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Did You Know?

Saudi Arabia Cut Everyone's Pay by Eleven Days Without Changing a Single Salary

Since 1932, Saudi Arabia had paid its public sector employees according to the Hijri calendar — the Islamic lunar year.

A Hijri year runs twelve lunar months of 29 or 30 days, determined by the sighting of the crescent moon, and comes to roughly 354 days. That is about eleven days shorter than a Gregorian year.

Salaries were annual. So for eighty-four years, a Saudi civil servant was paid a full year's salary every 354 days — which meant, measured against the sun, they were being paid for eleven days they did not work.

On 1 October 2016, as part of a broad austerity package, the Council of Ministers moved public sector pay onto the Gregorian calendar.

Nobody's salary figure changed. Not one number on any payslip was reduced. But the year those salaries were paid over got eleven days longer — so every public employee in the kingdom quietly took an eleven-day pay cut, delivered entirely through the calendar.

The same package cut ministers' salaries by 20%, reduced their annual leave from 42 days to 36, and cancelled bonuses.

The clock: the Hijri calendar is still very much alive in Saudi Arabia for religious and much civil use, and its lunar basis produces something the solar world never experiences.

Because it loses about eleven days a year against the sun, Islamic dates walk steadily backwards through the seasons. Ramadan drifts through spring, then winter, then autumn, then summer, and returns to where it started after roughly 33 years.

Which means a Muslim who fasts through a lifetime will experience Ramadan in every season there is — the short, mild fasting days of a Riyadh winter and the punishing ones of a Riyadh July — and over a long life will see the full cycle come round about twice.

Riyadh runs two calendars at once. One is anchored to the moon and moves. One is anchored to the sun and does not. The country has spent a century deciding, case by case, which of them each part of life belongs to.