Of every provision in the Saudi Labour Law, sick leave is the one where the first page of search results carries the most contradictory answers — and where several of the top results answer an entirely different question, namely annual leave.
The text itself is short and clear. What most employers get wrong is not the number of days, but three details around them: when the sick year starts, which wage gets multiplied by the day count, and what does not fall under Article 117 at all. Each of the three turns a figure that looks correct on paper into a labour claim.
Correction, 23 September 2026. An earlier version of this article counted the sick year as twelve Gregorian months and left commission out of the wage. Under Articles 10 and 2 of the Labour Law, the year is Hijri unless the contract says otherwise, and commission is part of the wage. Both sections below are corrected.
What Article 117 actually says
Article 117 of the Labour Law: a worker who proves illness is entitled to sick leave with full pay for the first thirty days, three quarters of the pay for the next sixty days, and without pay for the thirty days that follow, within one year, whether the leave is continuous or intermittent.
The ladder totals one hundred and twenty days per sick year:
| Tier | Days | Pay due |
|---|---|---|
| First tier | 30 days | Full pay |
| Second tier | 60 days | Three quarters of pay |
| Third tier | 30 days | Unpaid |
| Total | 120 days | — |
The phrase "whether continuous or intermittent" means the unit of account is the day, not the episode. An employee who takes three separate ten-day absences has consumed thirty days of the first tier, exactly like someone absent for thirty consecutive days. The ladder does not reset with each new medical report.
The sick year does not start in January
This is the most common error in payroll systems, and the wrong version looks obviously right.
The "one year" in Article 117 is the year beginning on the date of the worker's first sick leave. It runs for one year from that date, and Article 10 of the same Law counts every period in the Hijri calendar unless the employment contract or the work regulations say otherwise — so by default it is a Hijri year of 354 or 355 days, about eleven days shorter than a Gregorian one. Not the calendar year, not the company's fiscal year, and not the employee's joining anniversary.
The difference is not theoretical. Take an employee whose first sick leave fell on 10 December 2026:
- The window runs from 10 December 2026 (1 Rajab 1448) to 28 November 2027 (29 Jumada al-Akhirah 1449) — or to 9 December 2027 if the contract specifies the Gregorian calendar.
- They are absent 25 days in December, then 25 more in January 2027.
- That is fifty days inside a single window: the first thirty at full pay, the next twenty at three quarters.
A payroll system that buckets by calendar year sees "25 days in 2026" and "25 days in 2027" and pays all fifty at full rate. On a daily rate of SAR 360, that is an overpayment of SAR 1,800 on one employee in one window — and money that cannot be clawed back afterwards.
The error runs the other way too: an employee whose window opened in March 2026 and closed in March 2027 is owed a fresh full-pay tier in March, which calendar bucketing withholds.
Which "pay"? A gap worth a quarter of the entitlement
Article 117 says "with pay" and "three quarters of the pay" without qualifying the word. It does not need to: Article 2 defines the basic wage and the actual wage, then states that "wage", wherever the Law uses it unqualified, means the actual wage. That is the basic wage plus allowances such as housing and transport, bonuses the contract or custom has made part of the pay, and — named first in the definition — commission and percentages of sales. Commission has no fixed monthly figure, so Article 96 prices it as a daily average over the days actually worked.
So the unqualified word in Article 117 is the actual wage. Systems that reuse the overtime base here — which is the basic wage — underpay every single sick day, and systems that stop at basic plus allowances underpay every commissioned employee on top of that.
A worked example, for an employee on a basic wage of SAR 8,000, housing allowance SAR 2,000 and transport allowance SAR 800:
| Base used | Monthly wage | Daily rate | 30 days at full | 60 days at three quarters | Ladder total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual wage (correct) | 10,800 | 360 | 10,800 | 16,200 | 27,000 |
| Basic wage (wrong) | 8,000 | 266.67 | 8,000 | 12,000 | 20,000 |
A gap of SAR 7,000 across the full ladder, roughly 26 per cent of the entitlement — on a line nobody audits until the employee leaves.
