Who Pays for Repairs in Dubai
The Landlord and Tenant Maintenance Rules, Article by Article
The air conditioning fails in August. The water heater goes. A tap has been dripping since the day you moved in. Dubai law has a clear default answer about who pays — and a four-word phrase in the same sentence that lets your tenancy contract change it. Here is what the law actually says, and what to check in your own lease.
What Article 16 Actually Says
The governing instrument is Law No. (26) of 2007 Regulating the Relationship between Landlords and Tenants in the Emirate of Dubai, issued on 26 November 2007. On maintenance, everything turns on a single sentence in Article 16:
Two things follow from that, and most disputes come from people noticing only one of them. The first is that the default is the landlord. If your tenancy contract says nothing about maintenance, the landlord carries it — not just for structural failures, but for any defect or damage affecting your intended use of the property.
The second is the opening clause: unless otherwise agreed by the parties. Article 16 is a default rule, not a mandatory one. A tenancy contract can lawfully shift some or all of the maintenance burden onto the tenant, and in the Dubai market a great many of them do. That is why the answer to “who pays for repairs in Dubai” is never settled by quoting the law alone. It is settled by reading your own contract first and falling back on Article 16 only where the contract is silent.
It is worth knowing what has not changed. Law No. (33) of 2008, issued on 1 December 2008, amended Law No. 26 of 2007 — but it replaced Articles 2, 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 25, 26, 29 and 36. Article 16 is not among them. The maintenance default has stood unamended since 2007, which is why it remains the reference point in rental disputes almost two decades later. The contract itself still has to be registered; our Ejari registration guide covers that step, and our guide to the Dubai tenancy contract covers what else the lease has to contain.
The Legal Position at a Glance
Maintenance under Dubai tenancy law
The Seven Provisions That Decide Repair Disputes
Maintenance is not governed by Article 16 alone. Seven consecutive articles of Law No. 26 of 2007 together set out what the landlord must deliver, what the tenant must preserve, and how the property must come back at the end.
| Article | What It Provides | Binds |
|---|---|---|
| Article 15 | The landlord must hand over the property in a good condition which allows the tenant to fully use it as stated in the lease contract. As amended in 2008, the parties may agree to rent an uncompleted property, with the tenant responsible for completion. | Landlord |
| Article 16 | Unless otherwise agreed, the landlord is responsible during the lease term for maintenance works and for repairing any defect or damage affecting the tenant’s intended use. | Landlord |
| Article 17 | The landlord bears responsibility for structural changes, and for any defect, damage, deficiency and wear and tear occurring to the property for reasons not attributable to the fault of the tenant. | Landlord |
| Article 18 | The landlord must provide the approvals required for the tenant’s decoration work, provided that work does not affect the structure. | Landlord |
| Article 19 | The tenant must pay rent on the due dates and maintain the property in such a manner as an ordinary person would maintain his own property. The tenant may not make changes or carry out restoration or maintenance works without the landlord’s permission and the required licences from the competent official entities. | Tenant |
| Article 20 | The landlord may obtain a security deposit from the tenant to ensure maintenance, refundable upon expiry of the lease contract. | Her ikisi de |
| Article 21 | The tenant must surrender the property in the same condition in which it was received, except for ordinary wear and tear or damage due to reasons beyond the tenant’s control. | Tenant |
Article summaries and quoted wording taken from Law No. (26) of 2007 Regulating the Relationship between Landlords and Tenants in the Emirate of Dubai, and from Law No. (33) of 2008 Amending Law No. (26) of 2007, both published on the Dubai Legislation portal at dlp.dubai.gov.ae and retrieved 1 September 2026. Article 15 is quoted as amended by Law No. 33 of 2008.
The “Minor Maintenance” Clause and What It Really Means
Walk through a hundred Dubai tenancy contracts and you will find some version of the same clause: the tenant is responsible for minor maintenance up to a stated amount per incident, and the landlord picks up anything above it. It is so widespread that many tenants and a fair number of agents believe it is a rule of law.
It is not. Law No. 26 of 2007 sets no monetary threshold for maintenance of any kind. Article 16 draws no distinction between minor and major works — it makes the landlord responsible for maintenance and for repairing defects, full stop, and then allows the parties to agree something different. Any figure in your contract is a commercial term the parties negotiated, not a statutory line. We have deliberately not published a “standard” amount in this guide, because we could not verify any such threshold in the legislation, and repeating a customary figure as though it were law is how the misunderstanding spreads.
The practical consequence is that the clause is negotiable, and it is worth negotiating. Two questions decide how much it will cost you over a year. Does the threshold apply per incident veya in aggregate across the tenancy? And does it cover only consumable repairs, or does it extend to plant such as the air-conditioning system and the water heater, where a single failure can dwarf the threshold? A clause that is silent on both points tends to be read expansively by whichever party is holding the invoice.
Six Disputes That Come Up Again and Again
How the articles above tend to apply to the repairs Dubai tenants and landlords actually argue about. Your contract can change each of these outcomes.
Not sure what your tenancy contract puts on you?
Send us the maintenance clause and TruHauz will tell you what it covers before you sign or renew.
Reading the Law Correctly
Almost every maintenance dispute we see turns on one of these three misreadings.
“The law says the landlord pays”
Only where the contract is silent. Article 16 opens with unless otherwise agreed by the parties, which makes it a default rather than a protection you cannot sign away. Read the lease before you cite the statute.
“There is a legal minor-repair limit”
Law No. 26 of 2007 sets no monetary threshold. Any figure in a Dubai tenancy contract is a negotiated commercial term. Treating a customary number as a statutory one is the most common error in this whole area.
“Wear and tear is the tenant’s problem”
The opposite. Article 17 puts wear and tear not attributable to the tenant’s fault on the landlord, and Article 21 expressly carves ordinary wear and tear out of the tenant’s handback obligation.
Sıkça Sorulan Sorular
The questions Dubai tenants and landlords ask most often about repairs and maintenance.
Know What Your Lease Puts on You
TruHauz reviews the maintenance, deposit and handback clauses on every tenancy we handle — for landlords and tenants alike — so the obligations are clear before anything breaks. Send us your contract.
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