Should my lunch break count as part of my working hours in the UAE?

Breaks sit on top of working hours, not inside them — that is the legal default, so clocking out for lunch is not itself the problem. The problem is the arithmetic it creates. Normal working hours under the Labour Law are capped at eight per day and forty-eight per week, so if you are now performing nine hours of actual work plus an unpaid hour of lunch, the company is over the cap, and the extra hour has to be treated and paid as overtime unless your role falls into one of the narrow exempt categories. There is also the contract point: you agreed to nine hours including lunch — effectively eight worked. Moving everyone to ten hours on site with nine worked is a unilateral change to agreed terms, and an employer cannot worsen contractual conditions without the employee's consent. Practical steps: keep your clock-in and clock-out records, put the discrepancy to HR in writing, and ask the company either to restore the contractual arrangement or to pay the additional hour as overtime. If it does neither, a MOHRE complaint follows naturally. A licensed UAE lawyer can confirm whether any exemption genuinely covers your role.