Ejari Renewal in Dubai: The Complete 2026 Workflow

What renewal actually costs, which channel you are allowed to use, what Dubai Land Department really asks for — and why renewals stop being admin and start being a systems problem somewhere around unit two hundred.

Ejari renewal is the most routine thing a Dubai property manager does, and the most commonly mis-described. Almost every guide online quotes one fee, lists documents Dubai Land Department does not ask for, and skips the part that actually trips teams up — which filing channel you are permitted to use in the first place.

Everything below is taken from DLD's own service pages and from the legislation, with the sources listed at the end. Where the commonly repeated version is wrong, we have said so.

What is Ejari, and why does renewal matter?

Ejari is the Dubai Land Department system through which tenancy contracts are registered. Registration is not optional housekeeping. Article 4 of Law No. 26 of 2007 states that all lease contracts governed by the law, “and any amendments thereto, will be registered with RERA.”

You will often see this stated much more strongly — that an unregistered tenancy contract is simply unenforceable. That overstates it, and we are not going to repeat it. The accurate and more useful version is this: the Rental Dispute Centre's own filing requirements list “a copy of the last tenancy contract (Ejari) translated” among the documents needed to bring a case. A lapsed registration is therefore both a compliance gap and a practical obstacle to recourse, which is a sharper problem than it sounds when you are trying to recover arrears.

Does Ejari renew automatically?

No. There is no auto-renewal. Every time a tenancy renews, the renewal has to be filed again.

Dubai Land Department treats registration and renewal as a single service — the same process, the same fee, the same channels. That is convenient, and it is also why the renewal is so easy to lose: nothing in the system nudges you, and nothing fails loudly when the date passes. A portfolio does not discover a missed renewal on the day it lapses. It discovers it months later, usually at the exact moment it needs the certificate.

What does Ejari renewal cost in 2026?

This is where nearly every other guide is half-right. The figure you will see quoted almost everywhere is “around AED 220.” That number is real — but it is only the trustee-centre route. File online and it is AED 177.75, roughly 20% less, and online is how most property managers actually file.

The online total of AED 177.75 breaks down as AED 100 tenancy contract registration, AED 10 knowledge fee, AED 10 innovation fee, AED 55 service partner fee and AED 2.75 VAT on that service partner fee. The trustee-centre total of AED 220 is the same first three components with a service partner fee of AED 95 plus VAT.

Across two hundred units that difference is a little over AED 8,000 a year. Not transformative — but it is real money paid for no additional outcome, and it is being paid mostly because the cheaper route is under-documented.

What documents do you need to renew Ejari?

Considerably fewer than you have been told. Aggregator guides routinely list passports, residence visas and title deeds. DLD's own page for this service does not ask for those.

Filing through the app, DLD lists:

• A copy of the Unified Tenancy Contract (individuals and companies only)

Filing at a Real Estate Services Trustee Centre, DLD lists:

• The original Unified Tenancy Contract
• The Emirates ID of the applicant, presented in person
• An official power of attorney where the applicant is a representative — if issued in Dubai the number alone suffices; if issued in another emirate the document itself must be attached

If a checklist in your team's SOP is longer than this, it is worth asking where the extra items came from. Collecting documents nobody requires is a quiet, recurring tax on a leasing team's time.

Which channel are you actually allowed to use?

This is the section that does not appear in the guides, and it is the one that explains why staff get bounced between channels.

Eligibility is not a preference. DLD attaches conditions to each route:

• Trustee-office registration requires that the property is not managed by a real estate company, and not held by an owner who already has Ejari system access.
• App registration requires that both tenant and landlord are individuals, with the owner's data up to date in the system.
• Company registration through the system requires a licensed property management activity.
• Representatives of individual owners require a legal power of attorney to manage the properties.

Read those together and the pattern is clear. A managing agent with a licensed property management activity files through its own Ejari system access — not through a trustee centre, and not through the app. The app route is for individual landlord and individual tenant. Sending a junior team member to a trustee centre with a corporate landlord's paperwork is a wasted morning, and it is a wasted morning that repeats until somebody writes the rule down.

How to renew Ejari online, step by step

Assuming you are eligible for the online channel:

1. Confirm the channel. Both parties individuals, owner data current. If the unit is under a managed portfolio, file through the company's system access instead.
2. Agree terms and sign the new Unified Tenancy Contract. If the rent or any other term is changing, the 90-day notice below applies and must already have been served.
3. Open Ejari in the Dubai REST app or on the DLD website and authenticate with UAE Pass.
4. File the contract and pay — AED 177.75, by credit card or Noqodi wallet. Cash is accepted at trustee centres.
5. Collect the certificate. The e-Contract Registration Certificate is issued and emailed when the filing is made online. Store it against the unit, not in an inbox.

The 90-day notice rule — what it does and does not require

Article 14 of Law No. 26 of 2007, as amended by Law No. 33 of 2008, reads: “Unless otherwise agreed by the parties to a Lease Contract, where either party wishes to amend any of its terms pursuant to Article (13) of this Law, that party must notify the other party of this intent no less than ninety (90) days before the date on which the Lease Contract expires.”

Two things about that sentence get missed constantly.

It is a default, not an absolute. The article opens with “unless otherwise agreed by the parties.” A lease may contract around the ninety days. Most standard contracts do not, but “the law says ninety days, full stop” is not what the law says.

It binds either party. Not just landlords. A tenant who wants to change a term on renewal owes the same notice. This is almost universally reported as a landlord obligation only.

Note also what the notice is for. Article 13 allows the parties to amend terms or reconsider the rent on renewal; Article 14 sets the notice required to do so. The notice window and the permitted increase are separate questions — how much the rent may rise is governed by Decree No. 43 of 2013 and the rental index, which we cover in RERA rent increase rules and the Smart Rental Index.

And if you need to cancel rather than renew?

Cancellation is free online through the Dubai REST app or the Ejari system. At a trustee centre there is a service partner fee of AED 40 plus VAT, and the service takes around 25 minutes. At a trustee centre you will need the original Unified Tenancy Contract, the applicant's Emirates ID, a power of attorney if acting as a representative, and — where the contract is still active — a letter from the owner requesting cancellation.

Renewals at portfolio scale: where it breaks

One renewal is a twenty-five minute errand. Two hundred renewals across staggered expiry dates, each with a 90-day notice window that has to fire on time, is something else entirely.

The failure mode is never dramatic. It is a notice window that opened while someone was on leave. A renewal filed but the certificate left sitting in a personal inbox. An owner's data that went stale in the system, so the app route silently stopped working for four units. A spreadsheet that was accurate in March.

The operational unit of work is not the renewal. It is the 90-day window before it — and windows, unlike tasks, expire whether or not anyone is looking at them.

Portfolios that handle this well do three things: they track expiry at the unit rather than the tenant, they trigger the notice window automatically rather than reading it off a date column, and they store the certificate against the unit so that any team member can produce it. None of that is sophisticated. It is simply not something a spreadsheet does.

How PropertyPad handles Ejari renewals

PropertyPad tracks tenancy expiry per unit, opens and escalates the 90-day notice window automatically, stores the Unified Tenancy Contract and the e-Contract Registration Certificate against the unit record, and shows renewal status across the whole portfolio on one screen — so a lapsed registration is visible before it becomes a problem rather than after.

If you are managing UAE property, the rest of the workflow is in the same place: leasing, maintenance, service charges and owner reporting. See what PropertyPad does.