Gratuity Calculator UAE

Enter your basic wage — not your total salary — and your completed service. The ledger below shows every step of the arithmetic rather than just a total, because the step where most estimates go wrong is the very first one: using the gross salary instead of the basic wage.

This is an estimate of a statutory entitlement, not a payslip. It models the ordinary case under Article 51: continuous service, a wage paid monthly, and no unpaid absence. Where your situation is not ordinary, the notes on each row say what the model is assuming.

This is the single most important thing on this page, and almost every gratuity calculator online still gets it wrong.

Under the old law — Federal Law No. 8 of 1980 — an employee who resigned before completing five years lost part of the entitlement: one third of the gratuity after one to three years, two thirds after three to five, and the full amount only after five. Those fractions are still repeated across UAE HR blogs, salary forums and competitor calculators as though they were current.

They are not. Article 73 of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 abrogated Federal Law No. 8 of 1980 in full, and the new Article 51 contains no reduction for resignation. An employee who resigns after completing one year is entitled to gratuity on the same 21-day and 30-day basis as one whose contract ends any other way.

If a calculator asks you whether you resigned or were dismissed in order to scale the result, it is applying repealed law. This one does not ask, because under the current Article 51 the answer does not change the arithmetic.

Two words in Article 51 do not match, and every honest UAE gratuity calculation has to confront it.

Accrual is unambiguous. Article 51(2) expresses both bands in days of basic wage, and Article 51(5) takes the last basic wage as the basis. Allowances — housing, transport, phone, schooling — are excluded. Article 1 defines Basic Wage as the wage excluding all allowances, and Wage as basic plus allowances.

The ceiling is where it breaks down. Article 51(6) caps the total entitlement at two years' "wage" — the term Article 1 defines as basic plus allowances. Read literally, the cap is therefore calculated on a larger figure than the accrual it limits.

We could not find a MoHRE clarification resolving this, checked 17 August 2026. So we state both readings rather than quietly choosing one:

• On the basic-wage reading, the cap is 24 × monthly basic wage. This is what the calculator above applies, because it is the more conservative of the two and matches the basis of accrual.
• On the wage reading, the cap is 24 × (basic + allowances), which is higher and therefore bites later.

In practice the distinction is close to academic for most people. On the basic-wage reading, 24 months of basic wage equals 720 days, and reaching 720 accrual days takes roughly 25.5 years of unbroken service. Very few private-sector careers with a single UAE employer run that long. If yours does, take advice rather than relying on either reading.

A tool that quietly models things it cannot know produces a confident wrong number, which on an end-of-service payment is worse than no number at all. The following are outside it, by choice:

• The alternative savings scheme. Employers may enrol staff in the voluntary end-of-service savings scheme instead of accruing statutory gratuity. Where that applies, your entitlement is the value of the invested contributions, not the Article 51 formula, and this calculator does not apply.
• Emiratis and GCC nationals. Pension contributions apply instead of gratuity. Different regime, different arithmetic.
• DIFC and ADGM. Both financial free zones run their own employment regimes rather than the federal Labour Law, with their own core-benefit percentages.
• Unpaid leave and absence. Excluded from service by Article 51(4). Deduct it from your service figure before entering it.
• Everything else in the final settlement. Untaken annual leave, unpaid notice, overtime, air fare where the contract provides one, and any repayment owed to the employer are all separate from gratuity and are not modelled.
• Any salary figure. This calculator assumes nothing about what you are paid and carries no benchmark: gratuity is computed from the basic wage in your own contract, and a market band — the sourced ones are on our accountant salary page — would tell you nothing about your entitlement. You supply your own basic wage.