Estate Planning in the UAE: A Complete Guide for Expats and Residents

Welcome back to Lawgical with Ludmila, where we untangle the legal knots so that you do not have to. I am Ludmila Yamalova, a U.S.-qualified lawyer based in Dubai. In each episode, we break down complex law into clear, practical insights that you can actually use.

In today's episode, we will talk about estate planning in the UAE.

Estate planning is the process of deciding, ahead of time, who manages your assets, your responsibilities, and your children after you die. Four questions usually drive the conversation: who takes care of your children, who inherits your assets, who carries out your wishes, and how your debts get handled.

In many countries, the answers are fairly predictable, whether or not you have written a will. In the United States, a surviving spouse typically inherits by default. In other countries, the assets go mainly to the children. In some, disinheriting a child is close to impossible. The UAE does not work that way, and it has become far more complicated than it used to be. I want to walk through how the system got here, because the picture today looks nothing like it did a decade ago.

No will or a will: the two starting points

Every estate falls into one of two categories. Without a will, there is no roadmap, and courts or administrators decide how your legacy gets handled. With a will, you have already made the decisions: who inherits which assets, who takes custody of your children, and how the rest of the estate gets managed.

Most of this article focuses on why a will matters so much here, and on the types of wills available in the UAE. First, though, it helps to understand what happens if you never write one at all.

Why estate planning gets complicated in the UAE

Most people living in the UAE are not UAE nationals. They come from dozens of countries and may want different national laws to apply to their estates. On top of that, many residents have mixed backgrounds: different countries, different religions, previous marriages, children from earlier relationships, sometimes more than one former marriage.

Picture a husband from France married to a wife from Zimbabwe, with children from his previous relationship living in Canada. Which country's law should apply when he dies?

That kind of scenario is exactly why the UAE has spent the last several years opening up its estate planning options. The upside is flexibility. The downside is that residents now face a genuine menu of choices, and making the wrong one, or making none at all, can leave a family with an outcome nobody wanted.

The legal framework: Personal Status Law

Estate planning in the UAE sits inside what is known as Personal Status Law, which also covers marriage, prenuptial agreements, custody, guardianship, and divorce. Inheritance is one branch of that broader framework.

Before 2017: one law, few real alternatives

Until 2017, the UAE ran on a single federal Personal Status Law. The UAE is a civil law jurisdiction, but that particular law was built on Sharia principles, so inheritance was generally handled that way by default.

The law did technically allow non-UAE nationals to apply their own country's law instead. In practice, that option ran into two problems.

First, a separate law carved real estate out of the arrangement entirely. Anything attached to land in the UAE stayed governed by UAE law, meaning Sharia-based rules, regardless of what a foreign will said.

Second, even where foreign law could apply in theory, applying it in practice was difficult. Someone had to walk a UAE judge through the inheritance rules of another country, and in common law systems such as the United States or the United Kingdom, much of that law lives in case precedent rather than a single statute. The U.S. alone has fifty states with different inheritance rules, so explaining "American law" to a judge here was never a simple task.

Indian expats were something of an exception. Because of their long-standing presence in the UAE, courts had encountered Indian inheritance law often enough to apply it with more confidence. Outside that, the default answer for almost everyone was UAE Personal Status Law based on Sharia.

2017: the DIFC opens a door

In 2017, Dubai created a route through the DIFC Courts, the Dubai International Financial Centre's common law court system operating within the wider UAE legal structure. Non-Muslim expats could opt into DIFC jurisdiction and register a will there, including one that covered real estate in Dubai. That mattered because it effectively undid the earlier rule that had excluded property from foreign law.

The catch was scope: the option applied only to non-Muslims, and it initially covered assets in Dubai only. Muslim expats got no benefit from it, and residents with assets outside Dubai were still not fully covered.

Abu Dhabi's civil law breakthrough

Abu Dhabi then introduced what is generally called the Civil Marriages Law and Its Effects, a civil personal status law in its own right. When it launched near the end of 2020, the title framed it as applying to non-Muslim expats. Within two or three months, that restriction disappeared from the title entirely.

