UAE Labour Law

UAE working hours and overtime rules: a guide for employers

Ask a Dubai operations manager about overtime and you will usually get the right answer: eight hours a day, two hours of overtime at most, 25% on top. Ask the same manager what one cashier actually worked on the second Thursday of last month and things get harder. The law on working time is short and fairly clear. Disputes are won and lost on the records.

Below is what the federal law says, where the free zones depart from it, and what your attendance data has to capture so that payroll, the employee and, if it comes to that, MOHRE are looking at the same numbers.

Which rules apply to your employees?

For mainland companies the governing text is Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 on the Regulation of Employment Relationships, in force since 2 February 2022, read together with its Implementing Regulation, Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022. It covers the private sector. Federal and local government staff, the armed forces, police and security services, and domestic workers are outside it.

Most free zones have no working-time regime of their own. DMCC's employment FAQs, for instance, say that employment there is governed by the federal Decree-Law and its Implementing Regulation. The exceptions that matter are the two financial free zones: the DIFC has its own Employment Law (DIFC Law No. 2 of 2019) and ADGM has the ADGM Employment Regulations 2024. A head office in DIFC and a warehouse in Al Quoz means two rulebooks.

The baseline: eight hours a day, 48 a week

Article 17 sets normal working hours at a maximum of eight a day or 48 a week. A five-day week gives 40 hours of normal time; a six-day week reaches the 48-hour ceiling. The Cabinet can raise or lower daily hours for particular sectors or categories of worker, so if a roster assumes a longer “normal” day, make sure a specific rule really covers those staff.

Breaks catch people out. Under Article 18, nobody should work more than five consecutive hours without a break, or breaks, of at least an hour in total, and that time does not count as working hours. A retail shift from 10:00 to 19:00 with an hour for lunch is eight hours of work, not nine.

Commuting is the other trap. Travel between home and work is not working time, except in cases the Implementing Regulation sets out. DMCC's summary of those cases covers time on the road in bad weather when the National Centre of Meteorology has issued warnings, delays on employer-provided transport caused by an accident or breakdown, and contracts that expressly count the commute. If you bus staff from accommodation in Sonapur or Musaffah to site, a breakdown on the way in can become working time.

Overtime: two hours a day, 144 hours every three weeks

Article 19 allows an employer to require overtime of up to two hours a day, and more only under conditions set by the Implementing Regulation. Whatever the arrangement, total working hours may not exceed 144 every three weeks.

The 144-hour limit gets far less attention than the daily cap, and it often bites harder. Divide it by three and you get exactly 48 hours a week. A business already running six eight-hour days has no room for regular overtime unless other weeks are shorter or the employee is in an excluded category. Six ten-hour days for three weeks comes to 180 hours. If your operation relies on routine overtime, get advice on how the limit applies to your staff; the two-hour daily cap is not the only constraint.

Overtime pay is calculated on the basic wage: the normal hourly rate plus at least 25%. Between 10 pm and 4 am the uplift rises to at least 50%, although employees who work in shifts are excluded from that night rate. Housing and transport allowances stay out of the calculation unless your contract is more generous.

For an employee on a basic hourly rate of AED 25, it works out like this:

Write down how you turn a monthly basic salary into an hourly rate, in the contract or a company policy, and use the same method every month. A method that drifts from one payroll run to the next is hard to defend once a former employee files a claim.

Who is outside the maximum-hours rules

The Implementing Regulation takes some categories out of the maximum-hours provisions. According to DMCC's FAQ, they are chairs and members of boards of directors; people in supervisory roles who exercise the employer's powers; ships' crews and others working at sea; work that technically requires successive shifts, as long as the average stays within 56 hours a week; and preparatory or complementary work that has to be done outside normal hours. “Supervisor” in a job title does not settle it. A supermarket shift lead who cannot hire, discipline or approve spending is hard to fit into that category.

