Can a Nurse Work a Second Job in Dubai? The Part-Time DHA Licence and the MOHRE Permit

Three months into a Dubai contract, most nurses have done the same sum. The basic wage is smaller than the package implied, the flat costs what it costs, and someone on the ward mentions that a clinic down the road pays cash for weekend shifts. The question that follows is always the same one: am I allowed to?

You are — but not on one permission. Working a second nursing job in Dubai needs two separate approvals from two different regulators, and they take opposite views of the one thing you are most worried about: whether your current hospital has to agree.

• The labour side (MOHRE)— a part-time work permit. The UAE government’s own page says a part-time contract employee may take several part-time jobs without the approval of the original employer.
• The licensing side (DHA)— a part-time professional licence. The DHA’s licensing manual requires your full-time facility’s medical director to approve it first, inside Sheryan, before the second facility can do anything at all.

Almost everything written about this online covers the first bullet and stops. The second is the one that decides whether it happens.

The labour side: MOHRE’s part-time work permit

The UAE has allowed a second job for a long time. The government portal’s page on working for two employers at one time, updated 30 December 2024, states that “since 2010, the UAE’s Labour Law made provisions which allow an employee to have a part-time job along with a full-time one subject to certain conditions”, and that “the employee can work part-time after getting the work permit from MoHRE”.

Three details on that page matter to a nurse specifically.

1. Your current employer does not have to agree

Describing the part-time contract system introduced in 2018, the page says: “Under this new system, part-time contract employees can take several part-time jobs without the approval of the original or other secondary employers; however, they are obligated to take permit from the MoHRE.”

This is worth reading twice, because a great many recruitment and business-setup blogs assert the opposite — that MOHRE requires a No Objection Certificate from your primary employer. The u.ae page attaches the NOC requirement to a different group: people living in the UAE on a family visa, who “can take up a second job after getting a part-time work permit with an NOC from the sponsor”. If you are here on your husband’s or your father’s visa, the sponsor’s NOC is yours to get — see working as a nurse on a family visa in the UAE. If you are here on your own work visa, the page describes no employer consent for the permit.

2. The part-time contract system is limited to skilled workers

The same page limits these contracts “only to skilled workers, namely holders of university degrees or higher and those who completed two or three years diploma in any technical or scientific field”.

Nurses land inside that definition from both directions. A BSc Nursing graduate is a holder of a university degree; a GNM or three-year nursing diploma holder is a holder of a two-or-three-year diploma in a scientific field. Which title that same qualification buys you on the licensing side is a separate question, and a more consequential one — GNM and diploma nurses: Assistant Nurse vs Registered Nurse covers it.

3. The fine lands on the hiring company, not only on you

The page states that “if an expatriate is caught working for another company without an official permit, then a fine of AED 50,000 will be applied to the hiring company, in addition to other penalties in case of repeating the offence”.

That is the practical reason a reputable clinic will not simply put you on the roster and sort the paperwork later. The exposure is theirs. A clinic that is happy to do that is telling you something about how it handles the rest of its compliance.

The licensing side: the DHA part-time licence

A MOHRE permit lets you work a second job. It does not let you practise nursing at a second facility. That takes a second professional licence, and the DHA sets out the rules in numbered clauses in its Manual for Licensing Healthcare Professionals, version 1.2, issued and effective 8 May 2025.

Clause 5.18 makes the relationship between the two systems explicit, and in the direction people do not expect: DHA approval “does not exempt the part time professional from obtaining the approvals from relevant authorities as deem required”. Neither permission substitutes for the other. You need both.

Your first licence can never be a part-time one

Clause 5.16: “License types are classified as full time or part time, where first DHA license is always a full-time license.”

So there is no part-time-only route into Dubai practice. You cannot arrive on a spouse visa, get registered, and go straight to two days a week at a clinic. A full-time facility has to activate you first — which is the same structural point made in registration versus activation: registration is what you earn, the licence is what an employer switches on.

Your full-time hospital is the gatekeeper

Clause 5.17: “All HPs requesting a part-time license shall obtain approval by the full-time licensing facility medical directorthrough Sheryan system.”

