UAE private sector workers get five paid days of compassionate leave when a spouse dies and three paid days when a parent, child, sibling, grandchild or grandparent dies. The clock starts on the date of death, not on the day you ask, and under Article 21(3) of the Executive Regulation you prove the death when you get back, not before you go.

Annual leave, sick leave and maternity leave are documented everywhere. The four entitlements sitting next to them in Article 32 of Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021 are not, and two of them behave very differently from what most HR handbooks assume. This guide covers compassionate leave, study leave, the Hajj leave the law does not actually contain, unpaid leave and what it quietly costs your gratuity, plus the three rules in Articles 32 to 35 that govern every leave you will ever take.

What Article 32 Actually Grants

Article 32 is titled “Various holidays” and contains four separate things: mourning leave, parental leave, study leave and national or reserve service leave. Only the first two are framed as entitlements. Study leave uses the words “may be granted”, which makes it discretionary.

That drafting difference is the single most important thing on this page. Clause 1 says the worker “is entitled to a paid leave”, and clause 2 says the worker “may be granted a study leave”. An employer who refuses compassionate leave is breaking the law, while an employer who refuses study leave is exercising a discretion the statute gave it.

Leave Length Paid? Entitlement or discretion Source
Mourning, death of a spouse 5 days Yes Entitlement Art. 32(1)(a)
Mourning, death of a close relative 3 days Yes Entitlement Art. 32(1)(a)
Parental leave, either parent 5 working days Yes Entitlement Art. 32(1)(b)
Study leave to sit exams 10 business days per year Yes Discretionary Art. 32(2)
National and reserve service Full-time for the service period Yes Entitlement, UAE nationals only Art. 32(3)
Leave without pay No statutory limit No Requires employer approval Art. 33

Article 32(1)(c) also lets the Cabinet add “any other leaves”. No Cabinet resolution creating an additional category had been published at the time of writing, which matters for the Hajj question further down.

Compassionate Leave: Five Days and Three Days

Article 32(1)(a) grants a mourning leave of five days on the death of a spouse, and three days on the death of a mother, father, son, brother, sister, grandson, grandfather or grandmother, “starting as of the date of death”. The leave is paid in full and sits on top of your annual leave balance.

The official English translation of the article lists male relatives for two of the categories, naming a son but not a daughter and a grandson but not a granddaughter. The government’s own summary on the u.ae compassionate leave page reads the same provision gender-neutrally: “5 days in case of death of spouse, and 3 days in case of death of a parent, child, sibling, grandchild or grandparent.”

Treat the u.ae wording as the operative one. The Arabic text prevails over any English translation, and no authority has ever suggested that a father loses three days because the child who died was a daughter.

The Date-of-Death Trap

The three or five days run from the date of death itself. If a parent dies on a Sunday and the news reaches you on a Wednesday, two of your three days have already been spent at your desk.

This is the most expensive detail in Article 32 for expatriate workers, because a death in the home country is frequently reported late and the travel takes another day. Nothing in the Decree-Law or the Executive Regulation permits the count to start from notification instead.

These Are Days, Not Working Days

Article 32(1)(a) says “days” for mourning leave and “working days” for parental leave in the very next clause. That contrast is deliberate drafting, so a weekend falling inside a mourning leave is consumed by it.

Three days beginning on a Thursday can therefore be almost entirely weekend. The rule is different from the way annual leave entitlement is calculated, where rest days inside the leave are treated under Article 29(7).

You Prove It Afterwards

Article 21(3) of the Executive Regulation is unusually practical: the worker is entitled to mourning leave “starting from the passing date provided that he submits what proves the death upon his return to work”. You do not need a death certificate in hand before you leave, and an employer who demands documentation as a precondition for release is adding a requirement the regulation does not contain.

In practice a hospital notification, a burial permit or an embassy letter is accepted, and a certified translation is asked for later if the document is not in Arabic or English. Send your manager a short written message naming the deceased, the relationship and the date of death before you travel, so the start date is fixed in writing.

