Your salary is stable in dirhams.
The rupee underneath it is not.

The AED has been pegged to the US dollar at a fixed 3.6725 rate since 1997, so it isn’t the currency that moves. The rupee is what moves, and it doesn’t move gently: PKR traded near Rs225 to the dollar in 2022, slid past Rs285 by 2023, a fall of more than a quarter in about a year, and has since been stabilized by the State Bank near Rs278 through 2025 and 2026. Because AED tracks the dollar, every one of those swings changes what your fixed dirham salary is actually worth back home, even though your AED balance hasn’t moved at all.

Converting everything to a single number at “today’s rate” hides this: a Karachi property bought for PKR 30 million five years ago and an AED fixed deposit opened last month both need to be tracked in the currency they’re actually held in, with the rate that applied on the day recorded next to them, not silently rewritten every time you check your balance. Apps like NetWorth+ handle it by letting every account keep its own currency and locking in the exchange rate on the date of each entry, so a rupee asset logged in 2023 isn’t retroactively repriced at 2026’s rate.

The Roshan Digital Account (RDA) is a State Bank of Pakistan scheme, run through partner banks, that lets a non-resident Pakistani open a Pakistani account remotely, in USD, PKR, GBP, EUR, SAR or AED, without a branch visit; by February 2026 it had crossed 900,000 accounts and $12 billion in cumulative inflows. Its best-known product is the Naya Pakistan Certificate (NPC), a government-backed term certificate with tenors from 3 months to 5 years; as of 2026 PKR certificates have been paying roughly 9.5 to 11 percent annually and foreign-currency ones considerably less, reflecting the currency risk PKR carries, with profit taxed at a flat 10 percent withholding.

Beyond NPCs, an RDA gives access to Pakistani government T-bills and Pakistan Investment Bonds, mutual funds, Roshan Equity for trading on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, and financing products like Roshan Apna Ghar for buying a home. The feature that matters most: RDA funds carry full repatriation rights, meaning principal and profit can be sent back to your overseas account at any time without prior approval from the bank or the State Bank, a guarantee ordinary resident Pakistani accounts don’t carry.

The instinct to convert everything to a single number and watch it climb produces false comfort or false panic with a currency pair this volatile: your AED savings didn’t get “worth more” the week PKR fell 4 percent, and your Pakistan-based EMI didn’t get cheaper the week the rupee recovered; both figures were real, in their own currency, the whole time. A steadier approach is to track net worth by category and currency rather than only a blended figure: know your AED liquid savings, your PKR assets and your liabilities in each currency on their own terms.

Remittances into Pakistan are, in effect, a stream of AED-to-PKR conversions, and the UAE alone sent $8.81 billion in FY2025-26, the country’s second-largest source after Saudi Arabia. A more useful habit than chasing the exchange rate is deciding your remittance as a fixed PKR target tied to a specific obligation, so a rate swing shows up as a visible, trackable number. Keep the exchange rate that applied on the day attached to each historical entry rather than today’s rate, which is what our expat net worth calculator is built to help with.