Who Pays for Maintenance in a Dubai Rental — and Can It Get You Evicted?

The default rule is simple: the landlord maintains, the tenant looks after it day to day. What almost no guide explains correctly is the other case — when "we need to renovate" becomes a legal eviction ground, and why that notice period is not the 90 days everyone quotes.

Search "who pays for maintenance in a Dubai rental" and you'll get a confident, mostly correct answer: the landlord, by default. What you won't get is the part that actually matters for a portfolio manager — that a landlord can also use "the property needs major maintenance" as a lawful ground to end a tenancy, and that doing it correctly requires a specific government-verified report and a notice period most guides get wrong by a factor of four.

Who is responsible for maintenance during the tenancy?

Under Law No. 26 of 2007 Regulating the Relationship Between Landlords and Tenants in the Emirate of Dubai, the default allocation is set out plainly. Article 15 requires the landlord to hand over the property "in good condition," fit for the use stated in the lease. Article 16 goes further: unless the parties agree otherwise, the landlord is responsible, for the whole term of the lease, for "the Real Property's maintenance works and for repairing any defect or damage that may affect the Tenant's intended use."

Article 17 extends that liability: the landlord answers for "any defect, damage, deficiency, and wear and tear" that is not the tenant's fault, and may not make changes that stop the tenant using the property as intended.

The tenant's side is narrower. Article 19 requires the tenant to pay rent on time and to maintain the property "in such a manner as an ordinary person would maintain his own property" — day-to-day upkeep, not structural repair — and bars the tenant from making alterations or carrying out restoration work without the landlord's permission and the relevant official licences.

What happens to the security deposit and the condition report?

Article 20 lets a landlord take a security deposit specifically "to ensure maintenance of the Real Property," refundable at the end of the lease. Article 21 closes the loop: at expiry, the tenant must return the property in the condition it was received, "except for ordinary wear and tear or for damage due to reasons beyond the Tenant's control." A dispute over that condition — or over the deposit — goes to the Tribunal, which in practice today means Dubai's Rental Disputes Center.

None of this is exotic. Where portfolio managers actually get exposed is the next part.

The part almost every guide gets wrong: maintenance as grounds for eviction

Article 25 of Law 26/2007, as replaced by Law No. 33 of 2008, gives a landlord four grounds to seek eviction specifically at the expiry of the lease — not mid-term:

• Demolition or reconstruction the landlord intends to carry out, with the required permits in hand.
• Restoration or comprehensive maintenance that cannot be carried out while the tenant remains in occupation, verified by a technical report attested by Dubai Municipality.
• Personal use by the landlord or a first-degree relative, where no other suitable property is available to them.
• Sale of the property.

Two details here are the ones that generic guides routinely flatten into "90 days notice":

• The notice period is twelve months, not ninety days. Law 33 of 2008 requires the landlord to notify the tenant of the eviction reason "at least twelve (12) months before the date of eviction" for all four Article 25(2) grounds. The 90-day figure belongs to Article 14 — a completely different provision, about renewing or changing the terms of an ongoing lease, not ending one for maintenance, sale, demolition or personal use.
• The maintenance ground needs a Dubai Municipality technical report confirming the work cannot be done with the tenant in place. A landlord who simply prefers to renovate without a tenant present, with no attested report, has not met the legal bar.

Confusing these two notice periods is not a rounding error. A landlord who serves 90 days' notice believing that satisfies a maintenance-based eviction is exposed to a dispute at the Rental Disputes Center that the eviction never had a valid basis to begin with.

Mid-lease maintenance is not eviction territory

It's worth separating two situations that get run together. If something breaks mid-lease — an air-conditioning unit, a leak, a structural defect not caused by the tenant — that is squarely Article 16 territory: the landlord fixes it, the tenancy continues, and nothing about the lease term changes. Article 25(2)(b) is a different, much narrower tool: it only becomes available at the point the lease is due to expire, only for restoration work substantial enough that the property cannot be occupied during it, and only with the technical report and twelve months' notice in hand. A landlord cannot use "we're renovating" to remove a tenant mid-term; that path runs through Article 16, not Article 25.

When a maintenance dispute does arise — a landlord who won't fix a defect, or a tenant disputing what counts as normal wear and tear against the security deposit — the Tribunal referenced in Articles 21 and 25 is, in current practice, the Rental Disputes Center, whose filing and appeal process is covered in detail there.

What about maintenance in a jointly owned building?

Everything above governs the relationship between one landlord and one tenant under an individual lease. It does not cover the building's common areas — lobbies, lifts, shared plumbing and the like — which sit under a separate regime: Law No. 6 of 2019 Concerning Ownership of Jointly Owned Real Property, funded through the service charges that RERA approves and that flow through the Mollak system. A landlord's Article 16 duty is to the unit itself; the owners association's duty, funded by the service charge, is to the shared structure around it. The mechanics of that budget and approval process are covered in the Mollak service charge guide, and the two obligations are easy to conflate when a tenant reports a problem that turns out to originate in a common riser or shared system rather than inside the unit.

Common mistakes in how this gets applied

• Quoting 90 days for a maintenance eviction. That figure is Article 14's renewal-notice period, not Article 25(2)'s eviction-notice period, which is 12 months.
• Skipping the technical report. A landlord's own assessment that the property needs work does not satisfy Article 25(2)(b) — the report has to be attested by Dubai Municipality.
• Treating a mid-lease repair as leverage to end the tenancy early. Article 16 obliges the landlord to fix it; it does not create an eviction right.
• Forgetting the deposit is maintenance-specific. The Article 20 deposit exists to cover the property's condition at handback, separate from any utility connection deposit.

How PropertyPad handles maintenance across a portfolio

PropertyPad logs every maintenance request against the unit and the lease it belongs to, distinguishing an in-term repair obligation (Article 16 — fix it, keep the tenancy running) from an end-of-term eviction case (Article 25(2)(b) — track the technical report and the twelve-month notice clock separately from the ordinary renewal-notice reminder). Security deposits are held per lease with the condition-at-handback documented, so a wear-and-tear dispute has a record to point to before it reaches the Rental Disputes Center.

See what PropertyPad does across leasing, maintenance and owner reporting. If a maintenance dispute does end up in front of the Tribunal, the process is set out in how the Rental Disputes Center works.