Core Hours

What core hours are

Core hours (الساعات الأساسية الإلزامية), also called core time, are a window of the working day during which every member of the team is required to be at work. The rest of the day is left to each employee to arrange within the limits the organisation allows, an arrangement known as flextime. Core hours are an internal scheduling convention that the organisation adopts. They have no connection with the flexible work contract (العمل المرن) defined in paragraph Two of Article 27 of the Implementing Regulation (اللائحة التنفيذية) of the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل), which is a separate contract type with its own conditions, discussed under employment status.

The organisation sets its window, announces it and changes it. Whatever it decides, the window is drawn inside the ceilings on working hours that the Labor Law sets, and never above them.

What core hours do, and what they do not

• They guarantee shared time. For part of the day everyone is available together, so meetings, reviews and any work that needs people at the same time can be scheduled there.
• They leave the rest of the day flexible. An employee may start early or late, within the limits that have been announced.
• They do not change the total. Core hours leave an employee’s total working hours as they were, governing when part of the day is worked, not how much of it.
• They are not the working hours themselves. Those hours still have to be set, and an employee works before or after the window to complete the day.

The statutory frame that comes before core hours

Core hours are an arrangement made inside the statutory limits, not above them and not in place of them. Under Article 98 of the Labor Law, a worker may not be employed for more than eight hours of actual work a day where the employer has adopted the daily standard, or 48 hours a week where it has adopted the weekly standard, and for Muslims in Ramadan those hours are reduced to six a day or 36 a week. Article 99 of the Labor Law allows the daily hours to be raised to nine for certain categories of worker, or in industries and works in which the worker is not continuously occupied, and reduced to seven for certain categories of worker, or in hazardous or harmful industries and works; those categories, industries and works are set by a decision of the Minister. Article 100 of the Labor Law allows the employer, in an establishment whose nature of work requires work by rotation and with the Ministry’s approval, to exceed eight hours a day or 48 a week, provided that the average over three weeks or less stays within those figures. Further cases sit in Article 106 of the Labor Law, which lets the employer disregard Articles 98 and 101 of the Labor Law and paragraph (1) of Article 104 of the Labor Law in four cases, within a limit of ten hours of actual work a day or sixty a week, and in Article 108 of the Labor Law, which takes four categories outside Articles 98 and 101 of the Labor Law. Those cases are set out under working hours exemptions. Rest periods, the weekly rest and overtime have their own sources in the Labor Law and its Implementing Regulation, covered in our guides to working hours and the weekly rest and to compensatory rest. The definition of core hours settles none of those provisions and describes no relationship between them.

The right order is to know those provisions first and then draw the window inside them. Drawing the window around operational need and asking afterwards where it stands in law, once it is already in use, reverses that order. Where the arrangement touches the working hours stated in the employment contract, it is a change to the contract and not a verbal understanding with a line manager. Employment contracts are documented electronically on the Qiwa platform, which is how the duty to document a contract in Article 51 of the Labor Law is discharged in practice. The establishment creates and documents the contract there, and the worker approves it, rejects it or requests an amendment from their Qiwa Individuals account, as set out in our guide to attesting employment contracts on Qiwa.

How core hours differ from a compressed workweek, hybrid work and shift work

Four arrangements are mentioned together under the heading of flexibility, and each one moves something different:

• Core hours move where the hours fall within the day. The number of hours stays the same, and so do the days.
• A compressed workweek moves how the hours are spread across the days. The total stays the same and only its distribution changes, with longer days in exchange for an extra day off.
• Hybrid work moves the place of work, not its timing.
• Shift work organises work in successive periods covered in turn by different teams. Its purpose is wider coverage over time, not simply a longer day for one employee, so it extends the establishment’s operating hours. How those shifts are allocated to people is discussed under shift bidding. Core hours leave coverage untouched and guarantee shared time within the day the organisation already works.

These arrangements can be combined: a core window inside a compressed week, or a core window alongside a flexible workplace. They are independent dimensions, not options of which only one may be chosen. Core hours also sit on the other side of the line from on call time: inside the window the employee is working, whereas on call the employee is by default not working and is only required to be able to attend.

How to draw a workable core hours window

• Base it on a real need to work together. When do members of the team actually need each other? A window with no operational reason removes the flexibility and keeps only its outward form.
• Keep it as narrow as will serve. Every hour added to the window is taken away from the flexibility the arrangement was introduced to provide.
• Take other teams into account, along with the customers they deal with. A window that does not overlap with the neighbouring department’s window produces waiting, not shared time.
• Write it down and announce it. State the start and the end, the limits of flexibility outside it, and what happens when an exception is needed.
• Protect what is inside it from being filled with meetings back to back. Otherwise the window becomes the worst part of the day rather than the most useful.
• Review its effect after a period announced in advance, rather than letting it continue simply because it is already there.

A worked example: how much flexibility core hours leave

“As narrow as will serve” is easy to agree with, and its meaning becomes clear only once the figures are worked through. Take an organisation that lets its employees start and finish at any time between 7:00 and 19:00, with a working day assumed, for the arithmetic, to run eight hours from start to finish. That availability span is 12 hours wide.