The practical result: residents anywhere in the UAE, not just Dubai, could register a civil will with the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department (ADJD). And because the non-Muslim restriction had been dropped, Muslim expats gained access to a civil will option for the first time, rather than being confined to Sharia-based inheritance.

At this point, three tracks existed side by side: UAE Personal Status Law, the DIFC wills regime, and the Abu Dhabi civil framework through ADJD.

DIFC keeps expanding

The DIFC framework did not stand still either. Through a memorandum of understanding with Ras Al Khaimah, DIFC wills could eventually cover RAK assets too. From there, coverage grew to include all UAE assets, and today it extends to global assets as well. DIFC remains open to non-Muslims only, but the assets it can cover have grown substantially.

A federal civil personal status law follows

After Abu Dhabi set the precedent, the UAE federal government introduced its own civil personal status law. Abu Dhabi's version remains the more developed and detailed of the two in practice, but the federal law now gives residents another civil route to consider.

2024: the original Sharia-based law gets reformed

In 2024, the UAE amended the original Personal Status Law itself, making it more flexible for foreigners and non-Muslim nationals. Under the amended law, people can now bring in foreign law, in some cases choose Islamic law from their own home country rather than the UAE version, and enforce foreign wills more easily than before.

Six possible frameworks, one important limitation

Add it up, and there are now six routes that could govern how someone's estate is handled in the UAE: the UAE Personal Status Law based on Sharia, the UAE Civil Personal Status Law, DIFC law, ADJD law, a foreign country's law, or a foreign will (a distinct category from simply applying foreign law).

These options are no longer confined to non-Muslims. The ADJD civil framework now covers Muslim residents, and the amended Personal Status Law lets Muslim expats choose their home country's law. The one group without this menu of choices is UAE Muslim nationals, who still have a single practical option: the UAE Personal Status Law based on Sharia. Everyone else, meaning UAE non-Muslim nationals and most residents, now has considerably more room to choose.

Do you actually need a will here?

A question I hear constantly: "In my home country, I never bothered with a will, and I already know roughly how my estate would be split. Do I need one here?" In the UAE, the answer is yes. With six possible legal routes now available, the absence of a will creates real uncertainty about which one applies to you.

If you die without a will

The default is the UAE Personal Status Law based on Sharia. Non-Muslims may also have access to the UAE Civil Personal Status Law, the Abu Dhabi civil personal status law where applicable, or foreign law. Muslim residents may be able to rely on the UAE Personal Status Law or, under the reformed framework, foreign law.

There is also a route through foreign judgments. If probate takes place elsewhere, say in Belgium, and a Belgian court issues a ruling on how the estate should be divided, that judgment can be brought into the UAE and enforced here rather than starting an entirely new inheritance case locally. UAE law around enforcing foreign judgments has matured a great deal; what used to be nearly impossible is now a fairly established process.

Foreign wills can sometimes travel the same path. We have seen wills from Belgium, Scotland, France, Switzerland, England, and Slovakia brought into the UAE for enforcement through an order on petition or similar mechanism, though outcomes vary widely by country and by how the will was drafted. A Scottish will moved through the system relatively quickly. A Swiss will took considerably more effort. A Slovakian will has taken longer still. The option exists, but it tends to be slow, uncertain, and administratively heavy, which is itself an argument for a UAE-based will.

One long-standing myth worth killing: dying without a will in the UAE never meant your estate went to the government. It never worked that way, and it certainly does not today. The real risk of dying intestate is complexity and uncertainty in the process, not loss of the estate itself.

If you do have a will

Non-Muslims currently have up to three local options: DIFC, ADJD, and potentially the UAE Civil Personal Status Law route, though that last one is still developing in practice. Muslim residents have one main practical local option, the ADJD civil will, because DIFC stays restricted to non-Muslims and the federal civil law route remains, in practice, more closely tied to non-Muslim residents. Both groups can also attempt to enforce a foreign will, though a local UAE will is generally faster and more predictable.