The DHA service catalogue describes the mechanics from the facility’s side: the medical director opens the professional’s record from the dashboard and approves the option “Allow this professional to apply for part-time licences”. It is a switch, and your employer owns it.

This is the crux of the whole page. MOHRE will not ask your hospital for permission. The DHA will — and if the medical director declines to flip that switch, a MOHRE part-time work permit buys you nothing you can lawfully use as a nurse.

A nurse gets exactly one

Appendix 2 of the manual publishes the cap, by title. It is the single most useful table in this guide, and the numbers are not flattering to nursing.

One slot. Not one per year, not one per employer — one part-time licence at a time, full stop. If you are choosing between a clinic on Fridays and an aesthetics centre on Saturdays, you are choosing, not collecting.

Note the last row too. A nurse carrying a trainee restriction gets none at all. The DHA applies that restriction to professionals who do not yet meet the Unified PQR experience criteria — including fresh graduates and applicants returning after a gap of practice — so the nurses with the thinnest salaries are precisely the ones locked out of topping them up. See the fresh-graduate route and gap of practice.

You never submit the application yourself

The DHA’s Health Regulation Sector Service Catalogue(marked “Update 21-3-2023”) lists Activate Professional Licence— the service that issues a full-time, part-time or trainee licence — and answers “For Whom?” with a single line: Delegated Healthcare Facility Representatives.

So the sequence is fixed, and you are the subject of it rather than the applicant in it:

• Your full-time facility’s medical director grants the part-time permission in Sheryan.
• The second facility applies to activate a part-time licence against your active registration.
• You practise once the licence is issued— the catalogue’s own wording — and not a shift before.

The catalogue’s service limitations for that application name the conditions that actually cause refusals: the facility’s own licence must be active and cover your specialty, your registration must be active, the “professional part-time permission matrix should be met”, the full-time facility must have granted the approval, and you must have no unpaid outstanding fines. If you want the wider picture of who clicks what inside the portal, the Sheryan guide walks it.

What the second licence costs — and why the number you were quoted is out of date

This is the part almost every page on the subject gets wrong, including an earlier version of this one. The figure in circulation comes from the DHA’s Service Catalogue PDF dated March 2023, which prints 4000AED part-time licence fee against both the Nurse/Allied/TCAM and the Physician/Dentist columns. That PDF is still online at the same address, which is why recruiters, agencies and blogs keep quoting AED 4,000 to nurses.

The DHA has repriced the service since, and the live Activate Professional Licenseservice card in Sheryan now publishes this for the Nurse and Midwife/Allied Health/T&CM category:

So the multiplier people warn you about is gone. A nurse’s part-time licence is now published at AED 1,000 — the same as her own one-year full-time licence, not four times it — and it renews at that rate. It is still a real annual cost that has to clear before a few extra shifts a month are worth anything, and someone has to agree to bear it. But a second licence costing the same as the first is a very different conversation with a clinic than one costing four times as much, and if you have already been told AED 4,000 and decided against the whole idea, that decision was made on a stale number.

Two smaller figures on the same card are worth knowing. A trainee licence is also AED 1,000 — though Appendix 2 gives a trainee-titled nurse no part-time slot at all, so that row will not apply to you while the restriction stands. And converting a part-time licence to full-time is AED 200, the same AED 200 a physician pays. That is the price of the rescue route described below: when your full-time job ends, the part-time facility can apply to convert rather than start again, and doing so costs two hundred dirhams rather than a fresh activation.

What happens when the main job ends

This is where a part-time licence stops being a bonus and starts being a liability, and the manual is precise about it.

Clause 5.19: “The part–time license(s) will be set as inactive when the full-time license is cancelleduntil expiry” — unless one of two things happens: a new full-time licence is activated and that medical director approves the part-time licence again, or the part-time facility applies to convert the licence to full-time within three months of the cancellation.

And clause 5.11 lists the conditions under which “the HP is not entitled to practice”. One of them is a part-time licence whose status changed to inactive because the full-time licence was cancelled.