You Can Stack Other Leave On Top

Article 21(5) of the Executive Regulation states plainly that “it is permissible to combine the mourning, parental, annual, and unpaid leaves”. Three days is rarely enough for an international funeral, and this clause is the mechanism that lets you bolt a week of annual leave or unpaid leave onto the end without the employer treating it as a single discretionary block.

Ask for the two separately and in that order. The mourning days are an entitlement your employer cannot refuse, and only the annual or unpaid extension is subject to approval.

Study Leave: Ten Days, and Why It Is Not Automatic

Article 32(2) allows ten business days of paid study leave per year for a worker enrolled at an educational institution accredited in the UAE, in order to sit examinations, provided the worker has at least two years of service with that employer. The verb is “may be granted”, so this is a discretion rather than a right.

Three conditions have to be met at once. The institution must be accredited in the State, so a distance-learning degree from a foreign university does not qualify on the face of the text, the leave must be for taking tests rather than for studying generally, and the two-year service threshold is measured against the current employer.

Article 21(1) of the Executive Regulation adds the paperwork. The worker needs “an academic acceptance from on the accredited institutions or university faculties in the State, indicating the type of studies, major and duration of the studies”, and the establishment “may request a proof of the dates on which the tests were taken”.

What This Means in Practice

Bring the acceptance letter and the exam timetable to the same conversation. An employer asked to release ten paid days on a verbal description of a course will usually say no, while the same request supported by an accreditation letter naming the major and the duration is hard to refuse without a business reason.

If your programme is with a foreign university operating a licensed UAE campus, ask the registrar for confirmation of the campus accreditation specifically. The condition attaches to the institution in the State, not to the awarding body abroad.

Parental Leave Sits in the Same Article

Article 32(1)(b) gives five working days of paid parental leave to either parent, to be taken continuously or intermittently within six months of the birth. It is one of the few genuinely gender-neutral leave entitlements in the region, and the practical mechanics of requesting it are covered in the dedicated guide to the five working days of parental leave and how to claim them.

Mothers take this in addition to maternity leave, not instead of it. Article 30(6) states that taking maternity leave “shall not prejudice her right to obtain other leaves”, and the full 60-day maternity leave schedule runs separately.

Hajj Leave: What the Law Does Not Say

Neither Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021 nor Cabinet Resolution 1 of 2022 contains any Hajj or Umrah leave provision. We searched the full consolidated text of both instruments and the words do not appear.

The government portal nevertheless lists it. The u.ae page on types of leaves in the private sector states that employees are entitled to “annual leave, sick leave, maternity leave, parental leave, compassionate leave and leave to complete Hajj”, and carries a separate Hajj and Umrah leave page beneath it.

We were unable to retrieve the body of that sub-page to quote it, so we are not reproducing a figure from it here. What can be said from the primary texts is this: the repealed 1980 labour law contained a standalone unpaid Hajj leave, the 2021 Decree-Law did not carry it forward as a named entitlement, and no Cabinet resolution adding it under Article 32(1)(c) could be located.

If your employer grants Hajj leave, it is almost certainly operating as unpaid leave under Article 33 or as a contractual benefit. Ask for it in writing on that basis rather than relying on a statutory right that the current text does not clearly provide.

Unpaid Leave and What It Costs Your Gratuity

Article 33 lets a worker take leave without pay with the employer’s approval, and there is no statutory cap on the length. Article 33(2) then removes those days from your period of service, and Article 51(4) says the same thing again for gratuity: “the days of absence from work without pay shall not be included in the calculation of the duration of service.”

Most people understand that unpaid leave means no salary. Far fewer realize that it also shortens the service period used to calculate end of service gratuity, and reduces contribution time under the retirement or savings scheme that applies to them.

A Worked Example

Under Article 51(2)(a) a foreign worker earns 21 days of basic wage for each of the first five years of service. On a basic wage of AED 10,000 a month, that is a daily basic of AED 333.33 and an accrual of roughly 0.0575 days of basic per calendar day worked.

