Practical GIS tools & UAE calculators

UAE Calculators

Five everyday calculators in one place

Alongside the GIS toolkit, Datum Bench provides free browser-based calculators for everyday UAE calculations. Choose a tab, enter your figures, and view the result without signing up.

• VAT: add VAT to a net amount or extract it from a VAT-inclusive total, with an adjustable rate.
• Salary: convert between annual, monthly, weekly, daily and hourly gross pay using your work schedule.
• Gratuity: estimate standard end-of-service benefits from basic salary and service dates, with the assumptions explained in the tool.
• Date: compare dates, count weekdays, or add and subtract days.
• Age: calculate age on a chosen date and days until the next birthday.

Salary and gratuity outputs are estimates, not final payroll or settlement figures. Review the eligibility notes and official sources in the calculator.

About the toolkit

Practical tools for everyday geospatial work

Geospatial projects often involve more than simply viewing coordinates on a map. Survey data may arrive in different coordinate reference systems, CAD drawings may need to be integrated with GIS datasets, and project deliverables may require a specific format such as CSV, KML, DXF or a projected coordinate system. Datum Bench brings several of these recurring tasks together in one simple interface.

The coordinate converter supports the projected and geographic systems most used in GIS and surveying workflows — convert Nahrwan 1967 to WGS84, UTM zone 39N/40N, Dubai Local TM (DLTM) to WGS84, plus global systems including ED50, NAD27, NAD83, ETRS89 and Web Mercator. The CSV to KML and CSV to DXF export tools turn coordinate data into a KML placemark file for Google Earth and web maps, or a DXF point file for CAD software. Separate converters handle angle (including DMS to decimal degrees), length, area and volume units, making the site useful for quick calculations as well as coordinate work.

The tools are designed with a simple principle: keep routine conversions accessible, transparent and convenient. The application runs in the browser, and the coordinate converter can process either an individual point or a CSV batch while preserving the other columns in the source file.

Why UAE survey data ends up in four different grids

The United Arab Emirates sits almost exactly on the boundary between UTM Zone 39N and Zone 40N, which runs along the 54°E meridian through the Al Dhafrah (Western) Region of Abu Dhabi. Depending on which side of that line a site falls, the same physical point is described by a completely different set of numbers.

On top of that, a lot of drawings still in circulation — utility records, older municipal plans, drainage networks — were originally surveyed on Nahrwan 1967, a pre-GPS datum built on the Clarke 1880 (RGS) ellipsoid. It doesn't line up with WGS 84 by a simple offset; converting it correctly needs the official EPSG datum-shift parameters, not a rough eyeball fit.

Dubai adds a third layer. Dubai Municipality standardised on its own grid, Dubai Local Transverse Mercator (DLTM, EPSG:3997), because a plain UTM zone distorts ground distances slightly at Dubai's longitude — annoying for construction layout, where every metre matters. DLTM fixes the scale factor to 1.0 at ground level instead.

The result: a single infrastructure project can require reading Nahrwan 1967 as-built drawings, delivering in WGS 84 UTM for a GIS platform, submitting site coordinates to Dubai Municipality in DLTM, and handing a KML file to a client — several conversions before lunch.