If you take one thing from this course, take this lesson. It is where the largest silent underpayments live.

The obligation. Three cases, three treatments, and the third is not a variation on the first two.

• Ordinary overtime — the hours are paid on the basic wage for those hours plus an uplift of at least 25%.
• Night overtime — the uplift is at least 50%. The module's input for it counts overtime hours worked between 22:00 and 04:00.
• Rest-day work — Article 19(4) gives the worker that day's full remuneration plus at least 50% of basic.

Source: Federal Decree-Law 33/2021, Article 19 including Article 19(4), and Cabinet Resolution 1/2022. All three percentages are statutory minimums.

The mental model. Two bases, not one. Ordinary and night overtime are priced from the hourly rate on basic. Rest-day work is priced from two different bases in the same line: the whole day's remuneration, plus half of that day's basic. The module keeps those bases apart because the article keeps them apart. Most payroll spreadsheets do not, because a spreadsheet usually has one column called "daily rate", and the moment a single daily rate has to serve both halves of Article 19(4), one half is wrong.

The click path. Nothing to click for the rates themselves — they descend from the divisors and uplifts in Settings › Payroll. You supply only the quantities, as payslip inputs, which is Lesson 4.

The worked example. In August 2026 our technician worked 10 hours of ordinary overtime, 6 hours at night and one rest day.

Now the part that costs money. Here are the three ways people compute that single rest day, on identical facts.

The middle row is the dangerous one, and its error is not random. It is short by AED 160, and AED 160 is exactly one day's allowance share: housing AED 3,300 plus transport AED 1,500 is AED 4,800 a month, and AED 4,800 ÷ 30 is AED 160. That generalises. Collapsing the two bases into 1.5 × basic always underpays by precisely one day's allowance, whatever the salary and whatever the allowance mix. The bottom row is the mirror image: it lands AED 80 above the article's figure — always half a day's allowance above it — so it is lawful, because the uplifts are minimums and you may pay more. But it is not what Article 19(4) says, it will not agree with the figure the module computes, and a number nobody can reconcile is a number somebody will eventually challenge.

The failure mode. A migration that reconciles totals rather than lines. Two systems can agree on a month's gross to the dirham while disagreeing on every rest day in it, because an overpayment on one worker's night hours quietly offsets an underpayment on another's rest day. When you move to UAE payroll, reconcile the rest-day lines first, on their own, employee by employee. If the old system produced AED 360 where the module produces AED 520, you have not found a software difference — you have found an underpayment, and it has a history.