• Before any core window is drawn, the range of possible start times is 12 − 8 = 4 hours, from 7:00 to 11:00.
• With a core window from 11:00 to 15:00, which is four hours long, the earliest possible start is 7:00, because someone starting then finishes at 15:00 and covers the whole window. The latest start is 11:00, because anyone starting after that misses the beginning of the window. The start range stays at 4 hours, and no flexibility has been lost.
• With a core window from 9:00 to 16:00, which is seven hours long, the earliest start is 8:00, because someone starting at 7:00 finishes at 15:00 and does not reach the end of the window. The latest start is 9:00. The start range falls to one hour.

Widening the window from four hours to seven removed three of the four hours of flexibility. It left a quarter of it, one hour out of four, and only two figures in the announced policy changed.

The calculation gives a general rule: the range of start times equals the smaller of two figures, the availability span minus the length of the day, and the length of the day minus the length of the window. The rule holds as long as the window sits far enough from both ends of the availability span. If it comes close to either end, that end itself limits the range further. The value of the rule is that the effect of any change is known before it is announced, not after a month of complaints. How breaks fall within the working day is governed by the provisions on rest periods mentioned above, and the arithmetic does not settle it.

The numbers in these examples show the method. They are not thresholds to measure against. We set no correct length for core hours, no position in the day, no acceptable level of meetings inside them and no period after which they should be reviewed. Each of those is an operational decision that the organisation makes according to its work.

Meeting load decides whether core hours have served their purpose

The window was set so that the team would be available together for shared work, not so that it would spend that time in meetings. A four hour window contains 240 minutes. If 150 of them are taken up by meetings on an ordinary day, the share taken is 150 ÷ 240 = 62.5%, and the remaining 90 minutes are all that is left for the purpose the window was set for: reviews, a question asked and answered on the spot, and joint work that needs both people present.

This can be measured directly from the team’s calendar, without a survey. If the share comes out high, the problem lies not in the length of the window but in what is placed inside it, and widening it adds to the occupied time without adding to the available time. That is what protecting the window means in practice: a written rule on how much may be scheduled inside it, not a recommendation to keep meetings down.

What undermines core hours

• A window widened until it covers the whole day or nearly all of it. It then becomes a fixed schedule under another name.
• Applying the window to roles that cannot accommodate flexibility, such as service roles tied to hours announced to customers.
• Measuring attendance inside the window alone and ignoring the rest of the day, so that being visible at a particular time becomes the measure.
• Leaving changes to individual managers. Several windows then appear within one organisation, and the shared time they were meant to secure is lost.
• Announcing the window without recording time against it. An arrangement that does not appear in the attendance record ends up managed by impression.

Cases where core hours are calculated differently

• Shorter working days. A four hour window on an eight hour day leaves flexibility. The same window on a four hour day takes up the whole day and removes flexibility altogether, because the start range becomes zero. So a single window applied to two days of different lengths does not give the same result. A part time contract under paragraph One of Article 27 of the Implementing Regulation sets hours below half the establishment’s usual daily hours, so on an eight hour usual day a four hour window would be longer than such a contract’s day.
• Teams spread across distant time zones. The window is set in local time. Where a team is spread across zones, the time actually available is the overlap between the windows, and it may be narrower than any single window or may not exist at all. What has to be calculated here is the overlap, not the window.
• Roles tied to hours announced to customers. Nothing in them is left to the employee’s choice, so drawing a core window for them announces an arrangement that does not exist.
• Shift work. A shift sets its start and its end, so there is no room for a core window inside a day whose timing offers no choice.
• Periods in which the length of the working day changes, such as the Ramadan hours that Article 98 of the Labor Law sets for Muslims. A window drawn for a day of one length does not stay valid when that length changes, and it has to be recalculated in the same way. What sets the length of the day in those periods comes from the Labor Law and its Implementing Regulation, not from the definition of core hours.

Statutory provisions relied on for core hours

The provisions relied on are those of the Saudi Labor Law as published by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development: Article 51 (the written and documented contract), Article 98 (the ceilings on actual work and the Ramadan hours), Article 99 (the nine hour and seven hour variations), Article 100 (work by rotation), Article 106 (the four cases) and Article 108 (the four excluded categories). From the Implementing Regulation, in the edition published by the same Ministry in April 2025: Article 27 (part time work and the flexible work contract). Royal Decree M/44 of 1446H, in force since 19 February 2025, amended Article 51 of the Labor Law. That decree did not amend Articles 98, 99, 100, 106 or 108 of the Labor Law.

Core hours, then, are a scheduling convention that the organisation chooses and announces, drawn inside those provisions once they are known, never before them and never above them.

This is an explanation of the concept and of the statutory provisions cited, not legal advice.

Related terms

• Working Hours Exemptions
• On Call Time
• Shift Bidding
• Job Autonomy
• Buddy Punching