UAE sick leave is 90 days. The hard part is the 15, the 30, and the 45.
After probation, a private-sector employee gets up to 90 days of sick leave per year of service: 15 at full pay, 30 at half pay, 45 unpaid. Leave Keeper counts which tier a new day falls into.
The UAE Government page "Types of leaves" (u.ae, dated 14 Oct 2026, read on 27 Oct 2026) is the source. Work injuries follow a different regime. The rules below cover ordinary illness in the private sector under Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021.
The rule in one block
After probation, sick leave is not more than 90 days per year of service, continuous or intermittent:
- First 15 days: full pay
- Next 30 days: half pay
- Remaining 45 days: no pay
The employee must tell the employer within 3 days and give a medical report from the medical entity. There is no paid sick leave during probation, although the employer may grant unpaid leave on a medical report. There is no paid sick leave if the illness comes directly from the worker's misconduct, such as alcohol or narcotics, or from ignoring safety instructions they were given.
The employer cannot dismiss the employee or serve notice during sick leave. If all 90 days are used and the employee still cannot return, the employer may end service, and end-of-service benefits apply.
What a year of service means in a tracker
Count the service year from the hire date unless your contract says calendar year. Leave Keeper's UAE sick template uses hire-date years. If you prefer calendar years, edit the policy. Mixing both in one company is how two people with the same days taken end up with different pay.
Intermittent days fill the tiers in order. Ten days in March and five in July are all full pay, because 15 are used. The sixteenth sick day in September is the first half-pay day. A spreadsheet that stores only "sick days used: 16" will pay day 16 at full rate by mistake.
How Leave Keeper counts the tiers
On Team and up, a sick policy can have three pay stages of 15, 30, and 45 days. Each approved sick day, or half day, lands in the first stage with room left. The manager card says "this day is half pay" when that is true. The daily post never shows pay. Payroll does, which is why Scale's monthly CSV has a stage column: full, half, or none.
Free has one policy and no stages. Do not run UAE sick leave on Free, because you will over-pay or under-pay.
The 3-day notice
The law speaks to the employer, not to Slack. A sick request dated today and submitted today meets the 3-day window in the simplest sense. A request dated last week and submitted today gets a late notice flag on the manager card. The manager can still approve. The flag is there so you can ask for the medical report first. The bot never rejects on day three by itself, because that would be a legal decision dressed up as a button.
Leave Keeper does not store medical PDFs. Keep reports in your HR drive. The bot stores the dates, the type, and the approval.
Probation
During probation the UAE template offers unpaid sick leave only. If you grant paid sick leave in probation anyway, you are kinder than the official page. Create a second policy named probation courtesy instead of editing the statutory template, so an audit can see the difference.
What we will not settle
DIFC and ADGM have their own sick leave rules. Secondments, domestic workers, and federal government staff are out of scope, and so are occupational injury and disease.
For handbook text, confirm your email and take the UAE and GCC leave policy template. It restates these tiers and the 3-day notice, with a blank for your medical provider list.
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