UAE WPS Payroll Rejections: The Codes That Cause Most Failures, and How to Clear Them

This is for the person who owns the monthly salary file: the payroll manager who uploads the SIF, the HR lead who gets the call when work permits stop being issued, and the controller who has to explain a debit that went out and came back. After reading it you should be able to read a rejection notice, tell whether the problem is in your file, in the employee's record at MOHRE or in the bank account, and clear it in the right order.

How the WPS moves money

The Central Bank of the UAE describes information as flowing "from the employer to one or more of the contracted agents for wage payments to employees", with "the CBUAE secures the employer's funds before dispatching the wage information to the agents". That sentence explains most of the behaviour teams find confusing.

The sequence, per the Wages Protection System Customer Requirements Guide issued by the Ministry of Labour and the Central Bank:

1. Registration. Employer registers with the ministry, employees are registered against that employer, banks and exchange houses register with CBUAE as agents.
2. Funding. The employer submits the Salary Information File (SIF) to its own bank. The bank validates it and secures the funds. WPS then validates the content and returns an acknowledgement (ACK) or a rejection (NAK).
3. Payment. WPS splits the file into per-agent payment files. Agents download them, confirm receipt, and WPS credits the agents' accounts.
4. Refunds and returns. The employer can request a refund of transferred amounts with a reason code. Amounts the agent cannot disburse go back to WPS with a return code, and WPS generates a return file to the employer's bank.

Two consequences. The money leaves your account before the employee is credited, so a downstream failure shows as an unexplained balance rather than a payment that never happened. And MOHRE treats the salary as paid when WPS accepts the file and the agent confirms disbursement, not when you approved the run.

Free zones sit inside the same pipe. Jafza requires all registered businesses to comply with the UAE WPS and has done since 2012. DMCC requires every employee holding an active or expired employment visa or Permanent Identity Card to be enrolled, with shareholders excluded unless added manually.

The SIF: two record types, twenty fields

The Salary Information File is a comma-separated text file, one Employee Detail Record (EDR) per employee and a single Salary Control Record (SCR) as the last line. The Customer Requirements Guide is blunt: "Even if there is a single error then the complete file is rejected."

EDR, Employee Detail Record

#	Field	Length	Type	What breaks it
1	Record Type	3	A	Anything other than EDR
2	Employee Unique ID	14	AN	MOHRE person ID, zero padded. Unpadded values fail
3	Agent ID	9	N	Employee's bank routing code, validated against the WPS database
4	Employee Account with Agent	see note	AN	Must not be left-padded with zeros
5	Pay Start Date	10	D	Must be YYYY-MM-DD
6	Pay End Date	10	D	YYYY-MM-DD, later than the start date
7	Days in Period	4	N	Calendar days in the salary period
8	Income Fixed Component	15	N	Send 0.00 if none. No negatives, no separators
9	Income Variable Component	15	N	Send 0.00 if none
10	Days on Leave for Period	4	N	Unpaid leave days. Send 0 if none

Field 4. The Ministry of Labour and CBUAE guide specifies 16 alphanumeric characters. Current agent bank specifications, including Mashreq and Emirates Islamic, specify a 23-character IBAN or salary card IBAN. Build to 23 and confirm with your agent bank. [NEEDS SOURCE: current MOHRE or CBUAE published SIF specification confirming the field 4 length and format, and the effective date of the change from 16-character account number to 23-character IBAN.]

SCR, Salary Control Record

#	Field	Length	Type	What breaks it
1	Record Type	3	A	Must be SCR, and the last line
2	Employer Unique ID	13	N	Ministry-assigned employer ID, zero padded
3	Bank Code of Employer	9	N	CBUAE routing code of your own bank
4	File Creation Date	10	D	YYYY-MM-DD, not later than the processing date
5	File Creation Time	4	N	HHMM
6	Salary Month	6	N	MMYYYY. The ministry uses this for compliance decisions
7	EDR Count	10	N	Must equal the number of EDR lines
8	Total Salary	15	N	Must equal the sum of all fixed and variable components
9	Payment Currency	3	A	Always AED
10	Employer Reference	35	AN	Optional. Some banks require the literal NONE

The file name carries data too: the 13-digit employer unique ID, then YYMMDDHHMMSS, then .SIF. Date and time in the name must agree with SCR fields 4 and 5. In the Emirates Islamic worked example, employer 965625 filing at 16:30 on 25 October produces 0000000965625091025163000.SIF. Acknowledgements and rejections come back as .ACK and .NAK with the WPS file reference appended. DMCC members should note the employee ID is constructed, not looked up: DMCC plus 000 plus the PIC or CEC number, 14 characters total.

