UAE sick leave pay — 15 days full, 30 half, 45 unpaid

Sick leave is the clearest rule in UAE employment law and one of the most frequently mispaid. The reason is not that anybody misreads the bands. It is that paying them correctly means knowing where in the year each absence sits — and that is a running calculation, not a lookup.

The three bands

Under Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, Article 31, an employee may take up to 90 days of sick leave per year, continuous or intermittent, paid as:

• The first 15 days at full wage.
• The next 30 days at half wage.
• The remaining 45 days unpaid.

The three bands total 90. That is the whole entitlement for the year — not 90 days at each tier, and not 90 days per illness.

"Full wage" here means the total package, not the basic component. Sick leave and annual leave are both paid on the full wage; gratuity is not. See basic salary versus full wage for why that distinction costs money.

Where payroll actually goes wrong

Not on the first band. Fifteen days at full pay is what everybody expects and what every system does correctly.

It goes wrong at the boundaries. An employee who took nine days in March and takes eleven more in September has six days left in the full-pay band and five that fall into the half-pay band — inside a single absence. Paying that absence entirely at full pay, or entirely at half, are both wrong, and both are common. The split has to be applied per day against the year-to-date position, which means payroll needs the sick-leave history and not just this month's dates.

It also goes wrong on what resets and when. The 90 days run against the year, so the band an absence falls into depends on everything before it. A company that resets the counter on each new illness will overpay indefinitely and never notice, because the error always favours the employee and nobody complains about being paid too much.

This is the kind of rule that should live in the payroll engine rather than in a spreadsheet formula somebody maintains — payroll reads the leave ledger and applies the band, so the payslip and the ledger cannot disagree.

Notification and evidence

The employee has to notify the employer of the sickness within a short window and provide a medical report from an approved authority. Keep the report on the employee record. A year later, when the year-to-date bands are being questioned, the certificate is what establishes that the absence was sick leave at all rather than unauthorised absence — and which date it started on, which is what decides the band.

There are also circumstances in which sick pay is not due — notably during probation, and where the illness resulted from the employee's own misconduct. Both are narrower than people assume, so check the current text rather than applying a rule of thumb.

Sick leave is not the only 90-day rule

Maternity leave runs on the same shape and different numbers: 60 days, of which the first 45 are at full wage and the remaining 15 at half. If your system models sick leave as a special case rather than as a banded leave type, maternity will be the next thing that has to be built by hand.

The general form — a leave type with an ordered set of pay bands, applied against the year-to-date position — covers both, and covers whatever gets amended next.

What to keep

1. Every absence, with its start date. The date decides the band.
2. The medical report, on the employee record rather than in an inbox.
3. A year-to-date position that is calculated, not carried forward by hand.

Get those three and the bands take care of themselves. Miss the first one and every sick payment after it is a guess.

Sources

• Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation — the current labour law and ministerial resolutions.
• Awareness guide for private sector companies (MOHRE).

Written for HR and payroll teams as a summary, not as legal advice. Confirm any figure that decides a payment against the current law.