Verbal Warning

Definition of a verbal warning

A verbal warning (الإنذار الشفهي), also called a verbal reprimand, is a notice given to an employee by word of mouth that conduct of theirs was unacceptable, together with a reminder of what they may face if the conduct continues or happens again.

Organisations use the phrase in two senses that cannot both apply to the same notice. In the first it is a management notice on which nothing is built. In the second it is meant as a penalty, the first rung of a disciplinary ladder. The difference does not lie in the tone of the conversation or in the seniority of whoever held it. It lies in two questions: whether anything is to be built on the notice, and where it is written down.

Where a verbal warning sits among the statutory penalties

Article 66 of the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل) confines disciplinary penalties to a closed list of six, and the first of them is a warning. The other five are a fine, withholding or deferring a raise, deferring a promotion, suspension from work without pay, and dismissal in the cases the Labor Law provides; how that list bears on a move to a lower grade is set out under demotion. One feature of the list matters for a verbal warning: Article 66 of the Labor Law names the warning without qualification, tying it to no medium and no form.

Article 67 of the Labor Law bars the employer from imposing any penalty not provided for in the Labor Law or in the establishment’s approved work regulation (لائحة تنظيم العمل). The test names two sources, and a penalty found in neither has no basis. How the work regulation is prepared, and what the Labor Law delegates to it, is covered in our guide to the work organisation regulation.

The model work regulation (النموذج الموحّد), the model on which establishments prepare their own work regulations, defines its first penalty as a written warning: a letter the establishment sends to the worker stating the type of violation committed and drawing attention to the possibility of a heavier penalty if the violation continues or is repeated.

The practical question that follows is therefore settled by the establishment’s own work regulation, not by a general definition: what its approved regulation names as a penalty, and in what terms. An organisation that wants an oral notice to carry the effect of a penalty turns to what its regulation provides on the point. One that finds no place for it there holds a management notice, not a penalty. That is an accurate and useful description, and there is nothing wrong with it, provided the notice is not treated as something more.

The questions that decide what a verbal warning is

The confusion around a verbal warning can be resolved by three questions, each answered yes or no before the conversation takes place.

• Will it be recorded in the employee’s file as a penalty? If yes, it is a penalty however it was communicated. If no, it is a management conversation however firm it was.
• Will a heavier penalty be built on it if the conduct is repeated? Building on an earlier step needs a penalty with a source and a fixed date.
• Can the employee lodge a grievance against it? Article 72 of the Labor Law requires the worker to be notified in writing of a decision imposing a penalty, and gives the worker thirty days, excluding official holidays, from that notification to file a written grievance with the competent body at the employer. Calling something a penalty without giving written notice of it leaves the employee without a known date from which that period runs.

An organisation that answers no to all three holds a useful management tool that none of the constraints on penalties restricts. One that answers yes to any of them has entered the territory of penalties and takes on everything that comes with it. One that leaves the questions unanswered produces a document of which nobody can say, a year later, which of the two it was.

The procedure when a verbal warning is meant as a penalty

If a penalty is intended, Article 71 of the Labor Law forbids imposing it until the employer has notified the worker in writing of what is alleged against them, questioned them, and investigated their defence, with all of this recorded in a minute placed in their own file, the employee file. The statutory step is the investigation of the defence, not merely hearing it: what the employee says has to be examined and checked.

Article 71 of the Labor Law states that duty and does not state what follows if a penalty is imposed without those steps. We found nothing in the sources we reviewed that settles the consequence, so we draw none from it, in either direction.

One point within that procedure is easily confused with a verbal warning: the exception that allows the questioning to be oral.

Why oral questioning does not make a verbal warning an oral penalty

Article 71 of the Labor Law allows the questioning to be oral in minor violations whose penalty goes no further than a warning or a fine deducting no more than one day’s wage, provided this is recorded in the minute.

This is where the confusion behind the term arises. What may be oral is the questioning of the employee, not the penalty and not its record. The warning remains the first penalty on the list, the minute remains required by the words of the exception itself, and the written notice of what is alleged is not lifted. Reading into the text a permission for an oral warning moves the permission from one step to another.

The confusion is deepened because the warning is named in the exception, which invites the assumption that the penalty itself has become oral. The text does not say so. It names the warning, and a fine of no more than one day’s wage, as the ceiling on the penalty in the minor violations it covers, and what it allows to be oral within that ceiling is still only the questioning.

The one day ceiling is measured on the actual wage (الأجر الفعلي). Article 71 of the Labor Law uses the word wage there without qualification, and Article 2 of the Labor Law provides that the wage, where unqualified, means the actual wage, so the ceiling is computed on the actual wage and not on the basic wage.

