The module is precise about pay and silent about eligibility, and knowing exactly where that line falls is the point of this lesson.

The obligation. Article 31 gives a worker 15 days at full pay, then 30 days at half pay, then 45 days unpaid, across the sick-leave year. It is a ladder, not a single entitlement, and where an absence falls on it depends on what the same employee has already used in that year. Source: Federal Decree-Law 33/2021, Article 31.

The maternity ladder works on the same principle of full-pay days followed by half-pay days, and the module ships the two leave types for it, but this course does not state the day counts because they were not part of the verified law pack it was written from. MISSING FACT: the maternity-leave pay ladder under Federal Decree-Law 33/2021 — how many days are paid at full pay and how many at half pay — taken from the current consolidated text of the Decree-Law.

The mental model. A leave type is a price. You choose the type, and the deduction rule attached to it decides what the payslip does. There is nothing else to configure and nothing else to override.

The module prices the tier you record. It does not split the 15/30/45 ladder for you. Deciding which tier a given absence falls into is your process in this version, and the module says so rather than implying otherwise. It also does not enforce leave eligibility: nothing stops you recording a full-pay sick day for an employee who has already used all 15 of them. Both limits are worth knowing precisely, because a system that quietly guessed at either would be worse than one that leaves the decision with you.

The click path. Assign the right leave type in time off and approve the request. The deduction follows from the type. Nothing is entered on the payslip itself, and nothing needs to be.

The worked example. Our technician was off sick for 25 consecutive days in May 2026, with no earlier sick leave in that sick-leave year. Article 31 splits that one spell in two, so you record it as two leave requests.

Record the spell as one block on one type and the arithmetic goes wrong in an entirely predictable direction, which is the useful thing about this error — you can look for it.

That May spell also decides what August costs. By August the employee has used all 15 full-pay days and 10 of the 30 half-pay days, leaving 20 half-pay days in that sick-leave year. So the two sick days on our August payslip are recorded as AE_SICK50 and deduct AED 400, not nothing.

The failure mode. Recording a whole spell on a single leave type because it arrived as a single request. Keep a small sick-leave-year ledger per employee — days used at full pay, days used at half pay, and the date the sick-leave year rolls over — and reconcile it before you approve anything long. The module will not keep that ledger for you and will not warn you when a tier is exhausted, and the first time anyone notices is usually when an employee's own count disagrees with yours.