WPS compliance checker
Whether a payroll month clears the Wage Protection System threshold, and which employees are the problem. The rule changed on 1 June 2026 — 85% instead of 80%, and now tested on every worker as well as on the total — so the month you pick decides which resolution is applied.
Add the employees and what each is being paid, and the verdict appears here — the establishment percentage, whether it clears the threshold in force for that month, and the rows that will be the problem.
Questions this raises
- What is the WPS compliance threshold in the UAE?
- Since 1 June 2026, 85% of the total wages due, under Ministerial Resolution No. 340 of 2026 — and the same 85% applies to each individual worker as well as to the establishment's total. Before that date, Ministerial Resolution No. 598 of 2022 applied and set 80% measured only against the establishment's total wage bill.
- When are wages due under the new WPS rules?
- On the first day of the Gregorian month following the one they relate to. The fifteen-day grace period that existed under the 2022 resolution was removed, and enforcement now begins from the due date itself.
- What happens if a company misses the WPS deadline?
- Enforcement is automatic and escalates: notices at day two, no new work permits at day five, administrative fines and reclassification at day eleven, automatic registration of labour disputes and permit suspension at day sixteen, and precautionary attachment, travel bans and referral to the Public Prosecution at day twenty-one.
- Who is exempt from WPS?
- The resolution lists specific categories — an employee with a wage dispute before the courts, one on approved unpaid leave, one reported absent, one detained by judicial order, one whose wages are paid outside the UAE under an approved arrangement, and holders of a mission work permit of up to three months. Everybody else counts, and a company on its own view of what ought to be exempt is a company relying on something MOHRE has not agreed to.
- Does WPS apply to free zone companies?
- It depends on the free zone. DIFC and ADGM employees hold permits from those authorities and sit outside MOHRE's system entirely. Other free zones vary — some have adopted WPS, some run their own wage protection arrangement, and some have not mandated a mechanism. This checker answers for the MOHRE mainland rule.
A file that submits cleanly can still be wrong
This checks the amounts. A SIF is also rejected outright for a missing labour card number or a malformed routing code — one bad field and the whole file bounces, on payday. Real Workforce generates the file from the payroll run and refuses to produce one at all while any row is incomplete, because an error at the desk is cheap and the same error at the bank is not.