Working Hours & Overtime in Saudi Arabia

Article 98 caps actual working time at 8 hours a day where the employer works to a daily standard, or 48 hours a week where it works to a weekly one. During Ramadan the hours are cut for Muslim employees to 6 a day or 36 a week. The reduction is a floor on the employer, not a favour: hours beyond the shortened Ramadan day are overtime.

Article 101 adds two constraints that are easy to satisfy on paper and easy to breach in a real rota. An employee may not work more than five consecutive hours without a break of at least half an hour for rest, prayer and meals, and the total time spent in the workplace — work plus breaks — may not exceed eleven hours in a day. A shift built as 8 hours of work around a three-hour split break is already at the ceiling.

Article 104 gives every employee a weekly rest of at least 24 consecutive hours, Friday by default unless the contract or the work’s nature says otherwise. In remote areas and continuous-operation work, rest days can be accumulated for up to eight weeks with the employees’ agreement and the Ministry’s approval — the exception, not the rule.

Article 107 sets the overtime rate, and it is the single figure most often carried across a border by mistake. Every overtime hour pays the hour’s wage plus 50% of the basic wage — 1.5× the hourly rate, flat. There is no lower weekday tier. An employer applying Kuwait’s or the UAE’s +25% to Saudi overtime is underpaying every single overtime hour by a fifth.

The flat rate cuts the other way too. Because all hours worked on a weekly rest day or an official holiday count as overtime hours by definition, the whole shift is paid at 1.5× — not just the part beyond eight hours. Saudi Arabia has no double-time holiday tier the way Kuwait does, so the same eight hours on a public holiday cost less in Riyadh than in Kuwait City while ordinary weekday overtime costs more.