Saudi Annual Leave Salary: Article 109, 111 + Free Calculator

Search for how leave salary is calculated in Saudi Arabia and the third result is a PDF hosted on the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development's own domain. It states that an employee is entitled to thirty-six days of annual leave a year, and that the right to that leave is forfeited if the employee never submits a request for it.

Both statements are accurate. Neither one applies to you if you work in the private sector.

That document is the Regulations on Leaves, issued by the Civil Service Council under Resolution No. 1/1037 of 16/02/1426H. It governs government employees. Private-sector workers are governed by the Labour Law, and on the two questions people actually search for — how many days, and what happens to days you never took — the two regimes point in opposite directions.

Two regimes, and the difference that costs money

The forfeiture rule is the one that migrates. It reads plausibly, it sits on a ministry domain, and it has been picked up by private guidance: the page currently ranking second on this query tells private-sector readers that "the carried balance lapses if the employee does not use it during the following year." The Labour Law contains no such provision. It caps how long an employer may postpone leave — it never extinguishes the entitlement — and Article 109 makes waiving leave during service unlawful in the first place, which a silent lapse would amount to.

What Article 109 actually grants

The text is short and is worth reading in full rather than in summary. A worker is entitled to a prepaid annual leave of not less than twenty one days, increased to not less than thirty days if the worker spends five consecutive years in the service of the employer.

Four details that get dropped in most summaries:

• Prepaid. The wage for the leave is paid in advance, when the leave is taken, not on the ordinary payday.
• Twenty one and thirty are floors, not figures. A contract or a work organisation regulation may grant more; it may never grant less.
• Five consecutive years with the same employer. Moving to another firm resets the counter to the 21-day tier.
• No waiver during service. A worker may not forgo the leave or receive cash in lieu of it while the employment relationship continues.

And one sentence almost nobody on page one quotes. Article 109 gives the employer the right to set the leave dates according to work requirements, or grant them in rotation — but immediately attaches an obligation: the employer shall notify the worker of the date of his leave in sufficient time of not less than thirty days. Scheduling is the employer's call; scheduling it on a week's notice is not.

The balance accrues day by day, not once a year

The most common error in manual calculations is treating leave as a block granted at the start of each year. Article 111 settles it: the worker is entitled to leave pay for the parts of the year in proportion to the part he spent at work. Half a year worked earns half a year's leave.

In monthly terms, every completed month adds:

• 1.75 days on the 21-day tier
• 2.5 days on the 30-day tier

Which is why a final leave balance is rarely a round number, and why computing it on "full years only" quietly deletes months that can be worth thousands of riyals.

Postponement: Article 110 contains two separate rules

They are routinely merged into one, and they run in opposite directions.

Article 110(1) — the worker asks. A worker may postpone annual leave, or days of it, to the following year, with the employer's approval.

Article 110(2) — the employer decides. An employer may postpone the leave for a period of not more than ninety days after the end of the year it is due, if work conditions require it. If work conditions require extending that postponement further, the worker's consent must be obtained in writing — and in no case may the postponement run past the end of the year following the year the leave is due.

The practical reading for an employer: an accrued balance does not evaporate through the passage of time, but rolling it forward without written documentation is a breach that sits with the firm. Both parties' recollection is not a record that survives a dispute.

Leave salary on exit, and the wage it is computed on

Article 111 is the provision that turns days into money. A worker is entitled to a wage for the accrued days of the leave if he leaves the work without having used it, for the period in which the leave was not taken, plus the proportional part-year entitlement.

Which wage? The statute answers it in its own definitions section, in three words: "Wage: actual wage." Wherever the Labour Law says wage without qualifying it as basic wage, it means the actual wage — the basic wage plus all other due increments: commissions and percentages of sales or profits, allowances for effort exerted or risks encountered, increments granted for the standard of living or family costs, and in-rem privileges such as employer-provided housing, the latter valued at a maximum of two months' basic wage per year.

Article 111 says wage. Leave salary therefore runs on the actual wage, not the basic. This is one point on which the better pages in the results get it right — the two strongest private guides both compute on total salary including fixed allowances — but payroll systems configured on the basic wage alone are still common, and the shortfall on a settlement is real.

The daily rate follows from another definition in the same section, "Month: Thirty days", unless the contract specifies otherwise:

Day wage = monthly wage divided by 30

Leave salary = day wage multiplied by the unused balance in days

Note what is absent here compared to end-of-service gratuity: there is no resignation ladder, no fractions, no two-year floor. An unused leave balance is a debt owed by the firm and is paid in full, whether the worker resigned or the employer ended the contract.

Worked examples in riyals

Example 1 — part-year balance. An employee in their third year, so on the 21-day tier, leaves eight months into the entitlement year having taken none of it:

• Balance: 21 multiplied by 8, divided by 12 = 14 days

Example 2 — the five-year step. An employee completes five consecutive years, then works a full sixth year:

• Sixth-year entitlement: 30 days instead of 21 — a 43 percent increase that anyone still computing on the old tier will miss.

Example 3 — leave salary on resignation. An employee on 7,500 SAR a month resigns with 18 unused days in the balance:

• Day wage: 7,500 divided by 30 = 250 SAR
• Leave salary due: 250 multiplied by 18 = 4,500 SAR — paid in full, resignation notwithstanding.

Example 4 — the compound case. An employee on the 30-day tier earning 9,000 SAR a month is terminated ten months into the entitlement year, carrying 5 days forward from the previous year:

• Current-year accrual: 30 multiplied by 10, divided by 12 = 25 days
• Total balance: 25 plus 5 = 30 days
• Day wage: 9,000 divided by 30 = 300 SAR, so leave salary = 9,000 SAR, a full month's pay.

The last example is the argument for precision: ignoring carried days, or counting the final year whole instead of prorated, moves the result by thousands of riyals in either direction.

Calculate it instantly

Rather than applying the tiers by hand, the free leave calculator returns the figure directly: enter the service start date, the monthly wage and the days already taken, and it applies the Article 109 tier, the daily accrual and the Article 111 cash value for you. If you are settling a wider set of entitlements, the end-of-service calculator and the overtime calculator sit alongside it and run on the same statutory rules.

Annual leave is also only one of several leave entitlements with its own arithmetic — sick leave under Article 117 and maternity leave under Article 151 each run on separate rules and separate pay fractions, and neither consumes the annual balance.

For employers: the balance is a liability accruing quietly

From the company's side, every unused leave day is a financial obligation on your books, and one that is revalued with every raise — because the cash value is computed on the wage at the time of settlement, not the wage of the year in which the day accrued. Firms that manage balances in spreadsheets discover the gap at the worst possible moment: settling a long-serving employee whose carried days were never documented, or in an audit that asks how the leave provision was derived.

The data that provision should be built from already exists in your systems. Employment contracts and service dates are administered through Qiwa and its HR system integrations, and the wages the cash value is computed on are the same wages reconciled monthly under wage protection and payroll differences. Wire those systems together and the leave balance and its provision become a report generated from attendance and payroll data you already hold — not a spreadsheet column someone updates by hand at month end.

Is the leave balance in your firm a trusted number, or an estimate? We review how your balances and provisions are calculated and how they connect to your attendance and payroll systems, and identify the gaps before a departing employee or an auditor does. Book a free diagnostic session.