Annual Leave

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We have a number of queries related to calculation of leave salary and leave entitlement of our company staff. We would also like to know how their leave salary is to be calculated as we have failed to find any law on some of the issues.

We have a 5-day working week with Friday and Saturday being off. We are also entitled to 30 days leave as per Kuwait Labour Law, enacted in February 2010.

For calculating the leave that can be taken by an employee do we consider a week as consisting of 5 working days per week which is the actual thing in our case, or 6 working days as our company says the Labour Law considers only one day per week as the official day off.

Also for calculating leave salary do we divide the total remuneration by 26 or 22 as we work only for 22 days in a month?

Name withheld

Answer: We have answered similar questions on the issue a number of times but we will do so again for the benefit of our readers.

First of all, your company is right. You have to consider the working week of six days while calculating your leave because giving you two days off is the internal policy of the company as it has divided the 6th day’s hours over the five days. You still put in about 48 hours a week but these 48 hours are divided over five days instead of six. As you must have noticed you are putting in a minimum of 9 hours a day.

So, as far as this issue is concerned, you consider the working week as six days in spite of the fact you have a two-day weekend.

Secondly, because of the above reason, you have to divide the total monthly remuneration by 26 (number of working days in the month according to the law to calculate the leave salary and not by 22).

In the end, please remember that you are entitled to 30 working days annual leave per year…which means that all the weekly off days (Fridays) and official holidays falling within the leave should not be counted in the leave.

In this case also, only one day per week is not to be counted and not both the weekly off days.

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