Guide · updated 31.07.2026 · 16 min read · Lucent Legal team

Inheritance and Wills in the UAE: DIFC Will, Sharia, and Your Assets — 2026

Inheritance is one of those topics that rarely comes up until it's too late to plan for. But if you're an expat living in the UAE — an apartment in Dubai, a local bank account, a car, kids at school — "what happens to all this if something happens to me" has a real, and not always comfortable, answer. The good news: over the past few years the UAE has built workable tools for non-Muslim expats — the DIFC Wills Service Centre in Dubai, the ADJD wills registry in Abu Dhabi, and a dedicated civil inheritance law. The bad news: without a will, none of that kicks in automatically, and a family left to deal with courts in an unfamiliar country and language is an entirely avoidable burden on top of a loss they're already dealing with. Here's what actually happens to an expat's assets in the UAE without a will, what your options are for making one, and where there honestly isn't a clean answer yet.

What Happens Without a Will

Since 1 February 2023, the UAE has applied Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2022 on Civil Personal Status (updated by Decree-Law No. 41 of 2024). It introduced an important principle: Sharia inheritance rules no longer apply automatically by default to non-Muslims. If someone dies without a will and no applicable foreign law is proven, the law sets its own civil default: 50% to the surviving spouse, and the remaining 50% split equally among the children, regardless of gender.

That's a real improvement over the old default, where Sharia shares could apply to non-Muslims by default too (different shares for sons versus daughters, a specific treatment of the spouse, and so on). But "better than before" isn't the same as "what you'd actually choose." A flat 50/50 split may not match your intentions at all — say you want to leave everything to your surviving spouse, include parents, a friend, or a charity, or split shares between children unevenly. On top of that, the statutory default only kicks in when there's neither a will nor proven foreign law — and proving another country's inheritance law (Indian, Filipino, Russian, or otherwise) in a UAE court without a will already in place is often a slow process with no guaranteed outcome. Case practice under this law is still developing, and courts can read the same facts differently in contested cases — no honest lawyer will promise a specific result without a will in place.

Bank Accounts Freeze After Death

A separate, often underestimated problem is bank accounts. Under Article 379 of the UAE Civil Code, all of the deceased's accounts at local banks — including joint accounts — are frozen the moment the bank learns of the death, and stay frozen until a court order on asset distribution comes through. This applies to joint accounts too: even if the account was held jointly with a spouse, that spouse can't freely access the funds until the court rules.

A will doesn't lift the freeze by itself — that's a legal requirement, not a consequence of there being no expressed wishes. But a registered will meaningfully speeds up getting the court order needed to unfreeze the account: instead of the court establishing the heirs and the applicable law from scratch, it works from an already-recognised document. In practice, that can be the difference between a few weeks and several months (sometimes longer, by some accounts) of a family locked out of money at the worst possible time.

Choosing Your Own Country's Law

Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2022 explicitly lets non-Muslim foreigners choose to have their inheritance governed by the law of their home country instead of the UAE's civil regime. That matters for anyone with a clear idea of how, say, Indian, UK, or Russian inheritance law would handle things, or whose estate is spread across several countries and who wants one consistent set of rules.

In practice, though, this choice only really works either when it's written into a registered UAE will (naming the applicable foreign law explicitly), or when the foreign inheritance law can be proven in a UAE court — a separate process requiring expert evidence on foreign law, translation, and document legalisation, with no guarantee of a fast or predictable outcome. In other words, "having the right to choose" and "actually being able to use it after death without any paperwork done in advance" are two different things. Whether choosing your home country's law or sticking with the UAE civil default (or a local will) works better for you depends on nationality, the mix of assets, and your family situation — worth discussing with a lawyer ahead of time rather than assuming the general rule will sort itself out.

DIFC Will: Types and Cost

The most common tool for non-Muslim expats in Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah is registering a will through the DIFC Wills Service Centre. Any non-Muslim (and anyone who has never been Muslim) aged 21 or over can register one, provided they have assets in the UAE and/or minor children living in Dubai or Ras Al Khaimah — UAE residency isn't required.

DIFC offers several will types for different needs:

• Full Will — covers all movable and immovable property in the UAE plus guardianship of minor children.
• Property Will — up to five properties (or shares in them) in the UAE.
• Financial Assets Will — up to ten bank or brokerage accounts in the UAE.
• Business Owners Will — up to five shares in UAE-registered companies.
• Guardianship Will — guardianship of minor children only, no property provisions.

Cost figures vary across sources, which is expected: the DIFC Courts fee schedule is updated periodically (the latest update legal sources reference is July 2026), and the final price depends on the will type and whether you're using a lawyer to draft the text. As a rough guide: a Full Estate Will runs around USD 1,400 in court fees, a single-asset-type will (property only, or accounts only) around USD 840; other estimates put a Full Will at AED 10,000–15,000, with simpler options starting around AED 5,000. A lawyer, translator, or tax adviser is billed separately if you use one — that's not part of the DIFC court fee. Check the exact current figure for your situation on the DIFC Wills Service Centre portal or with a practising lawyer — the numbers in articles go stale quickly.