A will settles which law applies, who inherits what, how your children are cared for, and how your legacy gets managed. Without one, the outcome may look very different from what you actually intended.

How Sharia-based inheritance works

Under the UAE Personal Status Law, inheritance calculations follow specific fractional rules. Male heirs generally receive larger shares than female heirs in equivalent categories, so a son typically receives more than a daughter. The law prioritizes certain classes of heirs, often starting with male descendants before moving to other family members. Parents, siblings, grandparents, and in some situations uncles can all inherit. Because the calculations are technical, a proper Sharia inheritance calculator is usually necessary to work out exact shares.

A few additional rules matter here. You generally cannot freely distribute your estate the way many people assume under Sharia. You may only will up to one-third of your estate to someone who is not already a legal heir, and even that portion may need approval from the other heirs. Non-Muslim family members do not inherit under Sharia at all. If a Muslim man marries a non-Muslim woman who does not convert, she has no automatic right to inherit from him; the one-third discretionary share could potentially go to her, but the same approval limitation applies. This is one reason some Muslim expats look at a civil will instead.

How the UAE Civil Personal Status Law splits an estate

This law is much newer, and where there is no will, the default split is fifty percent to the spouse and the remaining fifty percent divided equally among the children. Take a husband who dies leaving a wife, one son, and two daughters: the wife receives fifty percent, and the other fifty percent is split evenly three ways among the three children, regardless of whether they are sons or daughters. That is a substantially different outcome from the Sharia-based framework.

Bringing in foreign law, without a will

Where there is no will, heirs can also try to apply the deceased's home country law. A New Zealand resident living in the UAE, for example, might have heirs seeking to apply New Zealand law instead of UAE law, an option the amended Personal Status Law makes clearer than before. It still means educating a UAE judge on the content of that foreign law, which can be expensive, slow, and emotionally exhausting for a family that is already grieving and, in many cases, no longer even based in the UAE.

Enforcing a foreign probate judgment

Another no-will route: probate happens abroad, say in India or Kenya, a court there rules on how the estate should be divided, and that judgment is then brought into the UAE for enforcement. This can work, which is why an estate does not simply vanish just because someone died without a will.

DIFC versus ADJD: the two main local will options

For residents who want a local UAE will, DIFC and ADJD are the two practical routes today. A broader federal civil law will framework may develop further over time, but these two dominate current practice.

DIFC is available to non-Muslims only, can cover global assets, runs exclusively in English, is highly digitized, and allows updates and amendments after registration. ADJD is open to Muslims and non-Muslim residents, operates in both English and Arabic, costs considerably less than DIFC, is also fully digital, but does not offer the same flexibility for amendments; changing an ADJD will generally means reissuing it.

Cost

A DIFC will typically runs between AED 10,000 and AED 15,000, though template wills are available for around AED 5,000. An ADJD will costs around AED 950 to AED 1,000, plus additional translation fees since the will also needs to exist in Arabic.

DIFC looks far more expensive at first glance, and it is, but the DIFC fee also covers the later probate proceedings. That upfront cost includes the court process needed to probate and enforce the will after death, which narrows the gap somewhat once you factor in what happens after death.

Updates and amendments

DIFC lets you add new data points, such as a new property or bank account, without a formal amendment; you simply notify the DIFC. Substantive changes, such as swapping a beneficiary or an executor, generally cost around AED 500. ADJD does not offer the same tiered flexibility. Changing the will in any substantive way typically means going through the registration process again.

Marriage and divorce under DIFC

Getting married after registering a DIFC will automatically revokes that will, so someone who registers a will and marries three years later needs a new one. Divorce works differently: it does not revoke the entire will, but it can invalidate a gift left to the former spouse. If the will names the spouse as an heir to a certain percentage of the estate, that specific gift can fail after divorce. ADJD does not carry these same automatic effects.

What actually goes into a will

A will generally covers six areas: beneficiaries, executors, assets, special conditions, special wishes, and guardianship arrangements for children.