Sixty days of unpaid leave therefore removes about 3.45 days of basic wage from the eventual payout, or roughly AED 1,151. Past the five-year mark the rate rises to 30 days per year under Article 51(2)(b), so the same 60 days costs closer to AED 1,644.

These figures are modeled from the statutory formula on a round basic wage, not quoted from any published table. Run them against your own basic rather than your total package, because gratuity is calculated on basic wage alone.

The Trade Worth Making

Unpaid leave still beats resigning. It preserves the employment relationship, the residence visa sponsorship and the health insurance, and it keeps the notice-period and gratuity clock running from your original start date rather than resetting it.

Get the agreed dates in writing before you go. An absence the employer later characterizes as unauthorized rather than approved unpaid leave is the raw material for an absconding report.

Three Rules That Apply to Every Leave

Articles 32(4), 34 and 35 are short, easy to miss, and govern all of the leaves above. They deal with proof, with what happens if you come back late, and with what a leave does to a notice period already running.

Article 32(4) requires that proof of the grounds for any Article 32 leave “must be provided by the Concerned Authorities”. A hospital, a registrar or an accredited institution qualifies; a family member’s message does not.

Article 34 is blunt: a worker who does not return directly to work after a leave ends, without a legitimate reason, is not entitled to wages for the period of absence that follows. The wage stops, and the absence becomes a separate disciplinary question.

Article 35 is the one that protects you. If either party wants to terminate the contract during a worker’s leave, the agreed notice period “shall not start to take effect, except as of the day following the scheduled return of the Worker from leave”, unless both sides agree otherwise. An employer cannot serve notice while you are away burying a parent and quietly run the clock down.

Who Is Outside These Rules

Article 3(2) excludes three categories from the entire Decree-Law: employees of federal and local government agencies, members of the armed forces, police and security, and domestic workers. If you fall into one of them, Article 32 does not give you anything.

Government employees are covered by their own federal or emirate-level human resources law, which in most cases is more generous on compassionate leave rather than less. Domestic workers sponsored on a household visa sit under the separate domestic labour legislation, and their leave entitlements are set there rather than in Article 32, which is one of several reasons the domestic worker visa route is regulated differently from a standard employment visa.

Most free zones apply the federal Decree-Law directly, so an employee at DMCC, JAFZA or IFZA gets Article 32 in full. The two financial free zones do not: DIFC and ADGM operate their own employment laws with their own leave schedules, and if you work in either, check the applicable regulation rather than the federal text. The differences are summarized in the guide to employment law and visas inside ADGM.

What Actually Happens When You Ask

For compassionate leave, the sequence in most UAE companies is a message to your line manager, an HR acknowledgment the same day, and a leave record created retroactively once you supply the death document. No MOHRE application, portal submission or approval reference is involved at any point.

Article 32 leaves are not government transactions. They are entitlements between you and your employer, recorded in the company’s own attendance system, and MOHRE only becomes involved if there is a dispute.

What you will typically see is a leave type in the HR system labeled “compassionate” or “bereavement” that a manager can approve without a balance check, because it does not draw on your annual leave. If your system has no such category and HR tries to book the days against annual leave, that is a payroll configuration problem rather than a legal position, and it should be corrected before the month closes.

If Your Employer Refuses

Refusing an Article 32(1) entitlement, or deducting the days from annual leave, is a breach of the Decree-Law. Raise it in writing first, and escalate to MOHRE if the written request does not fix it.

Put the request in an email naming the article, the relationship to the deceased and the date of death. A single accurate reference to Article 32(1)(a) resolves a large share of these disputes without any escalation, because the underlying cause is usually an HR policy written before 2022 rather than deliberate refusal.

If it is not resolved, the complaint route is the same one used for wage disputes, and it is free to file. The process, the deadlines and what MOHRE can order are set out in the guide to filing a MOHRE complaint over unpaid entitlements, and the broader framework of rights sits in the UAE Labour Law reference guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many days of compassionate leave am I entitled to in the UAE?