File rejection is not the same as payment failure

Three failure planes, three owners, three fixes. Confusing them is why a team can spend a day fixing the wrong thing.

• The SIF rejects. WPS returns a NAK. Nothing is paid, nobody is credited. The fix is entirely in your file and the whole file is resubmitted.
• The file is accepted but individual credits fail. The ministry has the record, but the agent cannot credit the account. The money comes back with a return code while the file still counts as submitted.
• Everything clears and the establishment is still non-compliant. The file was late, covered the wrong salary month, or fell short of the required percentage of wages due.

Common rejection causes, and the fix

Codes below are from the Wages Protection System Customer Requirements Guide published by the Ministry of Labour and the Central Bank. Confirm the current list with your agent bank: the guide predates the ministry's 2016 rename and its field 4 specification has since changed.

Code	Message	Real cause	Fix
00001	Invalid File Format	Saved as .csv or .xlsx	Plain text, one record per line, ten comma-separated values
00003	Invalid File Naming Convention	Employer ID not padded to 13 digits, or seconds omitted	Build the file name from the SCR values, not the OS clock
00006	File name is duplicate	Resubmission reusing the original name	Regenerate with a new creation time
00805	Duplicate SIF file, already processed or rejected	Corrected file byte-identical to the rejected one	Change the creation timestamp as well as the field
00801	Record count in control record not matching total records	A leaver deleted from the EDR block without updating SCR field 7	Recompute EDR count from the file, not from headcount
00802	Total amount in control record not matching sum of detail records	Rounding at SCR level, or a stale spreadsheet range	Sum fields 8 and 9 across every EDR and write that to SCR field 8
00803	Last record should start with SCR	Trailing blank line	Strip trailing whitespace and the final newline
00804	Detail records should start with EDR	Spreadsheet header row left in	Delete the header row
00808	Invalid Employee Id	Person ID unpadded, or employee not registered under this employer	Zero pad. If it still fails, check the employee at MOHRE
00809	Invalid Employer Id	ID keyed from the trade licence, not the ministry record	Use the employer unique ID from the ministry record only
00810 / 00811	Invalid Agent Id / Invalid Bank Id	Routing code wrong for the branch, or employee changed bank	Re-derive the routing code from the current IBAN
00812	Invalid Employee Account	IBAN left-padded, spaces from copy and paste, or a closed salary card	Strip spaces, do not pad, verify the length your bank requires
00806	Employee has already received the salary for the period	Supplementary run using the same pay period	Use a distinct pay period, or pay off-cycle outside it
00807	Employer can pay only once with this salary month and bank	Two files, same salary month, same bank	Consolidate, or route the second file through a different registered bank
00813 / 00825	Invalid payment dates / start later than end	Locale date format, DD/MM/YYYY	Force ISO dates at file generation
00815	Invalid amount, cannot be negative	A clawback written as a negative variable component	Net the deduction inside the fixed or variable amount
00822	Invalid salary month, must be current or current+1	A late file for a prior month	Not fixable in the file. See the deadline section
00823	Invalid currency, should be AED	Multi-currency payroll pushing USD	WPS is AED only. Non-AED arrangements sit outside WPS
00826	Each line should have 10 comma separated values	A name or reference containing a comma	Strip commas from free-text fields before export
00829	There should be only one control record	Two SCR lines after merging files	Merge at data level, regenerate a single SCR

Failures at the agent use a different set. The guide lists return codes including 001 unable to locate account, 002 funds not collected in time, 005 account closed, 006 invalid account number, 007 invalid account title, 008 account dormant, 010 account frozen, 011 invalid person or employee ID, and 012 person or employee not registered under this employer. Code 012 usually reveals a broken HR record rather than a bank record: the permit has moved, lapsed, or was never linked to the establishment you are paying from.

The deadline, and what happens after a late or partial file

Article 16 of Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022 requires registered establishments to pay wages on their due dates through the WPS. The UAE Government portal has described an employer as late where payment is not made within the first 15 days after the due date, under Ministerial Resolution No. 598 of 2022.

That regime has been replaced. Ministerial Resolution No. 340 of 2026 took effect on 1 June 2026, superseding 598 of 2022, moving to a fixed calendar deadline with a higher compliance threshold. The resolution text could not be retrieved for this article, so every figure below is flagged. Verify each before changing a payroll calendar.