Rest days and public holidays

Article 21 entitles every worker to at least one paid rest day a week, set by the contract or the work regulations, and it need not be Friday. If you need someone on their rest day, Article 19 gives you two options: another day off, or the day's wage plus at least 50% of the basic wage for that day. Apart from day workers, nobody can be asked to work more than two consecutive rest days. Public holidays work the same way under Article 28, with a substitute day off for each day worked or the day's wage plus at least 50% of basic.

Substitute days are where records usually go wrong. If a hotel moves a housekeeper's rest day from Friday to Tuesday, somebody has to log that Tuesday as a substitute day. Otherwise it can turn up as unpaid leave in one place and an absence in another, and the rota, the attendance log and payroll each tell a different story.

The summer midday break on outdoor sites

From 15 June to 15 September each year, work in open areas under direct sun is prohibited between 12:30 and 15:00 under Ministerial Resolution No. 44 of 2022. Work that cannot be interrupted for technical or operational reasons and urgent repairs to services such as water, electricity and telecoms are exempt, but the employer then has to provide shaded rest areas, cold drinking water and cooling. Press coverage of the 2026 season, the 22nd year of the rule, reported fines of AED 5,000 per worker and up to AED 50,000 where several workers are involved.

For contractors this turns an outdoor site day into two blocks. If the foreman records one arrival and one departure for the whole crew, nothing shows the break was observed. A check-out before 12:30 and a check-in after 15:00 is cheap evidence.

DIFC and ADGM work on a weekly average

Under Article 22 of the DIFC Employment Law, working time may not exceed an average of 48 hours per seven-day period over the reference period unless the employee has agreed in writing. The law also guarantees 11 consecutive hours of rest in every 24 (Article 24), an uninterrupted 24-hour rest each week (Article 25), and rest and prayer breaks of at least an hour when working time in a day exceeds six hours (Article 26). There is no statutory overtime premium. Overtime pay is a matter for the contract.

ADGM's guidance on its 2024 Regulations is similar. Weekly hours are capped at 48 unless the employee consents in writing, the Regulations set no express overtime pay requirement, and overtime terms are left to the employment contract or company policy.

Record-keeping differs as well. DIFC employers must keep payroll records that show, for hourly-paid employees, the hours worked each day. The records must be in English and kept for six years after employment ends (Article 16).

What your attendance records should be able to show

Federally, employers must keep workers' files and records, and each worker's file for at least two years after the end of service (Article 13). Arabic is the approved language for records, files and forms, with contracts and instructions issued in Arabic alongside a language the worker understands (Article 66). Neither article prescribes a timesheet format. A practical test is whether you could answer an overtime claim two years from now, which means having:

• the scheduled shift and the actual first in and last out for each person, each day;
• breaks, at least where they are not fixed in the schedule;
• where the check-in happened, for multi-site and field staff;
• who approved overtime and when, and whether it was paid or taken as time off;
• substitute rest days and public-holiday work, marked as such;
• corrections, with the original entry still visible.

Paper sign-in sheets at a site gate rarely survive two summers of dust and borrowed pens. Spreadsheets survive, but nobody can tell who changed what.

Where HelloPDKS fits

HelloPDKS is a QR-based time and attendance system. Each entrance or site gets a printed QR code or a HelloPDKS wall terminal whose code changes over time, and employees scan it with the mobile app. Location verification is optional, and scans made offline are queued and sent when the connection returns. Overtime is calculated from the records against the scheduled shift and goes to the manager to approve or reject. The period summary (days worked, late arrivals, early departures, overtime, leave) exports as CSV for your payroll software, which still produces your WPS file. Branch and department permissions keep each site manager to their own people.

Two things UAE teams should know. The interface is in English and Turkish, so English-speaking supervisors and staff can use it as it is. And the built-in working-time compliance report follows Turkish labour rules, so UAE checks such as the 144-hour ceiling have to be run on the exported data. If that suits you, request a demo and we will set up your first branch with you.