The process itself is straightforward and can run entirely remotely: drafting the will text (from a template or with a lawyer), uploading documents (passport, ID, witness details), an online or in-person appointment of about 20 minutes, and electronic signing in front of two witnesses. Witnesses must be over 21, hold valid photo ID, and not be beneficiaries, guardians, or their spouses — they can also join remotely from anywhere in the world.

The Abu Dhabi Alternative

If you don't have assets in Dubai or Ras Al Khaimah — say your property or accounts are in Abu Dhabi or another emirate — there's a parallel option: the wills registry for non-Muslims run by the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department (ADJD). Unlike a DIFC will (built primarily around assets in Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah), an ADJD will is recognised by courts across all seven emirates.

The court fee, per legal sources, runs around AED 950 for a single will and about AED 1,900 for mirror wills for couples. The process is also fully digital: you apply online, get notified of approval or requested changes, pay the fee, then have a video call with a notary to formalise the will — no need to appear in court in person, and UAE residency isn't required to register. Separately from the court fee, you'll need a certified Arabic translation of the document, since the will is issued bilingually.

Which of the two — DIFC or ADJD — fits you depends on where your assets sit and which emirate your children live in; sometimes it's worth registering both, and again, a lawyer beats guessing which registry to use.

Children and Guardianship

For parents with minor children, guardianship often matters as much as who gets what. A Guardianship Will at DIFC (or the guardianship section of a Full Will) lets you name a temporary and a permanent guardian for children living in Dubai or Ras Al Khaimah, in case one or both parents die. Without that designation, a court decides guardianship based on general child-welfare principles, with no reference to what the parents actually wanted — extra uncertainty and delay for a family already under stress.

This matters especially for blended families, or families where the relatives the parents would want as guardians live outside the UAE — back home, wherever that is. The exact mechanism for transferring guardianship abroad and getting it recognised depends on the specific circumstances, and there's no honest "just name grandma in the will and it works automatically" answer: additional steps may be needed both in the UAE and in the country the child would move to.

Property and Taxes

Real estate in Dubai and elsewhere in the UAE is usually the asset that pushes expats to think about a will in the first place: without one, the property falls under the general distribution rules (the civil default, or proven foreign law where applicable), and until that process wraps up and a court order is issued, you generally can't sell, rent out, or re-register the property in the heirs' names. A DIFC Property Will, or the equivalent section of an ADJD will, removes much of that uncertainty by naming who the property goes to directly.

On taxes, some good news: the UAE has no inheritance tax, no estate tax, and no gift tax — confirmed by both government and independent sources, and this applies to all heirs regardless of nationality or residency. That doesn't mean there are zero tax consequences anywhere, though: if heirs are tax residents of another country (the UK and others with their own inheritance tax regimes, for instance), their obligations there are governed by that country's law, not the UAE's. Worth checking separately, based on the specific heirs' nationality and tax residency.

Assets in Two Countries: Conflicting Jurisdictions

Many expats in the UAE hold assets both here and back home — a flat, a bank deposit, a stake in a business. That adds a layer of complexity: cross-border estates are typically governed separately by each jurisdiction involved, and one will doesn't automatically cover everything. The UAE isn't a party to the Hague Apostille Convention, so documents issued here (including death certificates and court orders) generally need consular legalisation to be used abroad, rather than a simple apostille — the exact steps vary by home country and its consulate (for Russian nationals specifically, our Russian-language guide covers the consular legalisation process in detail).

Lawyers who specialise in cross-border estates often recommend having separate wills for assets in each country (drafted so they don't contradict each other), rather than trying to cover everything in one document. But which approach fits your case — one will with a chosen governing law, or several local wills — depends on your mix of assets, your heirs' nationalities, and each jurisdiction's requirements. There's no single universal answer here: this is a case for consulting lawyers both in the UAE and in the other country where your assets sit, ahead of time.

When to Talk to a Lawyer

Some situations are worth a lawyer's time before you draft anything yourself:

• you have property, a business, or accounts in the UAE worth a meaningful amount;
• you have minor children and guardianship matters to you;
• your assets are split between the UAE and another country;
• your family is blended (spouses of different nationalities, children from different marriages), where the default distribution could create conflict between heirs;
• you want heirs' shares to differ from the 50%-spouse / 50%-children-equally default, or to include people outside your immediate family.

Registering a straightforward DIFC or ADJD will with no complications is something many people handle themselves from a template. But once multiple jurisdictions, business shares, contested family circumstances, or a wish to deviate from the standard split come into play, paying for one lawyer consultation up front is far cheaper than leaving your family a document that doesn't hold up, or contradicts itself, a few years down the line.

This material is for information only and is not legal advice. UAE law changes — a lawyer will assess how it applies to your situation.