What Your Employer Owes You in South Sudan: Leave, Notice and Gratuity (2026)

There is an entitlement in South Sudanese law that most employees never claim, and many employers never volunteer: a gratuity of one month's gross salary for every year you have worked. Ten years of service is ten months' salary. It is not a bonus, it is not discretionary, and it sits in the Labour Act alongside the rest of what you are owed.

This guide sets out those entitlements — hours, leave, notice, severance, gratuity and final settlement — as the Labour Act, 2017 states them.

Start here: the gratuity

If you have completed at least one year of continuous service, you are entitled to gratuity pay, calculated as follows:

The total cannot exceed 36 months' gross salary, and it is calculated on your last month's gross salary — not an average, and not what you were earning when you joined. For a production employee, gratuity after service is calculated on the average gross income of the last three years instead.

Two things follow from that, and they are worth thinking about carefully.

First, because the calculation runs off your final gross salary, a raise late in your career lifts the value of every earlier year of service. Second, the entitlement is expressed in the Act without any of the exclusions that apply to severance. Gratuity and severance are separate entitlements under separate sections, and the Act does not say that receiving one cancels the other.

Money of this size arriving at once deserves a plan before it arrives, not after. Read this alongside how to save and grow money in South Sudan and protecting your money from inflation — in an economy where prices move quickly, a lump sum left idle loses value fast.

Your hours

Normal working hours must not exceed 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week.

An employer can ask for more than eight hours on one or more days, but only within limits: for employees not on shift work, the day must not exceed nine hours, and the other days in the week must be proportionately reduced so the week still does not exceed 40 hours. For shift workers, normal hours must not exceed 40 when averaged over a three-week period.

You are entitled to:

• a break of at least one continuous hour, with pay, once you have worked continuously for more than five hours
• a weekly holiday of not less than 24 consecutive hours, taken on the customary day or another day you and your employer agree

A detail that quietly matters: any rest period of less than half an hour counts as working time. Short breaks are not deducted from your day.

Overtime, and what it must be paid at

Any hour beyond the normal hours above is overtime. It is paid at not less than:

• one and a half times your regular hourly rate on an ordinary working day
• two times your regular hourly rate if worked on a weekly holiday

Your employer must pay it on the date wages are paid, and not later than one month from the date the overtime was worked. Overtime that keeps rolling over unpaid is not a scheduling matter; it is outside the Act.

Two limits and two exceptions:

• Working more than three hours of overtime in a day, or ten in a week, requires agreement between you and your employer.
• Those limits can be exceeded in genuine emergencies: an actual or imminent disaster or accident threatening life, health or serious damage to property or the continued operation of the business; urgent work on plant, equipment or machinery to keep the business running; preventing damage to perishable goods; and work of vital public importance.
• Overtime does not apply to positions an employer classifies as senior management, or, for those under the Civil Service Act, 2011, to Leadership or Super Grade positions.
• Leave may be granted in lieu of overtime.

Working on a public holiday is treated separately again: you are entitled either to two times your regular hourly rate for the time worked, or to one day's paid leave as compensation.

If the numbers on your payslip do not match this, our guide to getting paid and managing your salary covers what to do about it.

Annual leave, and why it does not expire

Annual leave is with full pay, and it rises with service:

Three rules make this stronger than most employees assume:

1. Untaken annual leave accumulates from year to year. It does not lapse at the end of the year.
2. Once you have accumulated two years of untaken leave, you may, by written agreement with your employer, take financial compensation for half of it.
3. On termination, you are paid out for any untaken annual leave — irrespective of the cause of the termination. Even a dismissal does not extinguish it.

Your employer decides timing with you, but the Act says the employer shall not unreasonably refuse a request for leave.

Sick, maternity, paternity and compassionate leave

Sick leave is 12 days on full pay per year of continuous service. You must tell your employer as soon as you become aware you cannot work, and how long you expect to be off. Your employer may require a medical certificate from a government hospital or clinic, or a private clinic.

Twelve days is not a large cushion for a serious illness, which is the practical case for planning ahead for health costs and building an emergency fund.

Maternity leave is 90 days on full pay, on each occasion you are pregnant, plus 45 days for breastfeeding while working half day. At least 90 days must be taken immediately following childbirth, and you must give your employer at least fourteen days' notice of your intention to go on leave.

Several protections sit around it:

• If you take leave before the anticipated date of childbirth, that period is extended by any gap between the anticipated and actual date — and the compulsory period after birth is not reduced because of it.
• After a miscarriage or stillbirth, you are entitled to six weeks' leave.
• You have the right to return to the position you held immediately before the leave.
• For at least six months after returning, if you are nursing, you are entitled to two breaks of thirty minutes each during the working day, or a reduction of sixty minutes from your daily hours, or a clean space at work to breastfeed. These are additional to other rest periods and count as working time, with pay.
• Your employer must not require or permit you, while pregnant or nursing, to do work hazardous to your health or your child's.

Paternity leave is two weeks on full pay, on each occasion your wife is pregnant, taken within three days after the birth or immediately following a miscarriage — with the same right to return to your position.

Compassionate leave is up to three days on full pay each year for an employee who works more than four days a week and has completed at least three months' continuous service. It covers illness or injury of your child or spouse, and the death of a family member. It does not accumulate from year to year.

