The UAE working week, measured rather than assumed, is almost flat. The lightest day of the week carries 12.9 per cent of all punches and the heaviest carries 15.3 per cent. There is no weekend in this data, and that single fact reshapes how rosters, overtime and lateness all behave.
What was measured, and what was not
Every figure below comes from live production data, read in one consistent snapshot on 31 August 2026: 140,775 punches and 40,970 attendance records, from 47 biometric terminals across 43 sites and four companies with active staff, spanning 274 consecutive days from 1 December 2025.
The punch count is a moving target, because the terminals are still sending. It rose by fourteen while these queries were being written. Everything here was read at one moment so the figures reconcile with each other. Read it again tomorrow and the totals will be larger while the percentages will not have moved.
Editorial disclosure: Wurxa publishes this and sells attendance software, so read the numbers with that in mind. Everything here is an aggregate. No company, site or individual is identifiable, no figure is small enough to single anybody out, and nothing has been excluded to make a point look better.
Two limits worth stating plainly. This is a specific shape of employer: multi-site operations that already run biometric hardware. A single-site professional services firm would produce a different histogram entirely. And 274 days is three quarters of a year, so seasonal claims are not available.
The week has no shape
Share of all punches, by day of the week:
If you handed a European operations manager these numbers they would assume it was broken. Friday and Saturday, the UAE weekend, carry 14.8 and 14.6 per cent. That is more traffic than Monday.
The explanation is not that nobody rests. It is that these are operations that do not close: retail floors, facilities teams, hospitality. The staff rotate; the site does not. Sunday being the lightest day at 12.9 per cent is the closest thing to a weekend effect in the whole dataset, and it is a 2.4 point spread across the entire week.
What follows from that is practical. A roster built on a Monday-to-Friday mental model will be wrong for most of these sites, and every downstream calculation, overtime included, inherits the error.
The day has three peaks, not two
Share of all punches, by hour of the day:
Three things stand out.
The largest peak is at 18:00, not 08:00. Eleven per cent of every punch in 274 days lands in that one hour. A single-shift office produces its biggest spike in the morning; this produces it in the evening, which is the signature of a changeover, one group leaving as another arrives.
The middle of the morning is dead. From 10:00 to 11:00 the rate falls to 1.4 per cent, lower than midnight. Nothing happens between the morning arrival and the midday movement, which is exactly what you would expect and is worth stating because it is the baseline against which anything unusual shows up.
Nights are real, not noise. 22:00 and 23:00 together carry 10.1 per cent, and midnight carries another 4.0. Roughly one punch in seven happens after 22:00. Under Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, work between 22:00 and 04:00 attracts a 50 per cent overtime uplift rather than 25, and shift workers are excluded from that specific provision. Whether a given punch in that window costs the ordinary rate or the premium one depends entirely on whether the roster says shift, which is a data question before it is a legal one.
The true trough is 03:00, at 0.1 per cent. One punch in a thousand.
The number that causes the most trouble
Of 40,970 attendance records, 6,110 have a clock-in and no clock-out. That is 14.9 per cent, roughly one shift in seven.
Records with the opposite problem, a clock-out and no clock-in, number zero.
That asymmetry is the entire finding. It is not that the terminals drop punches at random; a random fault would produce both kinds in similar quantities. It is behavioural. People clock in because clocking in is how you are recorded as present and how the day starts. Clocking out is the last act of a shift, done while leaving, and nothing visible happens if you skip it.
Every one of those 6,110 records is a day where the hours worked cannot be computed from the data. Somebody has to decide what happened, and whatever they decide becomes payroll. That is where disputes begin.
Half the records say "late"
20,296 records, 49.5 per cent, carry a late flag. The mean lateness on those records is 271 minutes.
Four and a half hours. Nobody is four and a half hours late half the time.
That number is not measuring people. It is measuring the distance between a schedule and the shift somebody actually worked. When a night-shift employee is attached to a day-shift roster, every single one of their days is recorded as hours late, and the flag stops carrying information.
The lesson we took from it, having built the thing that produces the flag: a lateness metric is only as good as the roster underneath it, and a system that reports half its records as exceptions has stopped reporting exceptions. Before anybody acts on lateness, the roster has to be checked against what people are actually doing.
