Saudi Maternity Leave in the Private Sector: 12 Weeks, Not 70 Days

Search for maternity leave in Saudi Arabia today and you will get three different answers to one question: ten weeks, twelve weeks, and seventy days. All three sit on page one, and one of them is on a Saudi law firm's site carrying a date that falls after the statute was amended.

Only one of them binds your establishment. And the question that matters more to payroll than the duration does — who actually pays that wage? — changed its answer on 1 July 2025, and almost none of the ranking pages mention it.

This guide separates the regimes, states what applies to an establishment under the Labour Law, and shows where the rule actually breaks in practice.

The correct private-sector figure: 12 weeks (Article 151)

Article 151 of the Labour Law, as currently in force:

"A female worker is entitled to maternity leave on full pay for a period of twelve weeks, of which the six weeks following delivery are mandatory, and she may distribute the remaining six weeks as she sees fit."

Three points read straight off the text:

• Twelve weeks at full pay. Not ten, and not conditioned on length of service.
• Six weeks after delivery are mandatory. They cannot be waived, even if the worker wants to come back.
• She distributes the other six, and may begin the leave at most four weeks before the expected date of delivery on a certified medical report.

The increase from ten weeks to twelve came in the Labour Law amendment package issued under Royal Decree M/44, published on 23 August 2024 and in force from 19 February 2025. Any content written before that date — or copied from content that was — will say ten weeks, and it is wrong.

Where does "70 days" come from? Two entirely different regimes

This is the source of most of the confusion, and two causes stack on top of each other.

First: ten weeks is exactly seventy days. The 70-day figure was the old private-sector text, before M/44.

Second, and more important: the government sector is governed by a different statute — the Civil Service human-resources law and its regulations — not the Labour Law. The difference is not only the duration; it is the vocabulary itself:

Look at the third row. In the Civil Service, "wada" and "umuma" are two different leaves, the second being extended childcare at a quarter of salary for years. In the private sector that split does not exist at all — the two words name the same thing, and there is no extended quarter-pay childcare leave.

This is where the expensive mistake happens: an HR manager at a private company reads an article written about the Civil Service and believes the company owes three years at quarter salary. Or a private-sector employee claims an entitlement that does not exist in her regime, and the whole claim is rejected, including the valid part of it.

The practical test: if your salary comes from an establishment registered with the labour office and your contract is documented in Qiwa, you are under the Labour Law. Your number is twelve weeks.

The six weeks she may not be employed — and the SAR 10,000 fine

The six weeks following delivery are not a right the worker may waive. They are an employment prohibition addressed to the employer. The distinction is decisive: a right can be given up, a prohibition cannot.

That means the worker's consent to return early does not protect the establishment. The Labour Law schedule of violations and penalties sets the fine for employing a woman during the six weeks following delivery at SAR 10,000, multiplied by the number of workers involved, and it does not vary with establishment size.

This violation is unusually easy to detect, because its trace appears in two places at once: attendance records and the wage protection file. A worker registered as on maternity leave, and a timesheet saying she was at work.

Who pays the wage? The answer changed on 1 July 2025

This is the part missing from nearly every page in the search results.

Since 1 July 2025, the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) has paid a maternity compensation benefit to subscribers — Saudi and non-Saudi — on behalf of the employer. It may not be combined with wages paid by the employer; it replaces that payment rather than adding to it.

But the benefit is not a carbon copy of the Article 151 obligation, and that is where the traps are:

Three differences produce three recurring payroll errors:

1. Twelve weeks is not three months. Twelve weeks is 84 days; three calendar months run between 89 and 92. The gap is not zero, and its direction depends on the month of birth.
2. The contributory wage is not the full wage. The contribution base has its own definition and its own ceiling, and may not include everything the worker actually earns. If her actual pay exceeds her contribution base, the GOSI benefit alone does not reach the "full pay" that Article 151 requires.
3. The 12-month condition excludes a whole group. A worker eight months into the job with no prior contribution history does not qualify for the benefit — while her Article 151 right carries no service requirement at all. Her leave stands, and the question of who funds it returns to the start.

One check to run before any expected delivery in your establishment: pull the worker's contribution months in the occupational hazards branch over the last 36 months, and compare her contribution base to her contractual wage. Those two numbers together decide whether GOSI covers the obligation in full or only in part. To automate that reconciliation, the GOSI contribution engine shows how the contribution base is built and matched against payroll.

