Unpaid leave and the service clock

The rule

Periods of unpaid leave do not count toward the period of service your end-of-service gratuity is calculated on. The employment relationship continues — you are not resigning and re-joining — but the clock the entitlement is measured by does not run.

Source: The UAE Government portal u.ae, on the computation of the period of service under Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021: days of unpaid absence are not counted.

Why almost no calculator asks

For most people this changes nothing, and that is exactly why it is missing from most tools: an input that is zero for the majority of users looks like clutter. It is not clutter for the minority it applies to.

If you took an extended unpaid break — a long personal leave, an unpaid sabbatical, an unpaid gap between assignments that was handled as leave rather than as termination — a calculator that does not ask will quietly overstate what you are owed. It will do so in a way that looks completely reasonable, which is the problem: you have no way of noticing.

What counts as unpaid leave

The distinction is whether the period was paid, not whether you were at work. Some examples of the boundary, in the order people ask about them:

• Paid annual leave — service continues. It is paid time off within the employment. How annual leave works at the end of service.
• Sick leave — governed by its own provision with a graduated pay scale. Where a portion of an extended sick leave is unpaid, the same principle applies to that portion as to any other unpaid period.
• Maternity leave — a distinct statutory entitlement with its own paid and reduced-pay structure, not simply a category of unpaid leave.
• Agreed unpaid leave — the plain case this page is about. Time off granted without pay, by agreement, with the contract continuing.
• Unauthorised absence — a different matter entirely, with consequences under the termination provisions rather than a simple service adjustment.

Working out your own figure

The calculator on this site has an input for it. Enter the total number of unpaid days across your whole service — not per year, and not as a period — and the result will state plainly that it removed them and how many.

If you genuinely do not know, enter zero and read the assumption the result states back to you. This site will always tell you which assumption it made rather than making one silently; that is the difference between an estimate you can rely on and one you cannot.

Getting the number right

Two practical notes. First, your HR records are the authority here, not your memory — unpaid leave is normally recorded, and the recorded figure is the one a settlement will use. Second, if the unpaid period was long enough to matter, it is worth confirming the exact days before you compare your figure to your employer’s, because a disagreement about service length looks identical to a disagreement about the formula and is far easier to resolve.

Then check the other two inputs people most often get wrong: which salary figure to use and what your last day actually is.