Notice

Notice runs both ways — it is the notice you must give as much as the notice you are owed.

The Act allows the parties to agree a longer period; allows an employer to waive its right to receive notice at the employee's request; and allows you to accept payment instead of notice, equal to the total wages and other entitlements you would have received during the notice period. Termination without notice is permitted only for gross misconduct under the Act's own gross-misconduct section.

A fixed-term contract, or one for a specified task, simply ends when the term expires or the task is completed, without either side giving notice.

One provision is worth knowing because it can revive a job you thought was over. If, after the notice expires, the employer asks you to stay on — or you keep working without the employer expressly objecting — the notice of termination is null and void and the contract remains valid.

Severance and redundancy

Severance allowance is a different entitlement from gratuity, with different triggers. It is payable where you have been in continuous service for six months or more and one of these applies:

• you are unfairly dismissed
• you die in the service of your employer
• you terminate your contract because of physical incapacity
• the contract ends by reason of the death or insolvency of the employer
• any other circumstance the Minister prescribes by regulation

It is not payable where you are summarily dismissed with justification, where you abandon your job or abscond for more than seven days without explanation, or where the contract terminated was a probationary one.

The Act says the calculation of severance pay is negotiable between employer and employees or the union representing them — so there is no single statutory multiplier for severance generally.

Redundancy is the exception with a number attached. Where employment is terminated by reason of redundancy, the Act provides severance pay equal to two weeks' wages for each completed year of continuous service, and requires severance pay in respect of the reduction to be among the matters consulted on before the redundancy takes effect.

Your final settlement: 30 days, no exceptions

This is the clearest deadline in the Act, and the one to quote.

Your employer must pay you all wages and any other accrued entitlements and benefits within 30 days of the date your employment terminated — regardless of the cause of the termination.

Not on the next payroll run. Not when a replacement is found. Thirty days, whatever the reason you left.

Where the termination is due to the insolvency of the employer, your wages and accrued entitlements are privileged against the employer's creditors under the Insolvency Act, 2011. You are not an ordinary creditor at the back of the queue.

One more protection, in the section on the wage register: signing the register without stated reservations does not waive your right to recover wages payable under your contract. Signing for what you were given is not agreeing that it was all you were owed.

If a lump sum is coming, get it somewhere safe and useful rather than leaving it as cash — how to open a bank account and budgeting when prices change fast are the practical next steps.

If you were dismissed unfairly

Where the Labour Court finds a termination unfair, it may order your employer to reinstate you in your position, or place you in a reasonably comparable position on the same terms; to treat your service as having continued without interruption; to pay you the wages you lost as a result of the termination; or to pay compensation the Court determines.

The presumption favours you: the Court shall order reinstatement or relocation unless the employer proves either that the necessary relationship of mutual trust and confidence cannot be resumed — between you and the employer, or between you and other employees — or that work has changed so substantially that your position no longer exists and no reasonably comparable one is available.

Disputes about termination can be reported in writing to the Commission for conciliation. Put it in writing, keep a copy, and do it promptly.

Frequently asked questions

Is gratuity the same as severance?

No. They sit in separate sections with separate conditions. Gratuity turns on one year's continuous service and pays a month's gross salary per year. Severance turns on six months' service plus one of five specific situations, such as unfair dismissal or the employer's insolvency, and its calculation is negotiable. Redundancy has its own figure of two weeks' wages per completed year.

I resigned. Do I still get gratuity?

The gratuity section conditions the entitlement on completing at least one year of continuous service, without the list of exclusions that the severance section carries. Whatever else applies, your untaken annual leave must be paid out irrespective of the cause of termination, and your full final settlement is due within 30 days.

My employer says my leave expired at the end of the year.

It did not. The Act says untaken annual leave accumulates from year to year, and that you are compensated for any untaken leave on termination regardless of the cause.

I signed the wage register. Have I given up my claim?

No. The Act says your signature, unaccompanied by stated reservations, does not waive your right to recover wages payable under your contract.

Can my employer make me work twelve-hour days?

Not as normal hours. Normal hours cannot exceed eight a day and 40 a week, and for non-shift employees a longer day is capped at nine hours with the rest of the week proportionately reduced. Beyond that it is overtime — payable at 1.5 times your hourly rate, or double on a weekly holiday — and going past three overtime hours in a day or ten in a week requires your agreement, outside genuine emergencies.

Does any of this apply if I never signed a contract?

The Act sets these as statutory entitlements of employment rather than terms you have to negotiate. Keep whatever evidence of employment you have — payslips, the wage register, messages, a staff ID — because the practical difficulty is usually proving the length of your service, and length of service is what the gratuity and leave ladders are built on.

Reviewed 4 September 2026. Every rule and figure above is taken from the Labour Act, 2017 (Act No. 64, Juba, 24 October 2017), the Ministry of Justice printing of the Act as enacted. South Sudan has no public legislation portal, so the copy consulted was the one republished in the South Sudan NGO Forum document library; the text is the Act itself and each figure is attributed to the section it comes from. The Act sets no minimum wage figure, and none is quoted here.

This article is general information, not legal advice. If your job or your final settlement is at stake, get advice on your own facts.