Read those together and the trap is obvious. Resign from the hospital and the clinic work does not survive on its own — it switches off with the job that was supporting it, and the clock to rescue it is three months. If you are thinking about leaving, the sequencing matters: resigning from a nursing job in the UAE covers the notice and gratuity side of the same decision, and transferring between UAE authorities covers what your registration carries with it.

The Service Catalogue adds the renewal counterpart: a part-time licence “cannot be renewed if the full-time facility no longer grants a part-time approval for the professional”. Existing licences stay active; they simply hit a wall at renewal. Your employer can end the arrangement without ever cancelling anything.

Branches are not free extras

One genuine allowance, and one genuine catch, both in clause 5.19 and both worth knowing before you agree to cover another site:

• You may practise at group branches of your full-timefacility, “provided that branches have been added and approved as one group in Sheryan”. The catalogue notes the facility applies to add the branches and that this is completed free of charge. This is the rule that lets a hospital rotate you between its own sites.
• You may notdo the same at your part-time employer’s branches: “A part time HF shall not allow the part time HP to work under their group branches without obtaining an additional part time license(s).” And with a cap of one, a nurse has no additional licence to obtain. A part-time job at a two-branch clinic is a job at one of those branches.

A useful smaller allowance: a part-time facility “may activate a part time license for a specialty title that is not activated under the professional’s full-time license”. The second licence does not have to mirror the first.

Where these rules stop applying

Everything above is Dubai, DHA, private sector. Three boundaries are easy to walk over by accident.

• Government employers.Appendix 2 carries a footnote: professionals “employed by a government organization will be subject to the organization’s internal policies and procedures”. The cap is a floor, not a promise; your employer’s own rules may forbid outside work outright.
• Another emirate.A DHA licence is Dubai’s. Abu Dhabi is regulated by DOH, whose Healthcare Professionals Manual states at clause 15.1 that no person may practise a licensable profession in Abu Dhabi unless licensed by DOH — but it publishes no equivalent part-time permission matrix we could read. Do not assume Dubai’s Appendix 2 applies to you; ask DOH. Start from the DOH Abu Dhabi process.
• Free zones. Dubai Healthcare City is regulated separately, so a part-time role inside it is not a DHA part-time licence question at all — DHCC versus DHA explains the split.

The short version

• Two permissions: a MOHRE part-time work permit, and a DHA part-time professional licence. Clause 5.18 says one does not excuse the other.
• MOHRE does not require your current employer’s approval. The DHA does — clause 5.17 puts it in the hands of your full-time facility’s medical director.
• A Nurse or Midwife is capped at one part-time licence. A trainee-titled nurse gets none.
• Your first DHA licence must be full-time (clause 5.16), and the part-time one goes inactive if the full-time one is cancelled (clauses 5.19 and 5.11).
• The part-time licence fee is published at AED 1,000 for a nurse on the live Sheryan card — the same as her one-year full-time fee, not the AED 4,000 still quoted from the 2023 catalogue PDF. Converting it to full-time later is AED 200.

Official sources used on this page

• DHA — Manual for Licensing Healthcare Professionals, version 1.2 (issue and effective date 8 May 2025; document code DHA/HRS/HLD/MA-2). Clauses 5.11, 5.16, 5.17, 5.18, 5.19 and Appendix 2.
• DHA Sheryan — Activate Professional License service card — who may submit it, the prerequisites and service limitations, and the Approximate Cost table that is the source for every fee on this page.
• DHA Sheryan — Renew Professional License service card — the renewal counterpart, including the part-time approval condition and the same published amounts.
• DHA — Health Regulation Sector Service Catalogue (marked “Update 21-3-2023”), for the part-time licence FAQ section. Its fee pages are superseded by the service cards above and are the origin of the AED 4,000 figure still in circulation.
• DHA — Sheryan portal, for current fees and the live status of any licence.
• u.ae — Working for two employers at one time (updated 30 December 2024), and MOHRE for the part-time work permit itself.
• DOH Abu Dhabi — Healthcare Professionals Manual, for the Abu Dhabi licensing requirement.