UAE payroll: structure, overtime and leave tiers

What you will be able to do when you finish: opt a contract into UAE payroll deliberately rather than by accident, read the seven company settings and say which of them are law and which are practice, compute ordinary, night and rest-day overtime the way Article 19 computes it — including the rest-day rule that most summaries get wrong — price a sick or maternity absence into the tier you actually recorded, apply the Article 25 deduction cap to the right lines and only the right lines, and read a bilingual UAE payslip and a final settlement line by line.

Who this is for. You run payroll for a UAE mainland employer, or you are the finance manager who signs off what payroll produces. This is an Intermediate course. It assumes you know what a salary structure is and what a payslip run does. It does not assume you have read Federal Decree-Law 33/2021, and it quotes every article it relies on so you can check the text yourself.

How to follow along. Every screen named here belongs to the Odoone UAE Payroll module, odoone_l10n_ae_payroll. Three neighbouring subjects are deliberately outside this course: social insurance — GPSSA, the GCC schemes and ILOE — is course 4.2; end-of-service provisioning under Article 51 is course 4.3; and posting payroll to the general ledger is course 4.5, because this module seeds no accounting entries of its own. One running example carries the whole course: an expatriate technician on AED 12,000 a month, and the August 2026 payslip we build for them line by line.

This content is general information for UAE businesses, not tax, legal, or financial advice. Rules change and cases differ — speak to a qualified advisor about your situation.