How is overtime calculated under UAE labour law?
Article 19 sets a 25% premium on ordinary overtime and 50% for work between 22:00 and 04:00, alongside rest-day rules. And the practical point that matters more than the arithmetic: in a wage dispute the employer effectively carries the burden of proving the hours.
The premiums
Ordinary overtime carries a premium of 25% on the basic hourly wage. Work performed between 22:00 and 04:00 carries 50% — the night band, which on a construction site is not exotic but routine, because that is when the noisy work and the road closures happen.
Rest-day working carries its own treatment. Take the specifics from the law and your own counsel rather than from a summary: the rules are not complicated, but they are exact, and they are enforced.
The burden of proof is the real story
In a wage dispute, the employer is effectively the party who must demonstrate what hours were worked and what was paid for them. That inverts the usual intuition, and it has a concrete consequence: the absence of a record is not neutral.
A contemporaneous digital punch record — with a timestamp, a device, an audit trail — is not administrative tidiness. It IS the evidence. A paper sheet signed on Thursday from memory is the realistic alternative, and it is a considerably worse position to argue from.
And the night band is where mistakes concentrate
Because the 50% band is defined by clock time rather than by shift, a crew working through 22:00 crosses a rate boundary mid-shift. Payroll systems that apply a single rate to a shift will get this wrong, quietly, every time it happens.
It is the most common overtime error we see described, and it is entirely mechanical: the boundary is in the middle of the shift, and the calculation was written at the level of the shift.
References
- UAE Labour Law, Article 19 — overtime premiums including the 22:00–04:00 night band
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