An employee in month eight asks how much leave they have. Someone else is on day 20 of sick leave and payroll closes on Thursday. Eid has just been announced, and the warehouse still needs a crew. Three ordinary questions — and each one has a statutory answer.
UAE leave is not a matter of company goodwill. Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 sets out what employees are entitled to: annual leave, a tiered sick leave scale, maternity and parental leave, bereavement leave and paid public holidays. Get one of those wrong and the mistake lands on a payslip.
This guide walks through each entitlement in plain terms, then shows where manual tracking tends to break. If you want the product side — request flows, approvals, self-service — our leave management software guide covers that. This one is about the rules.
Why Leave Is a Compliance Question
Every leave type carries a pay treatment. Annual leave is fully paid. Sick leave drops to half pay, then to unpaid. Maternity leave splits between full and half compensation. When those transitions are tracked in email threads and paper forms, the record of who was off — and on what terms — drifts away from what payroll actually pays.
That drift is where disputes start. An employee believes they had full pay for a sick week that payroll treated as half pay. A balance that was never updated gets encashed at the wrong figure. Neither is fraud. Both are avoidable.
Annual Leave: Two Stages of Entitlement
Annual leave in the UAE depends on how long someone has been with you.
Six Months to One Year
Once an employee has completed six months of service, they accrue two days of paid leave for each completed month, up to the end of their first year.
After One Year
From then on, the entitlement is 30 calendar days of paid annual leave each year. Note the word calendar — the count runs across the days of the leave period, not just working days.
Carryover and Encashment
Unused days are not simply lost. They can be carried forward or paid out where the employer and employee agree in writing, and the payout is worked out on the employee's basic wage, not total package. That distinction matters when allowances make up a large share of pay — and it feeds directly into end-of-service figures, which we unpack in gratuity math, demystified.
Sick Leave: The Three-Tier Scale
Sick leave is where manual payroll goes wrong most often, because the pay rate changes as the days add up.
Once probation is complete, an employee can take up to 90 days of sick leave per year of service, either in one continuous stretch or spread across separate absences. Those days are paid in three tiers:
- Days 1 to 15 — full pay
- Days 16 to 45 — half pay
- Days 46 to 90 — unpaid
The trap is the boundary. An employee who crosses from day 15 to day 16 halfway through a pay period needs two different rates on the same payslip. Do that by hand across several employees and someone will be paid the wrong amount.
Family and Compassionate Leave
The current law also protects time off around births and bereavements.
Maternity Leave
60 calendar days in total — the first 45 at full pay, the remaining 15 at half pay.
Parental Leave
Five paid working days, available to either parent. They can be taken together or separately, as long as they fall within the first six months after the child's birth.
Bereavement Leave
Five paid days following the death of a spouse, and three days for the death of other close family members covered by the law.
Each of these needs its own request type, its own balance and, usually, supporting paperwork reviewed before payroll runs. A single generic "leave" form cannot carry that much distinction.
Public Holidays and Working Rest Days
The UAE Cabinet announces the official paid public holidays through the year — occasions such as Eid Al Fitr, Eid Al Adha and UAE National Day. Those announcements arrive through the year, so your holiday calendar has to be easy to keep current.
Some operations cannot stop for a holiday. When an employee is required to work on a declared public holiday or a scheduled rest day, the law expects them to be compensated — through a replacement rest day or a premium of 50% on their basic wage. Check current MOHRE guidance for exactly how that applies to your contracts, and make sure the compensation is recorded in the same payroll run as the shift itself, not on a side spreadsheet.
Where Employee Management Software Fits
None of these rules is complicated on its own. The difficulty is applying all of them, for every employee, every month, without a gap between the leave record and the payslip. That is the job good employee management software UAE employers rely on should do.
- Leave types are configured per company. You set up the types and policies you actually use, with their own balances and accrual rules, rather than working around a fixed list.
- Balances update as leave accrues and is taken, so the answer to "how much do I have?" is on screen, not in someone's inbox.
- Requests move through an approval workflow, leaving a record of who approved what and when.
- Approved half-pay sick days and unpaid leave carry into the payroll run as deductions, so the tier boundary is handled by the system rather than by memory. See how that connects in WPS payroll.
- A public holiday calendar and team calendar show who is off, and when, across the company.
- Employees and managers use a self-service portal that works in a mobile browser — submitting, approving and checking balances without chasing HR. Our employee self-service guide goes deeper.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Public Holidays Count Inside the 30-Day Annual Leave?
It depends. Because annual leave is counted in calendar days, a public holiday that falls inside an approved vacation may be treated as part of those 30 days unless your company policy says otherwise. Practice varies, so set out your position in policy and check current MOHRE guidance before applying it.
Can an Employer Terminate an Employee on Sick Leave?
An employer generally cannot terminate an employee for being on approved sick leave, particularly before their 90-day entitlement is used up. Termination is a serious step with its own legal requirements — take advice on the specific case rather than relying on a general rule.
How Does HRHub Handle Leave Approvals?
Managers review and approve requests through the HRHub portal, which works from a phone browser as well as a desktop. The team calendar shows who else is away in the same period, so the approver has the context to decide.
Get the Rules Right Once
UAE leave law is specific, and the specifics are what employees check: the day count, the pay rate, the holiday that may or may not come out of their balance. Configure those rules once, let balances and payroll draw from the same record, and the monthly argument over leave simply stops happening.
To see how it would work for your team, look at our pricing or talk to us.
