurs and thus class relations become less vital. In contrast, but in conversation with an emerging literature, this paper underlines the significance of including class. Using the departure point of wages allows us to unpack class in the Gulf, making the following two claims. First, wages substantiate the view of Gulf labour as inherently and intensely global, and subject to flows, contested sovereignty, and ideologies that circulate in global capitalism. Second, wages – their determination, distribution, and giving – underpins relations of inclusion and exclusion which reveal how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces particular tensions and perceptions of power and value that influence labour relations and reproduce class. Overall, this lens reveals the dialectic of neoliberal reform or the ‘invisible hand’ of market regulation in conflict with the ‘visible’ hand of state regulation in terms of labour protection and migration control. This tension sits at the heart of labour governance in the Gulf, and is a regulatory force running alongside and in between the various actors and institutions in multiple levels and spaces of governance. These dynamics therefore not only complicate assumptions about class in the Gulf, but also help explain the ebbs and flows in the successes and failures of labour market policies, and the forms of social resistance.