Saudi Resignation: Article 79 bis and the Real Exit Date

The costliest error in Saudi end-of-service files is not the gratuity formula. It is the contract end date. That date is not the day the resignation letter was handed over, and not the day the employee stopped showing up. The Labour Law fixes it with three written periods, and getting the day wrong shifts length of service, leave balance, the Article 85 bracket, and the record filed with the government platforms.

Since 19 February 2025 — the effective date of the Labour Law amendments issued by Royal Decree M/44 of 8/2/1446H, 180 days after publication in Umm Al-Qura — resignation has had an article of its own that did not previously exist: Article 79 bis. Most of what circulates about it confuses it with the notice period. They are two different rules.

Two articles, read as though they were one

This is the whole knot, and it is worth untying before any number:

Article 2 of the Law, as amended, now defines resignation as "the worker's expression in writing, free of coercion, of a wish to end a fixed-term contract, unconditioned by any restriction or condition, and the employer's acceptance of it." The wording is deliberate. An indefinite-term contract needs no resignation at all, because Article 75 lets either party end it unilaterally for a legitimate reason on written notice — with no acceptance or refusal available to the other side.

That is where the practical error occurs. An employer treats a worker on an indefinite contract as though it were "reviewing a resignation" and defers acceptance for sixty days, when the Law grants no such power over that contract type. Conversely, a worker on a fixed-term contract assumes thirty days of notice is enough, stops attending, and is recorded absent.

What Royal Decree M/44 actually added

Three linked additions that do not read separately:

1. A new definition in Article 2, restricted to the fixed-term contract, and requiring writing, absence of coercion, freedom from any condition, and the employer's acceptance.
2. A new case in Article 74, paragraph (3 bis): resignation. Resignation became a statutory ground for the contract ending in its own right, not merely an event the employer disposes of as it likes. The same amendment added paragraph (7 bis): a decision or final judgment ending the worker's contract within bankruptcy proceedings.
3. Article 79 bis in full, which had no prior text at all.

The effect of paragraph (3 bis) reaches further than it looks. If a worker resigns from a fixed-term contract and the employer accepts, the contract has ended on a legitimate statutory ground — which closes off an employer claim for compensation over the remaining term, because compensation under Article 77 is conditioned on the ending being for an illegitimate reason, which is not the case here.

The three clocks in Article 79 bis

The text starts three parallel periods from the moment the request is submitted:

Thirty days — deemed acceptance. "A submitted resignation request is deemed accepted if thirty days pass from its submission without a reply from the employer." Silence is not refusal here; it is acceptance. An employer that lets the request sit in an inbox does not suspend it — it ends the contract on a date it did not choose.

Sixty days — the deferral ceiling. The employer may defer acceptance for a period not exceeding sixty days "if the interest of the work so requires."

Seven days — the withdrawal window. The worker may withdraw the request within a period not exceeding seven days from submission, unless the employer accepted it before the withdrawal. That last condition inverts the usual instinct: prompt acceptance closes the door on retraction, and hesitation holds it open.

The end date, under paragraph 2, is whichever of these comes first: the date of the employer's acceptance, the lapse of the thirty days without reply, or the expiry of the deferral period.

Deferral is not an open-ended right

Deferral is usually presented as a simple administrative option. The text hedges it with three conditions, and losing any one of them returns you to deemed acceptance:

• The reason must be the interest of the work, not displeasure at the timing.
• It must be a written, reasoned explanation delivered to the worker. An uncommunicated internal decision does not count.
• It must be issued before the thirty days expire. A deferral on day thirty-one has nothing to operate on, because the contract has already ended by deemed acceptance.

And a point systems routinely miss: the deferral period runs from the date the explanation was given to the worker, not from the date of the request. Counting from the resignation date ends the contract before its statutory date.

The text also states that "a resignation request may not specify a deferred date for it." A letter saying "I resign effective the end of the quarter" is not a complete resignation, because the Law requires it to be free of any condition.

The contract stays in force — and what that costs

Paragraph 5 settles what used to be disputed: "the employment contract is deemed in force during the period of the resignation request, and both parties are bound to perform all obligations arising from it during that period."

Operationally: wages are paid, GOSI registration continues, leave accrues, and service time runs — through the thirty days, and through any deferral period. A worker who stops attending the day after submitting is in breach; an employer that stops the salary that same day is equally in breach.

This is the most common arithmetic error. An employer closes the file on the request date, then finds itself billed for a month's wage it never paid — or a worker loses thirty to ninety days of service, enough to move them down a bracket in Article 85.

"All rights prescribed under this Law" does not mean the full gratuity

Paragraph 6 provides that "a worker whose contract ended by resignation is entitled to all rights prescribed under this Law." That sentence is sometimes read as cancelling the effect of resignation on end-of-service gratuity. It does not.

It refers back to the Law as it stands, and the Law contains Article 85 — which was not among the articles amended by M/44 — setting the gratuity brackets where a worker leaves of their own accord: nothing under two years, a third from two to under five, two thirds from five to under ten, and the full award at ten or more. Paragraph 6 confirms the entitlement exists and cannot be forfeited as a penalty for resigning. It does not raise the bracket.

The gratuity calculation and the basic-versus-actual wage distinction are covered in the labour rights calculator guide, and the effect of the ending route on compensation in Article 77: how the compensation is actually computed.

What an HR system has to record

Article 79 bis cannot be run from a calendar and scattered email. Four fields are enough, and their absence is what manufactures the dispute:

• Contract type (fixed or indefinite term) — it decides which article applies at all.
• Date of submission, with a trustworthy timestamp, not the date a manager read the message.
• Date the deferral explanation was delivered to the worker, if any — the sixty days count from there.
• Date of express acceptance, if any — it is what closes the seven-day withdrawal window.

From those four fields the end date derives automatically, and from it length of service, and from that the gratuity, the leave balance, and whatever is filed with the government platforms. The split between contract types rests on Article 74, which we set out in Article 74 and the seven ways a contract ends. If you are building this logic in code, it is implemented step by step in a termination settlement engine in TypeScript.

Run the numbers on the same rules

Once the end date is fixed, the rest of the settlement is arithmetic. The free labour rights calculator computes entitlements from the published text entirely in your browser, with no figure sent anywhere; if you need the gratuity alone, the end-of-service calculator applies the Article 84 and 85 brackets to the same period.

Try the difference directly: enter the submission date as the end date, then enter the correct date after adding the thirty days or the deferral period. The gap between the two figures is the cost of reading the wrong article.

Is the end date in your records right?

Most employers cannot answer that, because the resignation date lives in an email while length of service is computed in payroll, and nothing reconciles the two until there is a dispute.

If you have closed end-of-service files dated after February 2025, send us the case and we will walk through how the end date is derived in your systems: where it comes from, whether it distinguishes the two contract types, and whether the deferral count starts on the right date. A diagnostic review of your actual files, not a product pitch.