The mistake was embarrassingly simple and it ran for about eleven months. We had three developers on contracts with an overtime clause, and when overtime came due I calculated the hourly rate from their total monthly package: salary plus housing plus transport, because that is the number that appears on the offer letter and the number everyone quotes. UAE labour law computes overtime on the basic wage. I had been overpaying, which sounds like the harmless direction to get it wrong in, until you try to correct it retrospectively on three live contracts and discover that you have effectively been operating a different pay structure than the one you wrote down. This is the method I built afterwards so it could not happen again.
What the Law Actually Says
The governing instrument is Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 on the regulation of employment relationships, with Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022 supplying the implementing detail. Two articles do almost all the work for an engineering team:
Article 17 sets normal working hours at a maximum of eight hours per day or forty-eight hours per week, with scope for the Cabinet to raise or lower this for particular sectors or categories.
Article 19 governs overtime. An employer may require additional hours provided they do not exceed two hours per day, and, the provision that matters most and gets quoted least, total working hours must not exceed one hundred and forty-four hours in any three-week period. Overtime attracts the normal hourly wage calculated on the basic wage plus an increase of not less than 25 percent. Where the overtime hours fall between 22:00 and 04:00, the uplift is not less than 50 percent. Work on a rest day attracts a 50 percent uplift or a compensating rest day.
Read the law yourself rather than taking my summary of it, the official consolidated text is published by the official UAE government portal, which also publishes a plain-language summary of working hours and overtime and of the employment laws and regulations that apply in the private sector. Free zones including DIFC and ADGM operate their own employment regimes, so if your developers sit in one of those, the numbers above are the wrong starting point and you need the applicable free zone regulations instead. Nothing here is legal advice; it is the operational checklist I run before asking a lawyer a narrower question.
The 7 Checks, in Order
Check 1: Write down the two ceilings before you plan a release
Most teams know the eight-hour day. Almost nobody I speak to knows the 144 hours per three weeks figure, and it is the one that actually bites, because it is the only limit that remembers what happened last week.
A single hard week is easy to justify to yourself: everyone worked ten hours for five days, which is fifty hours, comfortably inside a daily cap of eight plus two. Do that three weeks in a row and you are at one hundred and fifty hours against a ceiling of one hundred and forty-four, and you breached it some time on the Thursday of week three without a single individually unlawful day. Write both numbers at the top of the release plan, not in a policy document nobody opens.
Check 2: Separate basic wage from total wage in your own records
This is the check that exists because of my own error. Overtime is calculated on the basic wage. Offer letters, budgets and conversations with candidates all use the total package, because that is the number that wins offers. If your payroll record holds one gross figure, you physically cannot compute overtime correctly, and whichever way you resolve the ambiguity you will be wrong for as long as nobody checks.
Fix it at the contract stage rather than at the payroll stage, which is where the clause belongs anyway, the MOHRE employment contract and offer letter mechanics cover how the split should appear. If you are building or replacing the system that holds the figures, a Dubai payroll system should store basic and allowances as separate fields from day one; retrofitting the distinction across historical records is genuinely unpleasant.
Check 3: Apply the uplift band per hour, not per shift
An incident that starts at 21:00 and ends at 01:00 is not four hours at one rate. It is one hour at the 125 percent band and three hours at the 150 percent band, because the night band runs from 22:00 to 04:00. Teams routinely price the whole call at the lower rate, which underpays, or at the higher rate, which overpays and sets a precedent they then cannot withdraw.
This is also the point at which to note a genuine complication rather than smooth over it: the treatment of night hours differs where a role is formally operated on a shift system, and the detail is specific enough that it is worth reading the article text and asking a UAE employment lawyer about your particular rota rather than relying on a general summary. If your engineering team runs true follow-the-sun shifts, treat that as a question to get answered properly, not as something to infer.
Check 4: Decide, in writing, who is actually exempt
Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022 exempts senior executives, board members and supervisory staff holding employer-level authority from the overtime provisions. The failure mode is not malice, it is optimism: a company decides that its tech lead and its staff engineers are “senior management” because they are senior, and quietly stops counting their hours.