• Wages for the preceding Gregorian month fall due on the first day of each Gregorian month, with no grace period. [NEEDS SOURCE: Ministerial Resolution No. 340 of 2026, article establishing the first-of-month due date and removal of the 15-day grace period.]
• The compliance threshold rises from 80 per cent to 85 per cent of total wages due. [NEEDS SOURCE: Ministerial Resolution No. 340 of 2026, article setting the 85 per cent threshold and whether it applies per establishment, per employee, or both.]
• Escalation runs on day counts after the due date: monitoring from day 1, warnings around day 2, suspension of new work permit issuance around day 5, administrative fines and possible reclassification around day 11, labour disputes registered and wider permit suspension around day 16, and precautionary attachment, travel bans and Public Prosecutor referral around day 21. [NEEDS SOURCE: Ministerial Resolution No. 340 of 2026, the exact day counts and the measure attached to each step.]
• Day 16 permit suspension has been reported as applying above an employee count threshold. [NEEDS SOURCE: the headcount threshold at which day 16 permit suspension applies, and whether smaller establishments are treated differently.]
• [NEEDS SOURCE: the schedule of administrative fines for WPS non-compliance, in AED, per establishment or per worker, from MOHRE or the relevant Cabinet Resolution.]
• New exemptions reported: employees paid outside the UAE, employees whose liberty is restricted, and mission permit holders under three months. [NEEDS SOURCE: the full exemption list in Ministerial Resolution No. 340 of 2026 and how each exemption is registered with MOHRE.]

The operational point does not depend on the exact numbers. Work permit suspension is establishment-level, not employee-level. It stops new hires, transfers in and renewals across the entity, so a payroll error in one cost centre freezes recruitment everywhere. That is why WPS failures reach the executive team faster than their monetary value suggests.

Reconciling payroll to the bank

Run the reconciliation on three totals.

• Payroll net pay for the period, from your payroll system.
• SCR field 8 total salary, the sum of fixed and variable components. This is gross of deductions in WPS terms, so it will not equal net pay. Decide once how net pay, allowances and deductions map into fields 8 and 9, document it, and never vary it between months.
• The bank debit, which equals the file total plus per-transaction charges. The Customer Requirements Guide states that charges imposed by banks and agents cannot be deducted from wages, so the charge is an employer cost outside the file total.

Then reconcile the other way: individual credits confirmed by agents plus returns should equal the file total. An unreconciled residual means money is sitting with an agent against an employee who could not be credited. It comes back through the return or refund process with a code, and a refund request needs a reason code from the published set, for example 010 for a terminated employee or 011 for an employee out of the country.

Clearing a rejected file: the procedure

1. Read the NAK, not the summary email. Take the code and the exact message. "IBAN problem" from a relationship manager is not the same as 00812.
2. Establish which plane you are on. A NAK means nothing was paid. A return code means one credit failed. Check whether the account was debited before assuming either.
3. Open the SIF as plain text, not in a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets silently strip leading zeros from the 14-digit person ID and 13-digit employer ID, and reformat dates. This alone causes a large share of repeat rejections.
4. Validate the SCR against the EDR block. Count EDR lines, sum fields 8 and 9, compare to SCR fields 7 and 8 before anything else. Codes 00801, 00802 and 00819 resolve here.
5. Validate the file name against the SCR. Employer ID, date and time must match SCR fields 2, 4 and 5.
6. Fix only the field the code names. Do not regenerate from payroll yet. You want to know whether this file is clean, not whether a new one is.
7. For 00808 and return code 012, check the employee at MOHRE. If the person ID is correct and correctly padded and it still fails, the ministry record is the problem: expired permit, transfer in progress, or an absconding report. No file edit fixes this.
8. Regenerate the file name with a new creation timestamp. Codes 00006 and 00805 exist to catch resubmission under the original name.
9. Resubmit through the same bank for the same salary month. Code 00807 blocks a second payment for the same salary month through the same bank, so splitting the remainder to a second bank is a deliberate decision, not a workaround to stumble into.
10. Confirm the ACK and keep the reference with the pay run record. Acceptance is the event that matters.
11. Match agent confirmations to EDR lines. Anything unmatched after the disbursement window becomes a return.
12. Handle each return individually. Decide whether to re-pay through a corrected IBAN next file or raise a refund request with the correct reason code. Do not leave the residual sitting.
13. Write the cause into the employee master. A wrong IBAN corrected only in this month's file returns next month.
14. Log the timeline: original submission, NAK, correction, resubmission, ACK, with dates and times. If the establishment is later queried on late payment, this log is the evidence.

