Working Hours and Overtime Under Saudi Labor Law: A Practical 2026 Guide

One of the most common questions among Saudi business owners and HR teams: how many regular working hours are allowed per day? How is overtime calculated? And what changes during Ramadan? The answers live in Saudi Labor Law, but they're scattered across different articles, and they're often applied imprecisely because calculating them by hand month after month leaves room for error. This guide pulls the core rules into one place — working hours, overtime, breaks, the Ramadan schedule, and the Hijri calendar in reporting — in a practical format any business can reference directly.

Regular working hours

Saudi Labor Law caps a regular employee's working hours at 8 hours a day and 48 hours a week — however those hours are distributed across the work week. This limit is the foundation everything else in this guide is built on: any hour worked beyond that daily or weekly limit falls under overtime, and any special schedule — like the Ramadan schedule — temporarily adjusts this reference limit for a specific group of employees.

Staying within this limit isn't just a regulatory number — it's the starting point for accurate payroll. Without a clear record of the actual hours each employee worked daily and weekly, it's hard to pinpoint exactly when overtime starts and when it ends.

Overtime calculation under Article 107

Saudi Labor Law governs overtime under Article 107: for every overtime hour beyond 8 hours in a day or 48 hours in a week, an employee is entitled to their pay for that hour plus 50% of the basic wage — the base hourly rate plus a top-up of half an hour's base pay. The hourly rate used for this calculation is typically derived from the monthly basic wage divided by 26 days and then by 8 hours:

Base hourly rate = Monthly basic wage ÷ 26 ÷ 8

From there, the overtime hourly rate = base hourly rate × 1.5. A simplified example: an employee with a monthly basic wage of SAR 5,200 has a base hourly rate of 5,200 ÷ 26 ÷ 8 = SAR 25, so every overtime hour is paid at SAR 37.5 (25 + 50%).

Mandatory breaks

Any shift of 5 continuous hours or more requires a break of at least 30 minutes. This isn't a minor administrative detail — it's part of Labor Law compliance, and logging it accurately in the attendance record protects the business in any review, just as it protects the employee's right to adequate rest during a shift.

The Ramadan schedule

During Ramadan, regular working hours are reduced to 6 hours a day specifically for Muslim employees. That means the reference limit covered in the first section (8 hours/day) doesn't hold steady year-round — it shifts for a specific group of employees during the holy month, which calls for per-employee logic rather than one schedule applied to everyone. Any business with a mix of Muslim and non-Muslim employees needs a system that automatically distinguishes between the two schedules — otherwise the burden of manual adjustment falls on HR every year, with all the risk of error that carries into overtime calculations downstream.

The Hijri calendar in government reporting

Saudi government bodies — from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development to platforms like Qiwa and Mudad — run their reporting and official transactions on the Hijri calendar. That means any attendance record or payroll report prepared locally needs to handle both the Hijri and Gregorian dates together, not just the Gregorian date, so the data stays consistent with what official bodies expect during any review or audit.

How TimeMobi calculates this automatically

TimeMobi is an attendance tool built on GPS and geofence verification for every clock-in and clock-out, so each employee's actual working hours are built from accurate data instead of manual estimates. On that foundation, it calculates this automatically from attendance data: overtime against the 8-hour/day and 48-hour/week limits, mandatory breaks for every shift of 5 hours or more, and the Ramadan schedule (6 hours/day) for each Muslim employee individually — instead of one schedule applied manually to everyone each year. Reports are shown in both the Hijri and Gregorian calendars, matching the format government bodies use in their own reporting.

These accurate working-hours and overtime reports are also the input that a wage file gets built on — we go deeper on that connection in our guide to the Wage Protection System (WPS) through Mudad. And if you're comparing a focused attendance tool against a full HR suite, our TimeMobi vs Jisr comparison covers exactly where accurate hours calculation makes a real difference in that decision.

Bottom line

• Regular working hours: 8 hours/day or 48 hours/week maximum.
• Overtime (Article 107): base hourly rate + 50% for every hour beyond that limit.
• Base hourly rate = monthly basic wage ÷ 26 ÷ 8 — verify against the implementing regulations before running payroll.
• A break of at least 30 minutes for every shift of 5 continuous hours or more.
• Ramadan schedule: 6 hours/day for Muslim employees, applied per employee.
• Government reporting runs on the Hijri calendar — keep both dates visible in your records.