Part-Time and Job-Sharing Gratuity UAE

Part-Time and Job-Sharing Employees Are Covered

It’s a common misconception that gratuity is only for full-time staff. It isn’t. The UAE’s 2022 labour law reforms explicitly extended gratuity rights to part-time, job-sharing, and other flexible work arrangements, recognizing that not every employment relationship follows the traditional 8-hour, 5-day pattern. The same one-year minimum service requirement that applies to full-time employees applies here too: you need at least one year of continuous service before any gratuity is owed, regardless of how many hours you worked during that year.

Part-time work in the UAE runs on its own specific work permit category. If you want to work part-time for one employer while also working for another, you need a permit from MOHRE authorizing that arrangement, since the standard employment framework otherwise assumes one employer at a time. This is separate from the gratuity calculation itself, but it’s worth knowing if you’re setting up a part-time or multi-employer arrangement in the first place.

The Pro-Rata Formula

Article 30 of Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022 sets out the calculation directly:

1. 1
   Take the number of working hours in your employment contract per year.
2. 2
   Divide that by the number of working hours a full-time employee in an equivalent role would work per year.
3. 3
   Multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.
4. 4
   Apply that percentage to the gratuity amount a full-time employee in your role would have received for the same period and salary.

In other words, your part-time gratuity isn’t calculated from scratch on a different formula, it’s the standard 21/30-day gratuity value for an equivalent full-time role, scaled down to match how much you actually worked.

Worked Example

Say a part-time employee is contracted for 1,000 hours a year, while a full-time employee in the same role at the same company works 2,000 hours a year. The part-time employee earns AED 8,000 basic salary and completes 3 years of service.

Job-Sharing Works the Same Way

Job-sharing, where two or more employees split the responsibilities and hours of a single full-time role, uses the identical formula. Each person’s individual contracted hours are compared against the full-time hours for that role, and each person’s gratuity is calculated separately based on their own share. Job-sharing isn’t treated as a single combined entitlement split afterward, each employee has their own contract, their own hours, and their own gratuity calculation under Article 30.

What Doesn’t Qualify

Temporary employment contracts for a duration of less than one year don’t attract gratuity at all, regardless of the hours worked, since the one-year minimum service threshold still applies as the baseline eligibility rule. If your part-time or job-sharing arrangement runs less than a year, whether by original contract length or because you left early, gratuity generally isn’t owed for that period.

Other Entitlements Follow the Same Logic

Part-time and job-sharing employees aren’t just entitled to pro-rated gratuity. Cash payment for any unused annual leave applies to them as well, calculated the same way as it would for a full-time employee, based on their basic salary. If you’re checking your full exit payout rather than just gratuity, see our final settlement guide for everything else that can be included.

Keeping the Comparison Fair

The formula depends on knowing what a genuinely equivalent full-time role looks like at your specific employer, not a generic industry average. If your company doesn’t have an actual full-time version of your exact role to compare against, HR typically needs to establish a reasonable equivalent based on the standard full-time hours for a comparable position. This is one of the more common points of disagreement in part-time gratuity disputes, since a part-time employee and their employer can genuinely differ on what the “equivalent full-time” baseline should be. Getting this comparison documented clearly in your contract from the start avoids arguing about it later.