What if an official holiday falls inside maternity leave?

This question is searched hundreds of times a month, and page one gives two literally contradictory answers: an HR platform says she is owed replacement days, and a law firm says the statute provides no such thing and the period stands unchanged.

The truth is that the statute is silent, which is why they disagree. But the silence is not neutral, and it can be read:

• Article 151 measures the leave in weeks, not working days. A week is a calendar unit that absorbs the weekly rest and any holiday falling inside it.
• By contrast, the law handled official holidays in a separate provision, Article 112, and provided compensation where they coincide with the weekly rest day. It did nothing equivalent for maternity leave.

The straight reading, then: the twelve weeks are not extended by an Eid falling inside them. But be aware this is a reading of a legislative gap, not an express text, and the competent authority may take a different view. If the amount is material in your case, file a documented enquiry with the Ministry of Human Resources before settling on it.

After the leave: the nursing hour and the sick newborn

• Article 154 — the nursing hour. On returning to work after maternity leave, she is entitled to one or more rest periods to nurse her child, totalling no more than one hour per day, counted as actual working hours, with no reduction in wage whatsoever. Deducting that hour from salary is a violation, and converting it into an hour made up at the end of the day does not satisfy the text.
• Article 152 — the sick newborn. If the child is born sick or with a disability requiring constant care, she is entitled to one month at full pay beginning when maternity leave ends, and may extend it by one month without pay.

Protection from dismissal (Article 156)

A worker may not be dismissed during illness resulting from pregnancy or delivery, the illness being proven by a certified medical report, provided her absence does not exceed 180 days. Nor may she be dismissed without a legitimate cause among those specified in the law during the 180 days preceding the probable date of delivery.

The phrase "without a legitimate cause" is the hinge: the protection is not absolute immunity, but it moves the entire burden onto the establishment to prove the termination rested on a ground the statute names and that it was documented beforehand. For what makes a cause legitimate and the standard of proof required, read the evidence gate behind Articles 80 and 81, and classify any termination against the seven contract endings in Article 74 first.

Paternity leave and iddah leave

• The father: three days at full pay on the birth of a child, taken within seven days of delivery (Article 113).
• Iddah: a Muslim worker whose husband dies is entitled to leave at full pay of no less than four months and ten days from the date of death, extendable without pay if she is pregnant until she delivers. A non-Muslim worker is entitled to fifteen days at full pay (Article 160). She may not work for anyone else during that period.

For employers: where these rules actually break

They do not break on interpreting the text. They break in the joints between three systems that do not talk to each other: the HR system that records the leave, the payroll system that pays the wage, and the GOSI file that determines whether the benefit is due at all.

The recurring failures we see when connecting these systems:

• Maternity leave is deducted from the annual leave balance because the leave type was entered wrongly — see the annual leave accrual engine for how the balance should accrue and when it is unaffected.
• Pregnancy-related illness is treated as ordinary sick leave on the Article 117 ladder, so the wage is reduced, when its treatment differs — the two ladders are set out in the sick leave engine.
• The nursing hour is logged as an early departure and surfaces as a deduction on the payslip.
• The GOSI benefit is paid and the wage is paid alongside it, or neither is paid because nobody tracked the claim.

These are data errors, not legal errors, and every one of them shows up in the wage protection file before it shows up as a labour complaint.

Know your balances first

Before any settlement, get your annual balance right — it is what is paid in cash when you leave, and it is unrelated to maternity leave:

Calculate your annual leave balance free — it applies Articles 109 and 111 with daily accrual.

For the full picture of your entitlements, the labour rights calculator guide brings end of service, leave and overtime together in one place.

Does your payroll actually apply these rules?

Most of the establishments we have reviewed were not in breach deliberately — they were running maternity leave in a spreadsheet separate from payroll and separate from the GOSI file, and the gap appeared at the first inspection.

Ask for a quick review of the leave cycle in your systems — we trace how leave moves from the HR system to the payslip to the wage protection file, and identify where it breaks. No obligation.

Disclaimer: this content is for guidance and reflects the Saudi Labour Law provisions and the GOSI maternity compensation benefit in force at the date of publication. Individual cases differ, and this does not replace legal advice or a check with the competent authority.