Beneficiaries. It helps to name backups. You might list your mother first, your father as an alternative if she has already passed, and an uncle and aunt after that. Or you might say all children inherit equally, with a deceased child's share passing to the remaining children, and failing that, to nieces and nephews. Beneficiaries do not need to be blood relatives; you can name neighbors, friends, or household staff, and some clients name housekeepers as beneficiaries of specific assets.

Executors. These are the people who administer the estate: filing proceedings, coordinating with authorities, handling paperwork, transferring assets, and communicating with heirs. It is worth naming more than one, including alternatives, and having at least one executor based locally given how nuanced UAE administration can be, even though executors can delegate practical steps to lawyers who handle probate and asset transfer. The minimum age for an executor recently dropped from 21 to 18, in line with the UAE's revised age of majority.

Assets. A will can cover UAE assets, global assets, real estate, physical property, financial accounts, and digital assets. You can describe them broadly, such as "all my assets, wherever located," or specifically, down to title deeds, bank account numbers, jewelry photographs, or art inventories. Wills typically separate specific gifts, such as a named watch going to a named person, from the residual estate, meaning everything left over after specific gifts are distributed.

Special conditions. You can attach conditions: monthly payments toward a parent's retirement home, a right for parents to keep living in a certain property, or trust-like structures under DIFC where a child only inherits after reaching a certain age, finishing university, or meeting other family obligations.

Special wishes. These cover funeral arrangements, cremation or burial preferences, and memorial wishes, and they are becoming a more common part of UAE wills.

Children and guardianship. This is often the most important section for parents of minors. A will can name permanent guardians for long-term responsibility and interim guardians to care for children immediately if the permanent guardians live abroad, for example if grandparents are based in Europe and both parents die in the UAE and someone local needs to step in right away, possibly traveling with the children until the permanent guardian arrives. Interim guardians are often close friends, relatives, or nannies. One important limit: if one biological parent is still alive, that parent retains default guardianship, and a will cannot override that unless there are separate legal grounds preventing the surviving parent from acting as guardian. A mother naming her sister as guardian does not override the surviving father's rights.

Registering a will: DIFC and ADJD formalities

DIFC registration happens in English only, online, by appointment, and requires witnesses who cannot themselves be beneficiaries; signing is digital, often through a QR code process. ADJD registration is available in English and Arabic, also online and by appointment, generally without a witness requirement, and involves Arabic documentation with OTP verification. DIFC wills can be filed through the DIFC portal directly or through a registered law firm's portal. ADJD processes typically run through UAE Pass, the ADJD online portal, and email-based steps.

Probate: how fast can an estate actually move

Once a DIFC will is registered, probate runs through the DIFC Courts, and the fee already paid at registration covers that process. The DIFC Courts now coordinate directly with a range of authorities and can issue letters for transferring property and other assets, a major improvement over the older system that often required opening separate local enforcement proceedings. ADJD wills also enforce efficiently. In practice, we have seen ADJD wills enforced within about a month, and DIFC wills move quickly as well, with full asset transfers completed in as little as a few weeks in some cases. That speed matters most for families who need access to property, bank accounts, or other assets soon after a death.

The bottom line

If you live in the UAE and hold assets here, have a will. Make it a UAE-based will where possible, since a local will is generally more efficient and predictable than relying on foreign law or a foreign probate route. And make it specific: identify your assets, list title deeds, name your bank accounts, define your beneficiaries clearly, name executors with alternatives, spell out guardianship arrangements, and include any special wishes or conditions that matter to you. Vague instructions like "everything goes to someone" defeat the purpose of a will, which is to give the people you leave behind a clear roadmap.

Because the UAE runs on a multilayered legal system with six possible routes an estate could take, clarity is not optional. A properly structured will is not really a cost. It is protection for your children, your spouse, your business, and everything else you are leaving behind.

That is all for this episode of Lawgical. If you found this useful, you can find more on our website: lylawyers.com. We are also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And for the full experience, you can watch the video podcast on YouTube.

Until next time: stay informed, stay safe, and keep things Lawgical.

‍