The test is about authority over other workers, not about job title or salary band. An engineer who writes code, has no hiring or disciplinary power, and reports to an engineering manager is very unlikely to qualify however senior the title. Make the determination explicitly, per role, with the reason written down, and have it reviewed by someone whose incentive is not to minimise payroll. An undocumented assumption that everyone above a certain level is exempt is the most expensive thing on this list.
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Lance-toi, talk to our Dubai teamCheck 5: Reduce the baseline by two hours during Ramadan
Working hours reduce by two hours per day during Ramadan. Everybody in the UAE knows this; the part that gets missed is the arithmetic consequence. With a six-hour normal day, overtime begins at hour seven. A sprint plan carried over unchanged from the previous month does not become slightly tight, it converts a chunk of every single day into overtime hours that attract an uplift and count toward the 144-hour ceiling.
I have seen a team end Ramadan in breach of the three-week limit without anyone feeling they had worked a long day, which is exactly how it happens: the hours were normal, the baseline was not. Reduce planned capacity before the sprint is committed, and move a release out of that window if you have the choice.
Check 6: Make the on-call rota produce a timesheet
Carrying the pager and answering it are different. Availability is not generally treated as working time, which is why a weekend rotation does not consume anyone’s hours by existing. The moment an alert is answered, work has started, and those hours count toward the daily cap, the weekly cap and the three-week ceiling at whatever band applies.
The practical problem in almost every team I review is not illegality, it is unmeasurability. The rota records who was on call. Nothing records who got woken up. When you need to demonstrate that an engineer stayed inside the limits, you have a schedule and no evidence. Log response time per incident rather than shifts, which has the useful side effect of showing you which service is eating someone’s evenings. If your rota needs rebuilding, the on-call escalation matrix method covers the structure, and this check is what you bolt onto it.
Check 7: Reconcile contract, rota and payslip once a quarter
Put three documents side by side: the employment contract, the current on-call rota, and three months of payslips. Then ask one question: do these describe the same working pattern?
They usually do not, and the drift is innocent. The contract was written before the team ran a rota. The rota was changed when someone left. The payslips reflect a side agreement made in a crunch and never formalised. Each step is reasonable; the aggregate is a working pattern nobody has approved and nobody can defend. Fifteen minutes a quarter catches it while it is still an administrative correction rather than a dispute.
Do this on the same cadence as your payroll compliance pass, the WPS checks that gate UAE work permits already force you to look at the payroll calendar monthly, so adding the working-pattern reconciliation to the quarterly version of that review costs almost nothing.
Where This Actually Shows Up in Hiring
The reason a working-time checklist belongs on a hiring blog rather than purely in an HR manual is that the working pattern is a term of the offer, and candidates in Dubai increasingly ask about it directly.
Two questions come up often enough that you should have the answer written down before the interview. The first is “is there an on-call rotation, and how is it compensated?” An employer who answers with a clear band structure and a response-logging practice sounds like an employer who has thought about it. One who says “it is included in the package” is either exempting the role incorrectly or has not looked. The second is “what happens during Ramadan?”, and the honest answer, that planned capacity drops for the month and the release calendar moves accordingly, is a strong signal in a market where a lot of teams simply absorb it.
There is also a classification dimension worth flagging. Some of the pressure to treat developers as exempt from working-time rules comes from the same place as the pressure to engage them as contractors: it looks simpler and cheaper right up until it is examined. The two questions interact, and contractor versus employee misclassification for UAE developers covers the other half. A related trap sits at the start of the relationship, where probation-period arrangements are sometimes used to justify an unusual working pattern, the 90-day probation plan under UAE labour law is the cleaner way to structure that period.
What This Checklist Does Not Cover
Three honest limits, because a checklist that claims completeness is worse than one that marks its edges.
