Employment & HR
Annual leave and public holidays
Thirty calendar days a year after twelve months' service, two days a month before that, and untaken leave has to be paid out. Companies that never tracked it discover the liability at the exit interview.
The entitlement
What the law gives, regardless of contract.
An employee is entitled to thirty calendar days of paid annual leave for each year of service once twelve months have been completed. Between six and twelve months of service the entitlement is two days per month. Public holidays are additional and are set federally each year. Leave is calculated in calendar days rather than working days, which means a two-week holiday spanning two weekends consumes fourteen days of entitlement rather than ten.
Untaken leave does not simply disappear. On termination an employee is entitled to be paid for accrued and untaken annual leave, calculated on basic salary, and there is no general power for an employer to write it off because the employee chose not to take it. The practical consequence falls on companies that never implemented leave tracking: a five-year employee who took two weeks a year instead of thirty days has accrued a substantial balance, and the sum becomes payable at exactly the point the relationship is ending. Tracking leave from day one costs nothing; reconstructing five years of it from memory does not.
The numbers
- After 12 months
- 30 calendar days per year
- 6 to 12 months
- 2 days per month
- Basis
- Calendar days, not working days
- Public holidays
- Additional, set federally each year
- Untaken leave
- Paid out on termination, on basic salary
- Carry-over
- Permitted subject to agreement and the law's limits
What it costs
In practice
How this is actually administered.
- Track leave from the first day of employmentEven with one employee. Reconstructing it later is the expensive version.
- Calculate in calendar daysA fortnight away consumes fourteen days, not ten. Employees frequently assume otherwise.
- Keep public holidays separateThey are additional to the thirty days, not part of them.
- Manage carry-over deliberatelyLarge untaken balances become cash liabilities at termination.
- Pay out accrued leave on exitCalculated on basic salary, alongside gratuity and any notice pay.
Related
Questions
Thirty calendar days a year after twelve months' service, and two days per month for service between six and twelve months.
Leave is calculated in calendar days, so weekends falling within a leave period are consumed.
Yes. Accrued untaken leave is paid out on termination, calculated on basic salary.
No. Public holidays are additional to the annual leave entitlement.
One question
How many people are on the payroll?
Then the order matters. Establishment card, then quota, then work permit, then entry permit, then medical, Emirates ID and contract registration. Skipping ahead to a signed offer letter before the quota exists is the usual way a start date slips by six weeks.
The first hire, in orderOr just ask usThis is the size where informal arrangements start costing money — salaries paid partly outside WPS, leave that was never tracked, gratuity nobody has accrued for. None of it is hard to fix now and all of it is expensive to fix at a MOHRE hearing.
What you are accruing without knowingOr just ask usThen Emiratisation quotas, WPS timing, ILOE subscriptions and health insurance renewals are running on separate calendars, and the penalty for each is levied per employee. Consolidating those dates is usually worth more than any single piece of advice.
What gets inspectedOr just ask us