Terminated From a Nursing Job in Saudi Arabia: Article 80, Your Award and Your Iqama

You have been told your service is terminated. Your iqama is sponsored by the hospital that terminated it, your accommodation very often belongs to the same employer, and your SCFHS registration is tied to a facility you no longer work at. Within a day you will have been told by three different people that a termination means you lose your end-of-service award, that you must be on a flight almost immediately, and that there is nothing to be done because your employer holds everything.

The Saudi Labour Law answers all of this in numbered articles you can read, and the answers are more specific — and in one place more generous — than the ward version. The single most valuable correction: the sliding scale that reduces an end-of-service award to a third or two thirds is written for resignation. If your employer terminated you, you are not on that scale.

There is also one place where a Saudi termination genuinely does cost you the award, it is a closed list of nine cases, and it is worth knowing exactly which nine.

The five-minute version

The ways a Saudi contract lawfully ends

Article 74 of the Labour Lawlists the cases in which an employment contract terminates. The ones a nurse meets are the written agreement of both parties (“provided that the employee's consent is in writing”), the expiry of a fixed term, resignation, and the one this page is about — termination “based on the will of one of the parties in contracts of indefinite duration, in accordance with Article (75)”. Force majeure, the permanent closure of the establishment and the termination of the activity you were employed in are also on the list.

Article 75 is where the notice periods live, and it is not symmetrical:

• Where the contract is of indefinite duration and the salary is paid monthly, and the employee terminates for a legitimate reason, written notice of at least thirty (30) days before the termination date.
• Where the employer terminates on the same footing, written notice of at least sixty (60) days.
• Where the salary is not paid monthly, thirty days either way.

Nurses are routinely told “the notice period is thirty days” because thirty is the number in the resignation clause of their contract. On an indefinite monthly-paid contract that is the figure for notice yougive. Article 76 supplies the remedy where notice is not observed: the terminating party “shall be obligated to pay the other party an amount equal to the worker's wage for the same notice period, unless the two parties agree otherwise.”

Article 80: the nine cases, and the sentence before them

This is the article your termination letter is, or ought to be, arguing from. Read its opening line carefully, because it is a prohibition with exceptions rather than a grant of power: “The employer may not terminate the contract without rewarding, notifying, or compensating the worker, except in the following cases and provided that the worker is given the opportunity to state their reasons for objecting to the termination.”

Three things are being withheld in those cases — the end-of-service award, the notice, and compensation — and the right to object is written into the same sentence as the exception. Abbreviated, the nine cases are:

• Assault on the employer, the responsible manager, a superior or a subordinate, during work or because of it.
• Failure to fulfil essential contractual obligations, disobeying lawful orders, or intentionally disregarding clearly posted safety instructions — despite being given a written warning.
• Proven misconduct, or an act involving dishonesty or breach of trust.
• Intentionally acting or failing to act so as to cause the employer material loss — and the employer must notify the competent authorities within twenty-four hours of learning of it.
• Resorting to forgery to obtain the job.
• Where the worker is appointed under probation.
• Absence without a legitimate reason for more than thirty days in one contractual year, or more than fifteen consecutive days — preceded by a written warning after twenty days of absence in the first case and ten days in the second.
• Unlawfully exploiting the job position for personal gains and benefits.
• Disclosing industrial or commercial secrets specific to the work.

Note the sixth case, because it catches nurses who did not realise it applied to them: a worker appointed under probation sits inside Article 80. If you are in your probationary period, the protections in this section are not the ones you are relying on. What your probation period may lawfully be, and how it is documented, is set by your contract as registered on Qiwa.

If the reason was not a legitimate one

Article 77 deals with termination for an illegitimate reason, by either party. Unless the contract itself specifies compensation, the party prejudiced by the termination is entitled to:

• Fifteen days' wages for each year of the worker's service, if the contract is for an indefinite term; or
• the wages for the remaining period of the contract, if it is for a fixed term;
• and in either case, compensation that “shall not be less than the worker's wages for a period of two months.”

Two practical points. The floor of two months' wages matters most to a nurse dismissed early in a posting, where fifteen days per year would come to almost nothing. And this compensation is a separate head from the end-of-service award and from the notice-period payment in Article 76 — those articles do their own work.

Most Saudi nursing contracts are fixed-term, which changes the shape of the claim considerably: on a fixed-term contract the measure is the wages for whatever remains of the term. Check what is actually documented on Qiwa rather than what you remember signing; the Saudi resignation guide goes through why the documented contract is the one that counts.

Your end-of-service award, and the scale that does not apply

Article 84 sets the award for every termination of the relationship:

• Half a month's wage for each year of the first five years of service;
• one month's wage for each subsequent year;
• calculated on the last wage received, with a pro-rata award for fractions of a year worked.

Then Article 85, which is the article the ward gets wrong. Its opening words are the whole point: “If the employment relationship ends due to the worker's resignation” , the worker gets one third of the award after two to five years' continuous service, two thirds after more than five and less than ten, and the full award at ten years or more.

That scale is a resignation rule. It is not a general discount on end-of-service awards, and nothing in Article 84 applies it to a termination by the employer. A nurse terminated at three years' service is not entitled to a third of an award — she is entitled to the Article 84 calculation in full. The fractions only reappear if she was the one who ended the relationship.

They cannot end your contract because you are ill

Article 82 is one sentence and it is absolute on its face: “The employer may not terminate a worker's service due to illness before the worker has exhausted the specified periods of sick leave stipulated in this Law.” The same article adds that the worker “has the right to request that their annual leave be combined with their sick leave”.

