UAE overtime and public holiday calculator
Extra hours, night hours, a weekend worked and a public holiday worked are four different rules, and only the first two are priced by the hour. This works each one under the article that governs it, and shows the day off in lieu beside the cash wherever the law offers both.
Enter the basic salary and what was worked, and the answer appears here — the hourly rate, the statutory uplift on each kind of hour, and what a weekend or public holiday worked is worth against the day off the law offers instead.
Questions this raises
- How is overtime calculated in the UAE?
- An overtime hour is paid at the wage for a normal hour plus at least 25%, rising to at least 50% for hours worked between 10pm and 4am. Both are calculated on the basic wage, not the full package. Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, Article 19(2) and 19(3).
- What is paid for working a weekend or a public holiday?
- Neither is priced by the hour. Article 19(4) and Article 28(2) give the employer a choice: another day off, or the wage for that day at normal working-day rates plus an increase of at least 50% of the basic wage for it. A whole day, however many hours were actually worked.
- Is overtime paid on basic salary or the full wage?
- Basic. Article 19 says the overtime hour is 'calculated according to the basic wage'. This is the opposite of annual leave, which Article 29 pays at the full wage — the same employee in the same month, two different bases.
- How many overtime hours can an employer require?
- Two a day, and no more than 144 working hours in any three weeks, under Article 19(1). Hours worked beyond that are still owed for — the ceiling limits what may be required, not what must be paid — but requiring them is itself a breach.
- What is an overtime hour worth, exactly?
- The law does not say what to divide a monthly salary by to reach an hour. Two conventions are in use — the monthly wage over 30 days and then over the contracted daily hours, or the monthly wage over a contracted number of hours a month — and they differ by around a fifth on the same salary. This calculator asks which one your contract uses rather than choosing for you.
The hard part is knowing which hours were overtime
Pricing an overtime hour takes a line of arithmetic. Establishing that it happened, that it was approved, and that it fell in the night window takes an attendance record somebody trusts — Real Workforce derives the hours from clock records and holds them unpaid until somebody with the authority approves them, because overtime is the first thing attendance adds to a payslip.
Worth reading alongside this: basic salary versus full wage, which is the distinction the whole of Article 19 turns on.