Holidays in United Arab Emirates

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in United Arab Emirates

The Weekend That Moved Twice in a Generation

Few countries have redrawn their own calendar as deliberately as the United Arab Emirates. Until 2006, the country observed a Thursday and Friday weekend, standard across much of the Gulf and built around Friday as the primary day of communal prayer. That year the UAE became the first Gulf state to shift to a Friday and Saturday weekend instead, a change other Gulf nations, including Saudi Arabia in 2013, gradually followed.

The UAE moved again in a far more unusual direction in January 2022, becoming the first country in the Gulf to adopt a Saturday and Sunday weekend, aligning its public sector and schools with the working calendar used across most of the world's major financial markets. The new schedule kept Friday as a working day but shortened it to a half day, with government offices and schools closing at noon for a fixed communal prayer time of 1:15 p.m., a specific clock time rather than the sunset dependent schedule that traditionally governs Muslim prayer times. Private companies were left free to choose their own arrangement, and at least one emirate, Sharjah, opted for a compromise of its own, declaring Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all part of the weekend rather than picking one system or the other.

7:42 in the Evening, 493 Million Kilometers From Home

On February 9, 2021, at precisely 7:42 p.m. UAE time, the country's Hope Probe slowed from a cruising speed of roughly 121,000 kilometers per hour to about 18,000 kilometers per hour in a critical braking maneuver, successfully entering orbit around Mars and making the United Arab Emirates the fifth nation in history, and the first Arab nation, to reach another planet. The probe, known in Arabic as Amal, had launched from Tanegashima Island in Japan on July 20, 2020, traveling roughly 493 million kilometers over more than half a year to reach its target, with officials publicly describing the orbital insertion as having only a 50 percent chance of success given the technical difficulty of the maneuver.

Leadership in Dubai and Abu Dhabi framed the mission's timing as deliberately symbolic, arriving fifty years almost to the year after the UAE's own founding as a federation in 1971. Once safely in orbit, Hope began a mission designed to run for a full Martian year, the equivalent of 687 Earth days, collecting the first complete picture of the Martian atmosphere's daily and seasonal cycles and sharing the resulting data freely with the international scientific community rather than restricting access to it.

A Committee That Watches the Sky to Set the Calendar

While the Gregorian calendar governs most of daily life in the UAE, the timing of the country's most important religious observances is still set the traditional way: by a government appointed committee that physically watches for the appearance of a new crescent moon. The UAE's Moon Sighting Committee, chaired by the Minister of Justice and made up of judicial officials, religious scholars, and members of the Emirates Astronomy Society, convenes each month on the 29th day of the current Hijri month, since Islamic lunar months run either 29 or 30 days depending on when the next crescent actually becomes visible.

The standards used to confirm a sighting are precise rather than simply a matter of opinion: astronomers require the moon to have been born before sunset, to sit at least six degrees away from the sun in the sky, to be at least twelve hours old, and to remain visible above the horizon for at least twenty minutes after sunset before a sighting can be considered scientifically valid. Sharia courts across the country report their observations directly to the committee, which now supplements human eyesight and telescopes with technology such as drones to improve detection, and the committee's announcement, typically made shortly after sunset prayers, determines with only hours of notice exactly when the fasting month of Ramadan begins and ends and when the multi day Eid Al Fitr holiday will fall for millions of residents and workers across the country.

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