The narrowness of the exception shows when it is set against the limits on fines. Article 70 of the Labor Law provides that a fine for a single violation may not exceed five days’ wage, while the oral exception stops at one day’s wage. Measured by amount, the exception therefore covers 1 out of 5 of the permitted range for a fine, one fifth, and the remaining four fifths lie outside it. The caps on fines, and how they sit beside other deductions from pay, are covered in our guide to wage deductions.

Penalties other than the warning and a fine within that ceiling are not reached by the exception at all. Suspension from work without pay, deferring a promotion, withholding or deferring a raise and dismissal are none of them penalties for which the questioning may be oral, because the exception stops at a warning or a one day fine, and anything beyond that falls outside it by the penalty alone. An employer’s own view of how serious a violation is does not extend the exception to those penalties. For each of them, written notice, questioning, the investigation of the defence and the minute are all required.

What an unrecorded verbal warning cannot support

A verbal warning may be intended as a first rung, on which a heavier penalty is built if the conduct is repeated. Building on it needs a record to refer to and a fixed date, and a notice that was never recorded cannot later show that it happened, when it happened or what the employee was told.

Article 68 of the Labor Law makes the point sharper. It ties aggravation of a penalty for a repeated violation to a period running from the date the worker was notified that the penalty for the earlier violation had been imposed, and it bars aggravation once 180 days of that period have passed. The model work regulation carries the same rule. The starting point is an event of notification of a penalty. An employer with no fixed date for that event has nothing to count from, and an employee who repeats a violation after a month then stands in the same position as one who repeats it after two years.

Where the model work regulation is cited for that rule, it is cited by name and not by number, because the model regulation and the Labor Law use the same article numbers for different subjects, and a number cited without its instrument points at the wrong rule.

We found nothing in the sources we reviewed that settles what may be built on an oral notice that was never recorded, and we draw no conclusion from that in either direction.

What a verbal warning is not

• A written warning. This is a letter that states the type of violation and is kept in the file, and the grievance route and its periods attach to it. A verbal warning carries none of that by itself. The difference between them is not only the medium but what is left of each when it is asked for six months later.
• A management conversation. A conversation about performance or conduct that is not meant to have a disciplinary effect does not need what a penalty needs. Holding one and then calling it a warning on paper moves it onto a track whose procedure it never followed, and the cost can fall on whoever wrote it before it falls on the employee concerned.
• A performance improvement plan. It addresses a shortfall in performance through a management tool with measured outputs, whereas a warning concerns a violation. Each has a track of its own.
• A note in a performance appraisal. The model work regulation deals with performance reports under a separate heading, and what is written in a report is examined under that heading. A note there does not stand in for the disciplinary steps, those steps do not stand in for the note, and no appraisal rating is built on a notice that never entered the appraisal.

Statutory sources on the verbal warning

The provisions relied on are those of the Saudi Labor Law as published by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development: Article 2 (the wage, where unqualified, is the actual wage), Article 66 (the closed list of penalties), Article 67 (no penalty outside the Labor Law or the work regulation), Article 68 (no aggravation of a penalty for a repeated violation once 180 days have passed from notification of the earlier penalty), Article 70 (the cap on a fine for a single violation), Article 71 (the procedure before a penalty, and the oral questioning exception) and Article 72 (written notification of the penalty decision, and the grievance). Royal Decree M/44 of 1446H, in force since 19 February 2025, amended Article 72 of the Labor Law, and the grievance period stated above is taken from the consolidated text published after that amendment. That decree did not amend Articles 66, 67, 68, 70 or 71 of the Labor Law, and while it added definitions to Article 2 of the Labor Law, it left the definitions of the basic wage and the actual wage unchanged. The definition of the written warning is that of the model work regulation annexed to the Implementing Regulation (اللائحة التنفيذية), which also carries the 180 day aggravation period.

Before a verbal warning is given

The question that comes before the conversation is not what tone to take but whether anything is meant to be built on it later. If not, it is a management conversation, it is called by that name, and the employee’s file does not say they were warned. If so, the track is the penalty track in full: a source in the Labor Law or in the approved work regulation, written notice of what is alleged, questioning that may be oral within its limit, investigation of the defence, and a minute placed in the file.

The grey area between the two is where a dispute can arise a year later, when the organisation is asked to show what it holds and finds only a supervisor’s memory. The definition of a verbal warning prescribes no particular wording for the conversation or for its record; the questions above are to be answered before the conversation, and they are not a form that has to be followed.

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

Related terms

• Demotion
• Employee File
• Buddy Punching
• Performance Standards