UAE End-of-Service Gratuity Calculator

End-of-service gratuity is the UAE's statutory leaving payment: when employment ends, the employer owes the employee a benefit computed from basic wage and length of service. It is not a bonus and not discretionary — it accrues by law, and this calculator estimates what has accrued.

The bands are simple. Each of the first five years of continuous service earns 21 days of basic wage; every year after the fifth earns 30 days. A part-year counts pro-rata once one full year is completed — six extra months after five full years adds half a year's accrual at the applicable rate. Below one full year of service, there is no entitlement at all.

Two inputs decide everything. The first is monthly basic wage: allowances for housing, transport and anything else are excluded, so enter the basic figure from the contract, not the total on the payslip. The second is time served: completed years plus completed extra months. Enter both and the tool builds the day count — years in the 21-day band and years in the 30-day band — then multiplies by the daily wage, basic wage divided by 30, and applies the statutory two-year-wage cap.

The arithmetic comes from Article 51 of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, the UAE Labour Law. Paragraph 2 sets the two bands: 21 days' wage for each year of the first five years of service, and 30 days' wage for each year after that. The part-year rule follows from the same article: once the one-year threshold is passed, a fraction of a year earns a fraction of the annual accrual, at the rate of the band it falls in — the 21-day band through five full years, the 30-day band after.

The wage base is deliberately narrow. The calculator uses monthly basic wage and excludes every allowance — housing, transport, cost of living and the rest — because the law computes the benefit on basic wage, not on the total package. A payslip total of AED 15,000 with a basic of AED 9,000 accrues gratuity on the AED 9,000. This is the single most common overestimate employees make.

The daily wage is basic wage divided by 30, the statutory convention, not divided by working days. And the one-year floor is absolute: service of eleven months and twenty-nine days accrues nothing, while twelve months accrues 21 days. The ceiling is equally real — total gratuity cannot exceed two years' wage — though it only binds after about twenty-five and a half years of unbroken service, so it rarely bites — but the calculator applies it as a final row regardless.

Four things sit outside the tool, and each of them can move the real figure. Unpaid leave and unauthorised absence can reduce the service period the law counts — the calculator assumes continuous, fully-paid service. Fixed-term contracts carry their own nuances on early termination and renewal that a day-count cannot capture.

Accrued but untaken annual leave is a separate entitlement, settled in cash on separation under its own rule; it is not gratuity and the tool does not add it. And the law permits certain disciplinary deductions, which an employer may lawfully apply in defined circumstances — the calculator shows the gross figure before any such deduction.

The deepest limit is that employment disputes turn on facts, not arithmetic. Which wage figure the contract actually designates as basic, whether service was genuinely continuous, how a termination was classified — these are the questions that decide real cases, and no estimator can answer them. Use the result as a starting point for a conversation with your employer or a qualified adviser, never as a figure to demand or to concede.

Check the two inputs against your documents before you act on the result. Confirm the monthly basic wage figure in your signed employment contract — not the offer letter, not the payslip total — and confirm your service dates from your labour card or visa records, counting only continuous service with the same employer.

If the figure matters — a resignation negotiation, a redundancy, a dispute — take it to a qualified adviser or to MOHRE before you rely on it. The calculator cannot see unpaid leave, contract nuances or disciplinary deductions, and the difference between the estimate and the legal entitlement lives exactly there. This page estimates; it does not determine anyone's rights, and nothing here is legal advice.