A Dubai trading client asked us whether a part-time designer could go on the same monthly payroll run as everyone else. The answer turned on which work permit the designer was hired under, and so did the gratuity accrual, the Wage Protection System obligation, and whether we needed a tax invoice from her at all. Most UAE hiring decisions are made on the operations side and only reach finance after the permit is issued. By then the accounting treatment is fixed.
TL;DR: The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (MOHRE) issues 13 work permit types. The permit you pick decides whether a hire sits inside payroll and WPS and accrues end-of-service gratuity, or invoices you as a supplier. Permit fees run from AED 250 to AED 3,450 depending on your company classification.
What Are the 13 UAE Work Permit Types?
MOHRE issues 13 distinct work permits for private-sector establishments (u.ae, 2026). They fall into four practical groups once you look at them through a payroll lens:
- Standard employment: recruitment from outside the UAE, transfer of a non-UAE worker between establishments, resident on family sponsorship, and the UAE/GCC national permit. All four run two years.
- Non-standard employment: part-time, temporary, and mission permits, each with a different contract shape behind it.
- Non-employment: the freelance permit, which carries no employment contract at all.
- Training and concessionary: juvenile (ages 15 to 18, one year), student training (age 15, three months), national trainee (12 months, renewable), Golden visa holder (two years), and private teacher (two years, issued free of charge).
The grouping matters because the first set behaves like conventional payroll, the second changes how you calculate statutory entitlements, and the third moves the cost out of payroll entirely and into your purchase ledger.
Which Work Models Does the Labour Law Recognise?
Four. Article 7 of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 sets out full-time, part-time, temporary, and flexible work (MOHRE, 2021). Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022 then added remote work and job sharing, bringing the recognised models to six.
The permit and the work model are two separate things, and conflating them is where errors start. A permit is the licence to employ that person. The work model is the contract terms that then govern leave, hours, and gratuity. You can hold a valid part-time permit and still write the contract wrongly.
In our experience job sharing causes the most confusion, because employers assume it creates one set of entitlements split two ways. It does not. The wage follows the split in proportion, but each worker is then treated under the part-time rules in their own right.
How Does a Part-Time Permit Change Your Payroll?
A part-time hire stays in payroll and stays in WPS. What changes is that every statutory entitlement is calculated on a proportion of the full-time equivalent rather than at full value.
For end-of-service gratuity, the official calculation divides contracted annual working hours by full-time annual working hours, converts that to a percentage, and applies it to the gratuity a full-time contract would have produced (u.ae, 2026). The full-time figure is 21 days' wage for each of the first five years and 30 days' wage for each year after that, capped at two years' total remuneration.
A part-time worker may also hold more than one job with Ministry approval. That does not reduce your obligation: your accrual follows the hours in your contract, not what the worker does with the rest of their week. For the ratio, actual working hours are capped at eight per day.
What Changes If You Use a Freelancer Instead?
Everything, and mostly in your favour on the payroll side. The freelance permit is issued to individuals working independently "without being sponsored by an employer in the UAE and without requiring an active employment contract" (u.ae, 2026). They are not your employee. No WPS filing, no gratuity accrual, no annual leave provision.
The obligation moves to your purchase ledger instead, and that side got harder this month. From 1 October 2026 a valid UAE tax invoice is necessary but no longer sufficient to recover input VAT. You must verify the supplier's identity and real place of business and keep a documented verification policy, which applies to a freelancer exactly as to any other supplier (new input tax rules from 1 October 2026).
What we see most often is a business paying freelancers for two years, then finding it cannot support a single input tax claim because nobody asked for a tax invoice carrying a TRN.
Temporary and Mission Permits Cover Project Work
These two get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. A temporary work permit lets you assign a worker already in the UAE to a task at a different company for a limited period, after which they return to their original employer. A mission work permit brings a worker in from outside the UAE for a specific time-bound job or project (u.ae, 2026).
Both sit inside the temporary work model under Article 7, which matters for one reason: gratuity does not arise where the engagement runs under one year. For a six-month project that removes an accrual line a full-time hire would have created.
The Permits That Lower Your Hiring Cost
Three of the 13 are worth knowing purely on cost. The Golden visa holder permit lets you employ someone who already holds Golden Residency, so you are not funding the residence visa. The national trainee permit runs 12 months and covers training a UAE citizen in line with their academic qualifications. The private teacher permit is issued free of charge.
Permit fees otherwise range from AED 250 to AED 3,450 depending on whether MOHRE classifies your establishment as A, B, or C (u.ae, 2026). Processing has compressed sharply too: MOHRE's Work Bundle consolidated five platforms into one, cut the process from 15 steps to five, and reduced issuance from 30 working days to five.
If you are approaching an Emiratisation checkpoint, model the national trainee route alongside a direct hire. Our post on what missing your Emiratisation target costs sets out the monthly exposure.
What Should You Check Before Your Next Hire?
Start from the finance consequence and work backwards to the permit. For any open role, three questions settle the treatment:
- Does this person belong in WPS and accrue gratuity, or are you buying a service? That is the employee versus freelancer decision, and it is the hardest of the three to reverse.
- If employed, does the engagement run under 12 months? A temporary or mission permit then avoids a gratuity accrual you do not need.
- If engaging a freelancer, do you hold their TRN, a compliant tax invoice, and a documented supplier verification check before the first payment clears?
One question clients always ask is whether a freelancer will eventually hand them a VAT charge. Often yes. A freelancer must register for VAT once taxable supplies pass AED 375,000 in 12 months, and may register voluntarily from AED 187,500. They register separately for corporate tax once business turnover exceeds AED 1 million in a calendar year, due by 31 March of the following year. Our guides on corporate tax for UAE freelancers, the WPS compliance checklist, and VAT on staff benefits cover each side in detail.
Frequently Asked Questions
We are a free zone company. Do MOHRE's 13 work permits apply to us?
Not directly. In general free zones such as DMCC and JAFZA, permits are processed by the zone authority and the zone runs its own salary protection system. Employment law there still sits under Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, so the work models and gratuity mechanics above still apply. DIFC and ADGM are the exception, operating their own employment legislation.
Does a freelancer on a MOHRE permit need to go through the Wage Protection System?
No. WPS covers employees, and a freelance permit holder has no employment contract with you. You pay them against an invoice through your normal supplier run. The trade-off is that you carry the input VAT evidence burden instead of a payroll obligation.
Can one worker hold more than one part-time job in the UAE?
Yes, with Ministry approval. Each employer then calculates leave and gratuity on the hours in its own contract, so there is no need to coordinate entitlements with the other employer.
Is end-of-service gratuity due on a temporary work permit?
Not where the engagement runs under one year, because gratuity requires one year or more of continuous service. Anything running past 12 months does accrue, which is why extension decisions on temporary permits are worth flagging to finance before they are agreed.
How long does a UAE work permit take to issue now?
Around five working days through MOHRE's Work Bundle, down from 30. Allow longer where medical fitness testing and Emirates ID issuance sit on the critical path for an arrival from outside the UAE.
If you are about to hire in the UAE and want the payroll, WPS, and VAT consequences mapped before the permit is applied for, get in touch. We will walk through the options for the role and what each does to your monthly numbers.