Overtime is mostly the expensive kind
15,651 overtime hours were recorded in the period. The split:
Almost three quarters of paid overtime is at the premium rate. That follows directly from the two findings above: if the week is flat, rest-day work is routine rather than exceptional, and if a seventh of punches happen after 22:00, night hours are normal operating conditions.
The practical consequence is a budgeting error we suspect is common. An employer who estimates overtime at 125 per cent, because that is the number in the handbook, is estimating with the rate that applies to the smaller share of it.
The terminals themselves
47 devices: 44 online, 3 offline at the time of measurement. 43 have sent at least one punch. Four never have.
Traffic is heavily concentrated. The busiest terminal carries 11,805 punches and the quietest has sent two. The top five devices account for 27.2 per cent of all traffic and the top ten for 44.4 per cent. Half the fleet handles a small fraction of the volume.
That matters for anyone sizing a deployment. The instinct is to treat terminals as interchangeable and monitor them equally. In practice a handful of doors carry the business, and an outage on one of those five is a different event from an outage on one of the quiet forty.
Across all 274 days in the window, every single day has punches. Not one gap.
Ramadan moves the entire day
This is the clearest signal in the dataset, and it is worth its own list. The window covers Ramadan 2026, 17 February to 19 March, which contributed 13,844 punches across 31 days.
The whole working day slides later. Activity drains out of the middle of the afternoon and reappears after dark, with a new peak at 20:00 that barely exists the rest of the year and a genuine early-morning shift between midnight and 02:00 where there is normally almost nothing.
The 22:00 and 23:00 collapse is the most counter-intuitive line in the list. The rest of the year, those two hours carry 10.8 per cent of traffic between them. During Ramadan they carry 3.2. Work has not stopped; it has moved either side of them, to 20:00 and to after midnight.
Two consequences that cost money. Under Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021, the 50 per cent overtime uplift applies between 22:00 and 04:00, so a shift pattern that moves from 22:00 into 01:00 does not leave the premium window, it moves deeper into it. And a roster built for the other eleven months will flag a large share of Ramadan attendance as exceptions, because the schedule it compares against no longer describes the day.
We had assumed, before looking, that the two-hour statutory reduction would be absorbed into rosters and not show up in aggregate punch data. That was wrong, and it was wrong by a wide margin. The reduction is not what shows up. The reshaping of the day around it is.
The mobile app nobody uses
Of 140,775 punches, 140,764 came from a terminal and 11 were entered by hand. Not one came from the mobile app, despite the app existing and working.
That is worth reporting against our own interest. The mobile punch is the feature asked about in every sales conversation, and in this population nobody touches it. The honest reading is that these are employers whose staff pass a fixed door at a fixed time, so a phone adds nothing, and the demand we hear about is coming from a different kind of company than the ones currently running on this data.
What the manual eleven tell you
Eleven punches out of 140,775 were entered by a person rather than captured by a terminal. That is 0.008 per cent.
It is a small number doing a lot of work. An attendance record that can be edited freely is worth very little in a dispute, because the other side can argue it was edited. A record where hand-entry is vanishingly rare, and every instance of it is logged as such, is a different kind of evidence.
The design principle underneath it, which we would defend in any system: manual entry has to exist, because terminals fail and people forget, and it has to be visibly distinct from a captured punch. Not blocked. Marked. The eleven are not a problem; the fact that you can tell they are eleven is the point.
What we would tell an operator
Four things, in the order they would save you time.
Check your rosters before you look at any lateness report. If more than a small minority of records are flagged, the flag is describing your schedule, not your staff.
Treat the missing clock-out as a design problem, not a discipline problem. One in seven is too many to solve by asking people to remember. Either the last punch of the shift has to be unavoidable, or the system needs an explicit, auditable way to close the day.
Budget overtime at the premium rate if you run past 22:00 or across the weekend, because in a flat week the premium rate is the normal one.
Know which five terminals matter. Not all doors are equal, and the monitoring should not pretend otherwise.
Every figure above came out of Wurxa, read from terminals that were already on the wall. Wurxa attendance takes punches live from the ZKTeco terminals you already own, works out lateness against each person's roster and overtime at 125% or 150% from the real punch times, and keeps a hand-entered punch visibly separate from a captured one. It is free for up to 5 employees on one site, and every new workspace gets every feature for 14 days with no card. Start your free trial, or check a specific overtime figure first.
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