Working a Public Holiday in the UAE: What You Owe the Team

Public holidays are the days your café makes money. The offices close, the malls fill, families go out for breakfast at ten instead of grabbing a flat white at seven, and your Thursday staffing plan is useless. So you roster the team, you trade well, and then a month later the payroll number looks wrong and nobody can quite reconstruct why. That gap — between knowing you have to pay something extra and knowing what — is where most owners end up guessing. It is worth not guessing, because it is a cost that recurs several times a year and it is one of the few labour costs that is both predictable and entirely avoidable as a dispute.

What the law actually gives the team

Official holidays in the UAE are set by Cabinet resolution, and they are paid leave. That is the baseline: a member of staff who does not work on an official holiday is still paid for it. The dates themselves move year to year — the Islamic calendar holidays shift, and the Cabinet announces the official list and any transferred days ahead of each year — so take the dates from the official announcement rather than from last year's rota.

The part that matters for a café is what happens when someone does work. Under Article 28 of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 on the Regulation of Labour Relations, an employee required to work on an official holiday must be compensated, and the law gives two ways to do it: a substitute rest day for each holiday worked, or payment for that day at their normal wage plus a supplement of at least 50 per cent of their basic salary. One or the other — not neither, and not a vague promise to sort it out later. Because entitlements are amended from time to time, confirm the current position on the MOHRE website or with your PRO before you set a policy you will apply for a year.

Day off or extra pay — which should you choose?

The choice between the two generally sits with the employer, subject to meeting the legal minimum, and the honest answer is that it depends on your café rather than on which one is cheaper on paper. The two options have genuinely different shapes:

• A substitute rest day costs you no cash this month, but it costs you a shift you will have to cover later — usually in a quieter week, which is when you had planned to run thin. If your team is big enough that one person being off on a normal Tuesday is absorbed without overtime, this is the cheaper option in real terms.
• The extra pay costs cash immediately and nothing afterwards. If you are running a small team where every absence has to be covered by someone else's overtime, paying the supplement is often cheaper than paying for the cover twice.
• A mix, by role, is usually what actually happens. Baristas on a five-person rota may prefer the cash; a kitchen lead who has worked eleven days straight may genuinely want the day.

Whichever way you go, write it down once — in the employment contract or the staff handbook — and apply it consistently. A policy that varies by who asked is the thing that turns a routine cost into a grievance.

How it hits the rota, not just the payslip

The mistake is treating a public holiday as a payroll problem. It is a scheduling problem that shows up on payroll. A holiday weekend typically moves your trade earlier in the day and lengthens the mid-morning peak, which means you need more people between nine and one and fewer at seven. Rostering a normal day and then paying a premium on top of it is how you end up with the worst of both — a premium-rate shift that was not even busy.

Build the holiday rota off last year's hour-by-hour numbers for the same holiday rather than off a normal week. If you have never done that, the first holiday you track properly pays for the habit. Our guide to scheduling café staff around actual demand covers the method, and it applies doubly on a day where every hour of cover is more expensive than usual.

Two further things that bite:

1. Volunteers first, then the rota. Ask who wants the shift before you assign it. On a day with a premium attached, you will usually have takers, and a willing team on the busiest day of the quarter is worth more than a perfectly even rota.
2. Give notice early. People make plans around public holidays. Publishing the holiday rota two or three weeks out, rather than the Thursday before, is free and removes most of the friction.

Budgeting for it so it is not a surprise

Public holiday premiums are not an unforeseeable event. You know roughly how many there are, you know which ones you will trade through, and you know how many people you will need. That makes this a line in the annual budget, not a monthly shock.

The practical move is to fold the expected premiums into your labour cost percentage as an annual figure rather than letting them distort one month. A café that budgets labour at a flat percentage of sales and then meets three holiday months a year will look over budget three times and under budget nine times, and will draw the wrong conclusion each time. Working out your labour cost percentage honestly explains what belongs in that number — holiday premiums included. It also sits alongside the rest of the picture: holiday compensation is one entitlement among several, and what you owe staff on leave, sick days and end of service is the wider version of the same question.

One more reason to track it precisely: a public holiday is usually one of your highest-revenue days. If you know the premium cost and you know the day's sales, you can answer the only question that matters — whether opening was worth it. Some cafés discover that a particular holiday is loss-making once staffing is priced properly, and close instead. That is a decision you can only make with the numbers in front of you.

Where MidaOne fits

MidaOne will not run your payroll, and it will not tell you what the labour law requires. What it does is give you the other half of the equation: sales by hour and by day, so you can see what the holiday actually traded; sales by employee, so you know who carried the shift; and shift closes showing expected cash against counted, so a long holiday day reconciles at the end of it instead of at the end of the week. Set against the premium you paid, that is enough to tell you whether next year's holiday rota should be bigger, smaller, or not there at all.

Frequently asked questions

The holidays are on the calendar months in advance. The rota, the compensation policy and the budget line can all be settled just as far in advance — and once they are, a public holiday becomes what it should be for a café: the best trading day of the month, with a known cost attached.