Unlimited Contract

An unlimited contract was the open-ended employment agreement used widely in the UAE private sector before the current Labour Law took effect in 2022. It had no expiry date and ran until either party terminated it with notice. The reform abolished this model for the private sector: employers were required to migrate staff onto fixed-term (limited) contracts within a transition window, so genuinely unlimited private-sector contracts should no longer exist on paper. The term still matters in practice because long-serving employees accrued years of service under the old regime, and disputes about gratuity, notice, and arbitrary dismissal sometimes turn on what rules applied during the unlimited-contract years. You will meet it when reviewing legacy employment files, calculating end-of-service for employees hired before 2022, and in DIFC or ADGM employment, which follow their own separate employment laws.