Can an Employer Legally Hold or Confiscate Your Passport in the UAE?

Passport confiscation by an employer, taking and holding an employee's passport for the duration of their employment, was a practice some UAE workers historically encountered, and it's a genuinely important question to address directly since this practice conflicts with current UAE labour protections rather than being a normal, accepted part of employment.

UAE labour law generally prohibits an employer from confiscating or withholding an employee's passport as a condition of employment; a passport is the employee's own personal property and identification document, and an employer retaining it against the employee's wishes, particularly as a means of restricting the employee's freedom of movement or ability to leave a job, is generally considered a labour rights violation. This protection exists specifically to prevent the kind of coercive control over an employee's mobility and documentation that passport confiscation historically enabled in various parts of the world, including practices the UAE has actively worked to move away from through updated labour regulations.

In practice, this means an employee shouldn't feel obligated to hand over their passport to an employer simply because it's requested, and if an employer has already taken and is refusing to return a passport, this generally constitutes grounds for a formal complaint through MOHRE's labour dispute channels, treated as a serious violation rather than a minor administrative disagreement. Some legitimate processes do involve temporarily submitting a passport, for visa processing at a typing center or government office, for example, but this is meaningfully different from an employer holding onto an employee's passport indefinitely as ongoing practice throughout employment.

Given how seriously this kind of violation is generally treated, and how an employee facing passport confiscation may understandably feel they have limited options while it's happening, anyone in this situation generally benefits from reporting it to MOHRE promptly and directly, rather than assuming nothing can be done or that the employer's request to hold the passport must be complied with as a normal part of employment.