Setting up Ramadan working hours: a practical guide.
Ramadan working hours are a yearly ritual for HR teams across the Muslim world — and a yearly opportunity to get it wrong. This guide covers how to configure the shorter hours in your HR system, communicate them to staff, and stay compliant.
In Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Egypt, labour law allows or requires reduced working hours during Ramadan. The exact rules differ — Jordan permits but does not mandate reduced hours for non-Muslims; Saudi mandates a 36-hour work week for all Muslim employees; the UAE mandates 6 hours/day for all employees regardless of religion. Knowing your country's specifics matters.
The typical pattern is a 6-hour workday instead of the regular 8 — often 10am to 4pm or 9am to 3pm in office environments, with a single 30-minute break instead of the usual lunch hour. Retail and field teams often shift the workday later in the evening to align with iftar timing.
Configuring this in an HR system has two parts. First, the shift schedule itself needs to switch to the Ramadan template for the month — start time, end time, break configuration. Second, payroll needs to know that the contractual hours are temporarily reduced, so overtime calculations work correctly (anything above 6 hours is overtime, not the usual 8).
Communication is the other half. Most teams send a memo two weeks before Ramadan starts, confirm the date based on the moon sighting (typically the announcement comes 1-2 days before), and post a reminder on the first day. Push notifications via the mobile app reach field teams who rarely check email.
Prayer breaks are a separate consideration. Most labour codes don't explicitly mandate workplace prayer breaks but cultural expectation does — typically 10-15 minutes for the midday Dhuhr prayer. In Ramadan, this stays largely the same; the meaningful change is the iftar break for teams working into the evening, which most employers treat as paid.
In Link HR, configuring Ramadan hours is a one-click template applied at the branch or department level for the date range of the lunar month. Overtime calculations automatically adjust to the temporary contractual hours. A memo template ("Ramadan working hours announcement" — Arabic + English) sits in Letter Studio and goes out via push notification to every employee on the first day.