The WPS Salary File in the UAE

The Wages Protection System does not accept a payslip, a spreadsheet or a bank template. It accepts one artefact: a Salary Information File, universally called a SIF after its file extension. It is ASCII text, the records are comma-separated values, and every record is terminated with a carriage return and line feed. There is no header row and no column titles — position in the line is the only thing that identifies a field.

The format is set by the Ministry and the Central Bank of the UAE, not by the bank you send it to. The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation does not publish the specification as a public download on its own site; it is issued to WPS agents, and the agents republish it to their corporate customers. That is why every copy you find is on a bank's domain rather than a government one.

Two of those copies are open and readable. Habib Bank AG Zurich hosts the Wages Protection System Companies Responsibility Guide, document code WPS-CRG01, version 3.0.0, published 21 January 2010 and valid from 1 February 2010 — the original Ministry of Labour and Central Bank specification, complete with record layouts and error codes. Dubai Islamic Bank publishes a shorter field reference that cites a later document, UAEWPS ENTAUX 998 — Corporate Responsibility Guide, V2015-01. Both were open and readable on 21 August 2026.

Read them as evidence, not as gospel. The 2010 guide is stamped "Proprietary & Confidential" on every page even though banks host it publicly, its own section 7 records that the Central Bank may add or remove codes at its sole discretion, and the two versions already disagree with each other on field lengths. The layout below is the shape you should expect; the authoritative copy is the one your own agent gives you when you are onboarded.

The EDR is the line that pays a person. There is exactly one per employee per file — the Ministry's guide is explicit that multiple records for the same employee cannot be placed in the same SIF — and the whole file is rejected if that rule is broken.

The fields below are the current reference set as published by Dubai Islamic Bank. Where the 2010 Ministry guide differs, the difference is called out underneath.

The SCR is a single line and it is the last line of the file. It is the employer's own identity, the month being paid, and a set of control totals the system checks against everything above it. The most common cause of a whole-file rejection is not a broken employee record; it is an SCR total that disagrees with the sum of the EDRs by a few fils.

The 2010 specification carries no allowance detail: fixed and variable are the only two money fields in the EDR. The current reference adds a separate Employee Variable Pay record, tagged EVP, which sits between the employee's EDR and the file's SCR and breaks the pay down into named heads.

The EVP record repeats the employee unique ID and the agent routing code from the EDR it belongs to, then carries seven amounts, each 15 characters, each mandatory, each sent as 0.00 when it is nil: housing allowance, conveyance allowance, medical allowance, annual passage allowance, overtime allowance, all other allowances, and leave encashment. Negative amounts reject the file, exactly as they do in the EDR.

This matters beyond formatting. The split between basic wage and allowances is the number that drives end-of-service gratuity, and a file that pushes everything into a single fixed component is a file that leaves no contemporaneous record of the split. If your payroll already computes the heads, put them in the EVP line.

The naming convention is fixed and it is unforgiving. The prefix is the 13-digit employer unique ID, then the file creation date as YYMMDD, then the file creation time as HHMMSS. The extension is .SIF. That is 25 characters of name plus the extension, and nothing else — no company name, no month, no version suffix.

Duplicate file names are not allowed, which is why the time element runs to seconds: two files created in the same minute for the same employer must still differ. If you resubmit a corrected file, it gets a new timestamp, not the old name.

The Ministry's error list treats naming as a first-pass check, before any record is read. Code 00003 is "invalid file naming convention", 00002 is "invalid file extension", 00001 is "invalid file format" and 00006 reports that the file name is a duplicate. A file that trips any of those is rejected in its entirety and no wage in it is recorded as paid — which is the point at which a naming typo becomes a Wages Protection System exposure rather than an IT problem.

A very large share of people searching for the UAE WPS format want an Excel template, and there is a real answer underneath the question — but it is not the one the search implies.

Excel is a perfectly good place to compute a payroll. It is not a SIF. A .xlsx workbook is a zipped XML package; the Wages Protection System expects flat ASCII with comma-separated records and CRLF line endings. Saving a sheet as CSV and renaming it .SIF gets you closer and still usually fails, because Excel will happily write a header row, reformat a date to DD/MM/YYYY, drop the trailing zeros off 2345.80, strip the leading zeros off a padded employer ID, and quote any field containing a comma. Every one of those is a rejection.

The workable pattern is the one most agents already support: keep the calculation in your spreadsheet or payroll system, then let the agent's own portal or a validated generator produce the file. Dubai Islamic Bank's instructions, for example, have the employer prepare an encrypted SIF in the Ministry's standard format and upload it through the WPS function of the online banking portal, with any rejection notified by email to the registered address. If you must build the file yourself, build it from the field table above with a script that controls the text output, not from a spreadsheet's Save As dialog.

One related search deserves a direct answer: there is no single "WPS salary format" beyond this. The SIF is the format. Everything else — payslip templates, salary certificates, offer letters — is your own document, governed by the employment contract and the Labour Law, not by the Wages Protection System.

We will not publish a downloadable SIF template or a generator. The two published copies of the specification disagree on field lengths, one of them is from 2010, and the Central Bank reserves the right to change the layout and the error codes without republishing anything. A template that is one field-length behind produces files that fail silently against your agent's validator, and we have no way to keep it current.

We will also not tell you what your agent charges. The Ministry's 2010 guide states that no charge was levied on companies for participating in the Wages Protection System at the time it was written, that the Central Bank may set a schedule of charges for banks and agents, and that what your bank or exchange house charges you for processing is negotiable and mutually agreed. That document is sixteen years old. Treat the fee position as a question for your agent, in writing, not as a published rate.

And we will not restate a fine. The current penalty ladder for late or missing wage transfers is on our page covering the Wages Protection System itself, sourced to the Government Portal and Ministerial Resolution No. 340 of 2026; the amounts that circulate on payroll-software blogs are frequently the superseded 2022 figures.