This is the article for a nurse being managed out during a long illness or after a work injury — a scenario that arrives on hospital wards more often than anywhere else. What the sick-leave periods themselves are, and how a work injury is treated differently from ordinary illness, is covered in our sick leave and work injury guide.

The mirror: when you may leave without notice

Article 81 is Article 80 from the other side. It entitles the worker to “leave work without notice, while retaining all their statutory rights” in seven cases, including where the employer fails to fulfil its essential contractual or statutory obligations; where the employer deceived the worker at the time of contracting about the terms and conditions of work; where the worker is assigned, without consent, work fundamentally different from what was agreed; where the employer, a member of their family or the responsible manager commits an act of assault characterised by violence or an act violating public morals toward the worker or their family; where the treatment is “characterized by harshness, injustice, or humiliation”; where there is a known danger to safety or health the employer has not acted on; and — the seventh, which is the important one here —

where the employer, through its actions, “particularly their unfair treatment or breach of the contract terms, has compelled the worker to appear as though they are the one who terminated the contract.”

That is the constructive-dismissal clause, and it is the answer to the oldest manoeuvre in Gulf employment: making conditions intolerable so that the nurse resigns and the employer never has to justify a termination. Article 81 anticipates it. It does not, however, make walking out safe — leaving without an Article 81 case behind you is how an absence turns into the Article 80 absence ground, and how an absconding report gets filed. Until the contract has formally ended, you are still employed.

The non-compete clause in your contract

Article 83 permits one only where your work allowed you to become acquainted with the employer's clients, and only where the clause is written, specific as to time, place and the nature of the work, and no longer than two years from the date the relationship ended. A separate paragraph covers confidentiality where the work gave access to business secrets, on the same written-and-specific conditions. The employer's claim for a breach must be filed within one year from discovering it.

A blanket “you may not work for another healthcare provider in the Kingdom” clause with no time limit, no place and no defined scope of work does not meet the conditions Article 83 sets for validity. Note the difference from the UAE, which has an express provision nullifying the clause where the employer terminated unlawfully; the Saudi article does not contain that sentence, so the argument here is about the clause's validity on its own terms rather than about the manner of your dismissal.

The settlement clock

Article 88 puts a deadline on your employer, not on you: “Upon the termination of a worker's service, the employer shall pay their wages and settle all their entitlements within a maximum period of one week from the date of the termination of the contractual relationship.” If the worker terminated the contract, the employer has two weeks. The employer may deduct any debt you owe it because of the work from what it owes you.

One week is short, and the reason to know it is sequencing. Nurses routinely surrender the leverage they have — signing the clearance, handing back accommodation, accepting a final exit — before the settlement lands, on the understanding that the money will follow. The order matters, and it is set out in the guide to leaving a Saudi nursing job, which covers the final exit visa, the clearance and the documents only your employer can give you.

Your iqama, your transfer, and your SCFHS registration

The iqama

Your residence permit is sponsored by the employer, and a termination starts a process that is an immigration and Ministry matter rather than a hospital one. Two routes exist and they are not the same thing: transferring your sponsorship to a new Saudi employer, and taking a final exit. The transfer rules were substantially rewritten by the 2021 Labour Reform Initiative, and the current position — including when a transfer no longer requires your employer's consent — is set out in the leaving Saudi Arabia guide. Do not take a final exit as a way of resolving a dispute; check the current position on Qiwa and, for the visa itself, on the GOV.SA service page.

The registration

Your SCFHS professional classification and registration are not the same thing as your permission to work at a given hospital. A termination ends an employment link; it does not revoke a professional classification. But the documents you will need to prove those years to the next regulator — the service certificate with exact dates, the good standing certificate, a named HR contact who will answer a DataFlow request — are all easiest to obtain while you still have an employer. Do that first; the mechanics are in the SCFHS classification and registration guide and the good standing certificate guide.

What to ask for, and what to keep

None of the articles above run on how unfair the termination felt. They run on documents, and every one of them is easier to obtain on the day than three months later from another country.

• The termination letter, and the ground it names. Whether the employer is relying on Article 75 (notice) or on one of Article 80's nine cases decides whether the award is payable at all. A letter that gives no reason is itself a fact.
• Whatever record exists of your opportunity to object, which the opening sentence of Article 80 requires in every one of the nine cases, and of any written warning that a specific ground required.
• Dates. The date notice was given (against the 60-day period in Article 75), the last working day, the date the contractual relationship ended (against the one-week settlement deadline in Article 88), and the dates of any absence the employer is relying on.
• The contract as documented on Qiwa — its duration above all, because fixed-term and indefinite-term contracts are compensated on completely different measures under Article 77.
• Payslips, the wage breakdown, and the settlement statementyou are given, alongside the figure the Ministry's own calculator produces from your dates.
• Anything in writing: the e-mail, the warning letters, the roster, the accommodation notice. A conversation in an office leaves no record; the same exchange by e-mail does.

Official sources

• MHRSD — the Labour Law in English, published part by part. The articles quoted here are in Part Five, Labor Relations: Articles 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 and 88.
• MHRSD — End of Service Benefit Calculator — the Ministry's own arithmetic, and the only figure worth relying on for your dates.
• MHRSD — services directory— labour relations services, including the amicable settlement stage that precedes the labour courts.
• Qiwa— the Ministry's platform for employment contracts and employee transfer; your documented contract lives here.
• GOV.SA— issuance of exit/re-entry and final exit visas through Absher.
• Saudi Commission for Health Specialties— professional classification and registration, and the good standing certificate.

Article numbers are stable; the Labour Law itself was substantially amended in 2025, and service routes, calculators and transfer rules sit below the level of the statute and change more often still. Read the Ministry's pages before you rely on anything from this or any other page — including this one.