MOHRE Enquiry: How to Check a Labour Contract, Work Permit or Complaint

MOHRE enquiries get searched heavily and explained badly. Part of the problem is that "MOHRE enquiry" is not one service, it is about six, and the one you need depends entirely on what you are trying to find out.

This guide separates them, tells you what each one needs as an input, and explains what the result means once you have it.

What MOHRE Is and What It Is Not

MOHRE is the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation. It regulates the employment relationship in the UAE private sector: work permits, labour contracts, wages, complaints, Emiratisation obligations and the rules employers must follow.

Its portal is mohre.gov.ae.

It is not the immigration authority. Residence visas, entry permits and Emirates ID belong to the Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Port Security at icp.gov.ae, or in Dubai to GDRFA.

If your question is "am I allowed to be in the country", that is immigration. If it is "am I allowed to work here, and on what terms", that is MOHRE.

Almost every wasted hour on these portals comes from asking one authority a question that belongs to the other.

Free zone employees are a partial exception. Most free zones administer employment inside their own authority, so a free zone worker's contract may not appear in MOHRE's records at all.

If you work for a free zone company and the enquiry returns nothing, that is very likely the reason rather than an error.

The Six Enquiries, and Which One You Need

How to Check Your Own Labour Contract

This is the one every employee should do once, and almost nobody does. The labour contract registered with MOHRE is the legally operative version.

If the document you signed in the office and the document lodged with the ministry differ, the registered one is what a dispute will be decided on.

1. Open mohre.gov.ae or the MOHRE app and switch to English if needed.
2. Find the enquiry or services section and choose the contract enquiry service.
3. Enter your person number, sometimes called the labour card number, or your Emirates ID, plus your nationality.
4. Submit the security check.
5. Read the whole record, not just the salary: job title, contract type, contract duration, basic salary and allowances.

What to look for: the basic salary figure, because basic salary drives your end-of-service gratuity and your ILOE insurance tier; the job title, because it must match what you actually do and it also drives the MOHRE skill classification; and the contract type, since UAE law now runs on limited-term contracts with defined renewal rules.

Checking Work Permit Status

A work permit is the labour-side permission for one named person to work for one named employer. It is separate from the residence visa, and it is issued first in the sequence.

The status values you will see are broadly:

• Under process. Submitted, no decision recorded.
• Approved or issued. The labour side is cleared and the immigration steps can proceed.
• Rejected. There will be a reason code, and it is nearly always a document or quota problem rather than a judgement on the person.
• Expired or cancelled. Either the permit ran its term or the employment ended.

If a permit is stuck, the useful question is which of the three usual causes applies: quota exhausted, documents incomplete, or a data mismatch against the passport. Our guide to Tasheel and Tawjeeh covers what each of those looks like and how it gets fixed.

Checking an Establishment, and Why Employers Should

Every company with mainland employees has a MOHRE establishment file. The establishment enquiry tells you whether that file is active, what quota it carries, and whether anything is flagged against it.

This matters before you make an offer, not after. An establishment with an expired trade licence, an unpaid fine or an exhausted quota cannot issue a work permit, and the candidate who has already resigned from their previous job will not find that an interesting technicality.

Checking takes a minute. Our renewals page explains how we keep these dates tracked rather than remembered.

The establishment enquiry is also how a job applicant can do basic due diligence on a prospective employer. A company with an active file and clean status is a different proposition from one without.

Labour Complaints: How the Process Runs

MOHRE handles labour disputes for the private sector, and the process is deliberately structured to try settlement before litigation.

1. The complaint is filed through MOHRE, by phone, app, website or at a service centre.
2. A case officer reviews it and attempts an amicable settlement between the parties. A large share of cases end here.
3. If no settlement is reached within the statutory period, the ministry refers the matter onward to the competent court.
4. The complaint reference number is what you use to track progress at any point.

Two practical notes. First, filing costs the employee nothing, which is deliberate policy.

Second, the strength of a case rests almost entirely on documents: the registered contract, wage records through the official wage system, and written communications.

Verbal assurances are worth very little in this process, which is another reason to have checked your registered contract long before you need it.

The Wage Protection System, in Brief

The Wage Protection System, usually shortened to WPS, is the mechanism that requires employers to pay salaries through approved channels so that MOHRE can see they were paid, on time and in full.

It is not optional for companies in scope, and non-compliance carries escalating consequences, including suspension of the company's ability to obtain new work permits.

For an employee, WPS records are the cleanest possible evidence in a wage dispute.

For an employer, WPS compliance is one of the quiet reasons a hiring pipeline suddenly stops working, because a company blocked over wage compliance cannot get new permits regardless of how good its licence position is.

Which Channel to Use

• The website at mohre.gov.ae for anything you want to read carefully or print.
• The MOHRE app for quick status checks on a phone.
• The call centre for cases where the status is ambiguous and you need a human. Contact numbers are published on the ministry site rather than repeated here, because they do change.
• A Tasheel or Tawjeeh service centre for anything requiring documents to be submitted in person.
• The unified government portal at u.ae if you want to confirm you are on a genuine service and not a lookalike site.

What MOHRE Enquiries Cannot Tell You

To close the loop, here is what belongs to somebody else:

• Residence visa status. ICP or GDRFA. See our guide to checking a UAE visa status by passport number.
• Emirates ID status. ICP. See Emirates ID status, application and renewal.
• Entry permits and immigration files. ICP or GDRFA, submitted through e-channel.
• Free zone employment records in most zones. The zone authority holds them, not MOHRE.
• Trade licence status. The licensing authority, which for Dubai mainland is Dubai Economy and Tourism.

Knowing which of those five owns your question is most of the skill. For businesses that would rather not hold this map in their heads at all, our PRO services are exactly this work, run as a tracked process rather than a series of urgent phone calls.

Emiratisation, and Why It Now Affects Mid-Sized Companies

One more MOHRE responsibility that catches growing companies by surprise: Emiratisation. MOHRE sets targets for the employment of UAE nationals in skilled roles, and the obligation applies once a private-sector company passes a headcount threshold rather than only to large employers.

Non-compliance carries financial contributions that scale with the shortfall, and it can also affect a company's classification and therefore its permit costs.

Two honest points for a founder. First, this is a real planning input rather than a box to tick later, because the target is measured against your skilled headcount and grows over time.

Second, the thresholds and target percentages have been revised more than once, so anyone giving you a specific number without checking the current rule is guessing. Confirm the current position on mohre.gov.ae before you build a hiring plan around it.