Editorial policy

Pages about employment law are only useful if you can tell how they were made. This is how ours are researched, checked, dated and corrected — and the limits we hold ourselves to.

What we write about

Final Settlement covers one subject: what a private-sector employee in the UAE is owed when employment ends. That means the end-of-service gratuity under Article 51 of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, the other lines of a final settlement, and the rules around them — notice, leave, deadlines, complaints. Where another regime applies instead — the DIFC, ADGM, domestic workers, UAE nationals — we say so and explain how it differs, rather than stretching the federal rules to fit.

We do not give advice on individual cases. Every page is general information about the law as published.

How a page is researched

Primary text first. Every legal statement starts from the text of the law itself: Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 and its amendments, Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022 (the executive regulations), and the ministerial and Cabinet resolutions that sit under them. For other regimes, the DIFC Employment Law, the ADGM Employment Regulations 2024 and Federal Decree-Law No. 9 of 2022 on domestic workers.
Official guidance second. The UAE Government portal (u.ae), the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, the ADGM Registration Authority, the DIFC Authority, GPSSA and free zone authorities. Where official guidance and the text of the law appear to differ, we say so on the page rather than choosing silently.
Secondary sources last, and labelled. Some points — how a recent amendment is being applied, for example — are not yet set out in an official consolidated text. Where a page relies on law-firm commentary or tribunal decisions rather than the statute, it says so in the sentence, not in a footnote.
Quote, then explain. Where a provision decides the answer, we quote it, with the article number, so you can check our reading against the words.

English translations of UAE legislation are not official; the Arabic text prevails. We work from the English translations published by the UAE authorities and say which one where it matters.

Primary sources on every page

Each page ends with a "Primary sources" block linking to the texts it relies on. If a page names a provision, the text it comes from should be in that block. If you find a page where it is not, that is an error and we want to hear about it.

How the arithmetic is checked

Worked examples are where pages like these most often go wrong, so they get a separate check:

Every figure in a worked scenario is recomputed independently, using the same method as the calculator: whole years counted by date, the remainder pro-rated over the length of the year it falls in, unpaid days removed from the end of the service period, the daily basic wage taken as monthly basic divided by 30.
Intermediate figures are shown to enough decimal places that a reader multiplying them out gets the stated total.
Where the law leaves a choice of method open — how to convert dates into years, which wage the two-year cap is measured against — the page says which choice we made and why, and what difference the alternative would make.
Where a figure depends on a rule we could not verify from a primary source, we do not give a figure. The domestic workers page is an example: we explain the gap rather than repeat a number we cannot source.

What the dates mean

Every page carries a date at the foot. It is the date the page was last checked against the law as a whole, not just edited. A page published on one date and reviewed on another says so. The dates in each page's structured data and in our sitemap match the dates on the page.

When the law changes, the pages it affects are reviewed and re-dated. A page with an old date is one we have not yet had reason to change; it is not a promise that nothing has changed since. If the amount matters, check the primary sources linked on the page.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, we fix it on the page and, where the change affects a figure or a legal statement, we say what changed and when. Corrections that change the substance of a page are also listed below. We do not quietly rewrite a page to look as if it was always right.

Write to us through the contact page. A correction that cites the provision you think we have misread is the quickest to act on. Every message is read, and a correction that needs checking against the statute may take longer to answer than a simple question — we would rather be slow than wrong.

Corrections and significant changes

September 2026 — the calculator stopped converting dates to years by dividing total days by 365, which counted leap days as extra service, and now counts whole years by date. Figures came down by roughly 0.09%. Explained on how gratuity is calculated.
October 2026 — links to the UAE Government portal were updated after the portal moved its private-sector employment pages to new addresses. No content changed.
October 2026 — the two-year ceiling was cited on the calculator page and in the calculator’s note as Article 51(3). In the published translation of the decree-law the ceiling is Article 51(6); Article 51(3) is the rule paying part years in proportion. The citation was corrected. No figure changed.

Independence

No affiliations. We are not a law firm, recruiter or government body, and have no relationship with MOHRE, any free zone authority or any employer.
Advertising is separate from content. The site is funded by display advertising, set out on how this site is funded. Advertisers do not see, commission or influence pages, and no page is written to promote a product or service.
No paid placements or referrals. We do not accept payment to link to, recommend or rank any lawyer, adviser or service.
No invented detail. Worked scenarios are illustrative cases, built to show how a rule works; they are not real people, and we do not present them as testimonials. We do not publish statistics we cannot source.

What we will not do

Tell you what you personally are owed, whether your employer is in the wrong, or what to do about it. A page cannot read your contract or see your employer's records, and those are usually what a dispute turns on. Where real money is at stake, a UAE-qualified lawyer or MOHRE is the right place to take it, and our pages say so.

Published 2026-10-18. Questions about this policy: contact us.