Where teams get this wrong

Fixing the file in Excel. Opening a SIF to correct one IBAN converts 00000012345678 to 12345678 and 2026-08-01 to 01/08/2026. The corrected file then fails on two new codes.

Treating the compliance threshold as a licence to underpay. It is a tolerance for the establishment, not permission to pay an individual short. Underpaying a specific employee remains a breach of contract however the establishment scores.

Submitting on the last possible day. Validation, correction and resubmission is not a same-hour cycle. Build the calendar backwards from the due date with at least two working days of slack.

Leaving leavers in the file. A terminated employee with a closed account produces return code 005, and the money sits until someone raises a refund with reason 010. Payroll cut-off and the MOHRE cancellation need to be the same event.

Not reconciling the residual. Because CBUAE secures funds before dispatch, a failed credit does not bounce back automatically. Teams that reconcile only the bank debit to the file total never see it.

Multi-entity groups sharing a calendar but not an employer ID. Each SIF must be for one employer only, and WPS disallows mixing employees of different employers. A group run produces one file per establishment ID, each with its own SCR.

What to automate, and what not to

Automate file construction, validation and reconciliation. Building the SIF from structured data instead of a spreadsheet removes the whole class of leading-zero and date-format failures. Validating the SCR against the EDR block, checking IBAN length, and comparing each employee's file amount to the salary in their registered MOHRE contract are deterministic checks a system should run before the file reaches the bank. Matching agent confirmations back to EDR lines and flagging the residual is also mechanical, and it is the step humans skip.

Do not automate the decisions. Whether to split a payment across two banks, whether to hold a file because a permit is mid-transfer, whether to pay an employee in dispute, and how to respond when the establishment is nearing a permit suspension are judgement calls with legal consequences. A system that quietly resubmits on your behalf will eventually resubmit one it should have escalated. Automate the checking, keep the approving.

Where a system helps

The check that prevents most WPS failures is not clever: does the amount in this month's file match the salary on the registered contract, and is the permit valid for the whole pay period. AuraOS runs both against every line before the file is produced, and produces one SIF per establishment ID so multi-entity groups do not have to unpick a merged file. Returns and refund reason codes are held against the employee record rather than a spreadsheet, so the same wrong IBAN does not come back next month. See AuraOS for HCM.

FAQ

Why does one wrong IBAN reject the entire file? WPS validates the file as a unit, and the Customer Requirements Guide states that a single error rejects the complete file. There is no partial acceptance at file validation, which is why pre-submission validation matters more here than in regimes that accept a file and reject individual rows.

Can I resubmit the same file after correcting it? Only with a new creation timestamp and a matching file name. A byte-identical resubmission returns 00805, and a resubmission under the original name returns 00006. Change the timestamp in the SCR and in the file name together.

What is the difference between a rejection and a return? A rejection (NAK) happens before money moves and applies to the whole file. A return happens after acceptance and applies to one employee whose agent could not credit the account. Rejections are fixed by editing the file, returns by correcting bank details or raising a refund request.

Does WPS accept currencies other than AED? No. SCR field 9 must be AED and code 00823 rejects anything else. Any arrangement to pay part of a package in another currency sits outside WPS and does not count towards compliance.

Are free zone companies exempt from WPS? Ordinary free zones are not. Jafza requires compliance for all registered businesses, and DMCC requires enrolment of employees holding an active or expired employment visa or Permanent Identity Card. DIFC and ADGM operate under separate employment regimes. [NEEDS SOURCE: whether DIFC and ADGM entities are inside or outside the UAE WPS, from a DIFC or ADGM primary source.]

Related reading: What Is MOHRE? Its Role in Contracts, Permits and Payroll Compliance (KB-001).

Sources

• UAE Wages Protection System (UAEWPS), Central Bank of the UAE
• Wages Protection System Customer Requirements Guide, Ministry of Labour and Central Bank of the UAE, published by Habib Bank AG Zurich (UAE)
• WPS File Format, Mashreq Bank
• businessONLINE Salary WPS File Creation User Guide, Emirates Islamic
• Cabinet Resolution No. 1 of 2022, Executive Regulations of the Labour Law, UAE Legislation portal
• Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 on the Regulation of Labour Relations, UAE Legislation portal
• Payment of salaries (wages), The Official Portal of the UAE Government
• Wages Protection System guideline, DMCC
• Wage Protection System for Jafza companies, Jebel Ali Free Zone
• Ministerial Resolution No. 340 of 2026 on the Wages Protection System, MOHRE (not retrievable at time of writing; all figures drawn from it are flagged above)