Annual leave, and the two different wages it is paid at

The entitlement

Article 29 of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 sets annual leave with full wage at not less than:

• 30 days for each year of continuous service;
• 2 days for each month where the service term is more than six months and less than a year;
• a proportional leave for the part of the last year worked, where service ends before the balance is used.

"Not less than" is doing real work in that sentence. It is a floor: a contract or company policy may be more generous, and where it is, the better term applies. It may not be less, however it is drafted.

Under six months of service there is no statutory annual-leave entitlement at all. Between six and twelve months you accrue at two days per month — so eleven months of service is 22 days, not a pro-rated 27.5. The step up to the flat 30 days happens at the one-year mark.

Calendar days or working days?

The statute says "thirty days" and does not add the word working. Two things point to calendar days. First, the part-time provision in the Implementing Regulation is explicit where it means working days — it sets a floor of "five working days per year" — and the drafters did not use that word in Article 29. Second, Article 29(7) folds public holidays that fall inside your leave into the leave period, which only has a purpose if the count runs across the calendar.

Plenty of contracts instead express leave as 22 or 25 working days. That is permitted, but check the arithmetic against your own week rather than assuming it is equivalent: 30 calendar days is roughly 21–22 working days on a five-day week and roughly 25–26 on a six-day week. On a six-day week, "22 working days" is below the floor and the statutory 30 wins.

The two wages — the part that costs people money

This is the centre of the page, and it is where most summaries online quietly go wrong. The law values leave days at a different rate depending on what happens to them:

"Wage" and "basic wage" are separately defined in Article 1. Basic wage is the figure stipulated in the contract for the work itself, expressly excluding any allowances or benefits in kind. Wage is that basic figure plus the cash allowances and in-kind benefits allocated under the contract — housing, transport, cost-of-living allowances, sales or profit percentages. In UAE packages the gap between the two is rarely small and is often close to half.

Worth knowing before you argue about it. The government portal's plain-language summary describes the carry-over cash payment as calculated on basic salary. The Implementing Regulation's own text at Article 19(1) says the cash allowance in lieu of carrying leave forward is paid "according to the wage they receive at the time of their entitlement to the leave", and reserves the basic-wage rule for Article 19(2), the end-of-service payout. Where a portal summary and the regulation it summarises diverge, the regulation is the instrument that binds — but expect a payroll department to quote the portal, and expect to have to point at the text.

A worked example

Package of AED 20,000 a month, of which AED 10,000 is basic salary and AED 10,000 is housing and transport allowance. Twelve days of leave are untaken.

Same twelve days, half the money. The practical conclusion is unglamorous and worth acting on: on a package with heavy allowances, burn your leave balance before you resign, because days taken are worth roughly double days banked. The reverse is true too — if your package is nearly all basic salary, it makes very little difference either way.

The 30-day divisor above is standard payroll and MOHRE practice for converting a monthly figure to a daily one. It is not written into Article 29, and a contract that specifies a different divisor will be applied as written, so check yours before assuming the number.

Carrying leave over: the half-balance cap

Article 29(5) lets you carry forward your balance to the following year with the employer's agreement. What that clause does not say — and what the Implementing Regulation does, at Article 19(1) — is that a worker may carry forward not more than half of the annual leave. The alternative offered in the same sentence is to agree with the employer to take a cash allowance instead.

So the realistic menu at the end of a year with an unused balance is: take the days, carry at most half of them into next year, or convert them to cash by agreement. What an employer may not do is simply let the balance sit and grow indefinitely — Article 29(8) prohibits preventing a worker from using leave accrued for more than two years, unless the worker has chosen to carry it forward or to be paid for it.

Who picks the dates

The employer may. Article 29(4) says leave is taken in the year it is earned, that the employer may set the dates according to work requirements and in agreement with the worker, or rotate leave among staff to keep the business running — and that the worker must be notified of the date at least one month in advance. That month's notice is a genuine obligation and the point on which "you're on leave from Sunday" instructions fail.

Public holidays that land inside your leave

They are counted as part of the annual leave, not added to it — Article 29(7) — unless the contract or the establishment's regulations provide something more favourable to the worker. So booking a fortnight around Eid does not buy you extra days by default, though a policy that says otherwise is valid and enforceable.

Working on a public holiday is a different matter and better paid: under Article 28(2) the employer must give another day off in exchange, or pay the day at the normal rate plus at least 50% of the basic wage for that day.

Three provisions people miss

• Leave during probation. Article 29(3) lets an employer grant leave out of the balance during the probationary period — and expressly preserves the worker's right to be compensated for the remainder of the balance if they do not pass probation. Leave taken on probation is not forfeited by failing it.
• The payout does not depend on how you left. Article 29(9) grants wage for accrued leave days "regardless of the leave duration" and without reference to whether you resigned or were dismissed. Unlike gratuity, there is no conduct-based reduction written into the leave provision.
• Part-timers accrue too. Implementing Regulation Article 18 converts contracted hours into working days against the full-time year, with a floor of five working days a year and a fraction of a day counted as a whole day. A part-time contract that grants no annual leave is not compliant.

Where this sits at the end of service

Untaken leave and end-of-service gratuity are two separate payments that happen to share one input — the basic wage. Both are diminished by the same thing: a contract that loads the package into allowances and keeps basic low. If you are working out what you are owed on exit, do the two together and start from the split itself.

1. Find the basic figure on your contract, not on your payslip's gross line — see basic salary vs total salary, which is the number that quietly decides both amounts.
2. Run the gratuity with the gratuity calculator.
3. Add the untaken leave days at basic wage ÷ 30 per day.
4. Add notice pay if notice was cut short — see notice, resignation and dismissal.
5. Only then look at a settlement figure. A full-and-final signed before you have added these up closes off the difference.

If the leave payout simply does not arrive with the rest, it travels the same route as any other unpaid entitlement: the free MOHRE complaint, and the two-year deadline that ends late claims — set out in what to do when an employer won't pay.

The other leave types, briefly

Annual leave is one of nine or so entitlements in the private sector. The ones most often needed: sick leave — up to 90 days per year of service after probation, paid at full wage for the first 15 days, half wage for the next 30 and unpaid for the remaining 45, with the illness notified to the employer within three days. Maternity leave — 60 days, of which 45 are fully paid and 15 half paid. Parental leave — 5 working days, available to either parent, within the first six months. Bereavement leave — 5 days for a spouse, 3 for a parent, child, sibling, grandchild or grandparent. Study leave — 10 working days a year for exams, after two years of service. Hajj leave — up to 30 days, unpaid, once per employer.