Note the divisor. The law prices a month at thirty days for wage purposes, so a sick day in February costs the same as a sick day in August. Systems that divide by the real number of days in the month produce a daily rate that shifts month to month and a settlement nobody can reproduce. The same logic governs how GOSI contributions and salary deductions are computed, where the contributory wage decides what is actually withheld.
Weekly rest days inside a sick leave
This is the rule employers most often invert.
What paragraph 26 of the Implementing Regulations to Article 117 says: where weekly rest days fall inside a period of sick leave, the worker is not compensated for them — meaning no substitute rest day is granted in their place.
That is the whole rule. It gives the employer no right whatsoever to reject a sick leave on the grounds that it coincides with the weekend. One is a question of compensating a rest day; the other is the refusal of an entitlement established by a certified medical report. They are unrelated, and refusing a verified sick leave on that basis is a practice with no text behind it.
Sick leave is not deducted from the annual balance
A verified and approved sick leave is counted as sick leave and is not deducted from the employee's annual leave balance. They are two separate balances under two different articles.
Paragraph 26 of Article 117 handles the case where the two overlap: if the sick leave occurs during annual leave, the annual leave is suspended until the sick leave ends, and the remainder then resumes. Sick days do not swallow annual days, and the employee does not forfeit what is left of the annual leave.
The reverse direction works on the employee's request: if the illness continues after the sick leave period ends, they may ask to join their annual leave to their sick leave. Joined days remain annual leave days — paid at full rate, drawn from the annual balance, and consuming none of the Article 117 tiers.
Article 82: no dismissal for illness before the periods are exhausted
For as long as the employee sits inside the statutory sick leave periods, illness is not available to the employer as a reason to end the contract.
If the employer terminates before those periods are exhausted, the dismissal is unlawful and the worker is owed compensation under Article 77 alongside their other financial entitlements. This is the rule most likely to turn a routine offboarding into a claim, which is why an HR system should surface the number of remaining protected days as an explicit field that the offboarding flow reads — not as a number someone infers by hand. For how that compensation is computed, and why the statutory floor beats the formula on short contracts, see how Article 77 compensation is actually computed.
Three cases that do not fall under Article 117
A doctor's appointment notice. The Labour Law does not provide that a notice of a medical appointment counts as sick leave — a point the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development states directly in its replies to enquiries. A notice is not a medical report granting leave.
Occupational injury. An employee injured at work is not on Article 117 leave. Work injuries are compensated through the occupational hazards branch of social insurance and consume not a single day of the Article 117 balance. An employee who spends forty days recovering from a work injury still starts their sick ladder from zero if they later fall ill.
Unverified leave. The Article 117 entitlement belongs to "the worker who proves his illness". With no certified medical report from a recognised authority, there is no paid sick day — the days are treated as unauthorised absence unless the parties agree otherwise.
Illness arising from pregnancy or childbirth has its own separate treatment and its own periods, covered in maternity leave, Article 151 and GOSI.
From the text to the payslip
The practical sequence that prevents most of these errors:
- Capture and store the date of each employee's first sick leave — that is what opens the window, not the start of the year.
- Fix the wage base as a documented decision, not an assumption buried in code.
- Route occupational injuries down a separate path before they touch the ladder.
- Tie the sick and annual balances to one ledger so no day is counted twice.
- Expose the remaining protected days to the offboarding flow.
For engineering teams building this logic inside a payroll system, building a sick leave pay engine in TypeScript covers the rolling window, the injury router and the protection guard in code, with tests.
Start with your daily rate
Every calculation on this page starts from one number: your daily rate on the correct base. The free Saudi Labour Rights Calculator computes it, alongside the annual leave balance that Article 117 suspends and resumes, end-of-service gratuity and Article 77 compensation — each broken down by its statutory article.
Found that what you were paid for your sick days falls short of the ladder above, or that your payroll system buckets days by calendar year? Noqta's team reviews the calculation logic inside your system and identifies exactly where the money leaks. Contact us for a free diagnostic.