Five paid days if your spouse dies, and three paid days if a parent, child, sibling, grandchild or grandparent dies, under Article 32(1)(a) of Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021. The days are calendar days, not working days, and they start running from the date of death rather than from the date you apply.

Does compassionate leave come out of my annual leave balance?

No. It is a separate paid entitlement under Article 32, and an employer that books the days against your annual leave is reducing an entitlement the law grants you on top of the annual leave in Article 29. Article 21(5) of the Executive Regulation also allows you to combine mourning leave with annual and unpaid leave if you need longer.

Does UAE compassionate leave cover in-laws, aunts, uncles or cousins?

No. The list in Article 32(1)(a) is closed and covers only a spouse, parent, child, sibling, grandchild and grandparent. For anyone outside that list you would need annual leave or unpaid leave under Article 33, both of which require employer approval.

What proof do I need for bereavement leave, and when?

Article 21(3) of the Executive Regulation requires you to submit proof of the death “upon his return to work”, so documentation is not a precondition for taking the leave. A death certificate, hospital notification, burial permit or embassy letter is normally accepted, with a certified translation if the document is not in Arabic or English.

Can my employer refuse study leave in the UAE?

Yes. Article 32(2) says a worker “may be granted” ten business days of study leave, which makes it discretionary rather than an entitlement, unlike mourning and parental leave. Even where the employer is willing, you must have two years of service and an acceptance letter from an institution accredited in the UAE stating the type of studies, major and duration.

Is there Hajj leave under the UAE Labour Law?

The current Decree-Law and its Executive Regulation contain no Hajj or Umrah leave provision, although the u.ae portal lists Hajj leave among private sector leave types and carries a page for it. In practice any Hajj leave granted today operates as unpaid leave under Article 33 or as a contractual benefit, so get the terms confirmed in writing rather than assuming a statutory right.

Does unpaid leave reduce my end of service gratuity?

Yes, directly. Article 33(2) excludes unpaid leave from your period of service and Article 51(4) repeats that unpaid absence is not counted when calculating gratuity. On a AED 10,000 basic wage in the first five years of service, sixty days of unpaid leave costs roughly AED 1,151 of gratuity on the statutory formula.

Can my employer serve notice while I am on leave?

They can serve it, but under Article 35 the notice period does not begin to run until the day after your scheduled return from leave, unless both parties agree otherwise. That prevents an employer from running down a notice period while you are away on mourning, annual or unpaid leave.

Do free zone employees get the same Article 32 leaves?

Most free zones apply the federal Decree-Law, so employees at zones such as DMCC, JAFZA and IFZA receive Article 32 in full. DIFC and ADGM are the exceptions, because both operate their own employment legislation with separate leave schedules that must be checked against the applicable regulation rather than the federal law.

What happens if I do not come back on the day my leave ends?

Article 34 removes your entitlement to wages for the period of absence following the end of the leave, where there is no legitimate reason for the delay. Beyond the lost pay, an unexplained failure to return is what employers rely on when opening an absconding report, so notify your employer in writing as soon as you know you will be delayed.

Official Sources

Information current as of August 2026. Every article number above was read from the official English texts of Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021 and Cabinet Resolution 1 of 2022 published on the UAE Legislation Portal, retrieved through archived copies because the portal blocks automated retrieval. Three limitations should be stated plainly. First, the portal’s English text is a translation and the Arabic prevails, so verify a decisive article number against the Arabic. Second, the u.ae portal lists a Hajj and Umrah leave that appears nowhere in the Decree-Law or its Executive Regulation, and the body of that page could not be retrieved, so no figure from it is reproduced here. Third, the gratuity numbers in this guide are modeled from the statutory formula on a round basic wage, not quoted from any published table.

Disclaimer: This guide is general information, not legal advice. Leave entitlements can be improved by contract or company policy, and employees of government bodies, the armed forces and police, domestic workers, and staff employed within DIFC or ADGM sit outside Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021 entirely. Check your own contract and, where a dispute has started, take advice from MOHRE or a UAE-licensed lawyer.