Annual leave you never took
Untaken annual leave is a separate entitlement from your gratuity, paid on a different basis, and it is routinely conflated with it — including by employers. This page keeps the two apart and explains what you should expect to see on your final settlement for each.
Two different entitlements, routinely merged
When you leave a job in the UAE you are typically owed two separate things: your end-of-service gratuity, and payment for annual leave you accrued and never took. They are separate entitlements, arising under different provisions, calculated on different bases.
They are also routinely conflated — in conversation, in online guidance, and sometimes on settlement statements themselves, where both arrive as a single figure with no breakdown. If you cannot see the two amounts separately, you cannot check either of them.
How annual leave accrues
Annual leave accrues per year of service, with a shorter entitlement in the early months of employment. Accrual runs with service, so a part-year of service earns a proportionate part of the annual entitlement rather than nothing.
Source: Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 and its Executive Regulations, on annual leave and on payment for untaken leave. This site does not name an article for either: the end-of-service research behind it covered the gratuity provision only, and it does not cite what it has not read.
Untaken leave when you leave
Leave you accrued and did not take is paid out when the employment ends. This is not discretionary and it is not a goodwill payment — it is an entitlement, and it survives the end of the relationship regardless of why the relationship ended.
The important detail is the basis it is paid on, which is not the same as the basis for the gratuity. Your gratuity is calculated on basic wage alone. Leave pay is not framed the same way, so the two figures are not simply different multiples of the same daily rate — and a settlement that computes them from an identical day-rate is worth querying.
Leave taken during notice
Leave that falls inside a notice period is a common source of dispute, because it sits at the boundary the whole settlement is measured to. Where accrued leave is taken during notice, it reduces the untaken balance being paid out — it does not extend the service period or shift your last day. How notice affects your last day.
What to check on your final settlement
A settlement you can actually verify shows these separately:
- The end-of-service gratuity, with the basic wage and service period it used. That is what the calculator on this site reproduces, step by step, so you can compare it.
- Payment for untaken annual leave, with the number of days it is paying and the rate it is paying them at.
- Any deduction, with the debt it corresponds to named.
If the statement gives one number for everything, asking for those three lines is a reasonable request and usually resolves the disagreement on its own — because most disagreements about a settlement turn out to be disagreements about one input, not about the total.
Public holidays and sick leave
Two adjacent entitlements, briefly, because they get asked about here. Public holidays are a separate statutory entitlement and are not deducted from annual leave. Sick leave is governed by its own provision with its own graduated pay scale, and taking it does not break your continuity of service. Neither changes the gratuity calculation itself — but unpaid absence does, and that is a separate page.