Free zones are a different regime. DIFC and ADGM have their own employment laws, and the hour limits and overtime mechanics above do not transfer. If your developers are on free zone contracts, this document tells you which questions to ask about the right instrument, not the answers.
Remote developers sitting outside the UAE are governed elsewhere. The working-time law of the country where the person actually performs the work is generally the live question, and a UAE-law clause in the contract does not settle it. That is the same analytical trap as the classification question.
This is not legal advice and the shift-work detail in particular needs a lawyer. I have flagged where the treatment of night hours under a formal shift system is more specific than a summary can usefully capture. Take the reconciliation output from Check 7 to a UAE employment lawyer and ask about your rota specifically. The value of the seven checks is that they turn a vague worry into three or four precise questions, which is a much cheaper conversation to have.
Fifteen minutes a quarter, or a dispute you cannot document
We build dedicated and offshore engineering teams for UAE employers, and we get the working pattern, the contract and the rota saying the same thing before anyone starts.
Lance-toi, brief our Dubai teamFrequently Asked Questions
Does UAE overtime law apply to a software developer on a monthly salary?
Yes, by default. Being salaried rather than hourly has no bearing on whether the working-time provisions of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 apply to a role. The exemption that people are reaching for when they assume otherwise is the one in Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022, which covers senior executives, board members and supervisory staff who hold employer-level authority over other workers. That is a test about authority, not about seniority of job title or method of payment. A senior engineer, a staff engineer or a tech lead who writes code, has no hiring or disciplinary power and reports into an engineering manager is very unlikely to meet it. The safest working assumption for any individual contributor on a development team, however senior, is that the eight-hour day, the forty-eight-hour week, the two-hour daily overtime cap and the uplifts all apply, and that you need a specific documented reason to conclude otherwise.
How do I calculate overtime pay for a Dubai developer?
Start from the basic wage, not the total wage. Derive an hourly rate from the basic wage, then apply the band that matches when the hours were actually worked: at least a twenty-five percent uplift for ordinary overtime, and at least fifty percent for hours falling between ten at night and four in the morning. Work performed on a rest day attracts a fifty percent uplift or a compensating day of rest. The error I have made and seen made repeatedly is computing the hourly rate from the total package including housing and transport allowances, which inflates every overtime payment and is difficult to unwind once it has been running for a year. The second most common error is pricing a whole incident at one rate when the response began at nine in the evening and finished at one in the morning, which crosses two bands and should be split accordingly.
Is being on call the same as working under UAE labour law?
Carrying the pager and responding to an incident are different things, and the distinction is where most engineering rotas become unmeasurable rather than illegal. Availability on its own is not generally treated as working time, which is why a rota can cover a weekend without consuming anyone’s hours. The moment an alert is answered, work has started and those hours count toward the daily cap, the forty-eight-hour week and the one-hundred-and-forty-four-hour three-week ceiling, at whichever uplift band applies. The practical problem is that most rotas record who was on call and nothing else, so when you need to show that an engineer stayed inside the limits you have a schedule instead of a record. Fix it by logging response time per incident rather than by logging shifts, which also gives you the data to see which service is quietly eating a person’s evenings.
What changes during Ramadan for a Dubai engineering team?
Daily working hours are reduced by two hours during Ramadan. The compliance consequence is straightforward and the planning consequence is the one teams miss: overtime now begins after six hours rather than eight, so a sprint plan carried over unchanged from the previous month converts a substantial part of each day into overtime hours that attract an uplift and count toward the three-week ceiling. I have seen a team arrive at the end of Ramadan having breached the one-hundred-and-forty-four-hour limit without anyone working what felt like a long day. The fix is calendar hygiene rather than legal advice: reduce planned capacity for the month before the sprint is committed, and move any release that was scheduled into that window if you can, because a release week on a six-hour baseline is where the ceiling gets crossed.
Bryan
Delivery & Offshore Teams Expert at HireDeveloper.ae. Structures dedicated and offshore engineering teams for UAE employers and advises on the employment model and working pattern behind each role.