A question our advisors hear less often than it should, usually only after a client has already committed several million dirhams to a unit, is what happens to that property if the owner dies while still holding it. The answer in the UAE is more procedurally involved than in many buyers' home countries, because inheritance here intersects with both UAE federal law and, for Muslim owners, Sharia-based succession rules that apply by default rather than by choice. This piece is general information based on current practice, not legal advice, and given how much the outcome depends on a buyer's specific nationality, religion, marital status, and whether a will has been registered, we strongly recommend a qualified UAE-licensed probate or estate lawyer review your specific situation rather than relying on this article, or any general guide, as a substitute.
For Muslim property owners, UAE federal law applies Sharia-based inheritance rules to assets located in the UAE, including Abu Dhabi real estate, regardless of the owner's nationality or where they otherwise reside. These rules assign fixed shares to specific relatives, a surviving spouse, children, and in some cases parents or siblings, in ratios set by Islamic jurisprudence rather than by the deceased's personal wishes, and a will cannot generally override these fixed shares for a Muslim testator's UAE assets. This surprises some foreign Muslim buyers who assume a will drafted at home, distributing the estate however they choose, will simply apply to their Abu Dhabi apartment the way it would to assets in their home country. It typically will not, at least not for UAE-situated real estate, without a specific legal process establishing an exception, which is uncommon.
For non-Muslim foreign owners, the position is considerably more flexible, and this is the part worth acting on rather than assuming will sort itself out. Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2022 on Civil Personal Status, along with the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department's dedicated wills registry for non-Muslims (paralleling the framework Dubai established through the DIFC Wills Service Centre, with Abu Dhabi Global Market's courts offering an equivalent registration route), allows non-Muslim foreign nationals to register a will in the UAE specifying exactly how their UAE assets, including Abu Dhabi property, should be distributed. Registered under this framework, the will is recognized directly by UAE courts and by DMT for the purpose of transferring title, without defaulting to Sharia-based shares. This is the single most useful piece of estate planning a non-Muslim foreign buyer can do at the point of purchase, and it is frequently skipped.
Without a registered will, the default process for any foreign owner's estate, Muslim or not, runs through UAE courts, and DMT will not process a transfer of title on the property until a court-issued succession certificate identifies the legal heirs. For a Muslim owner this typically means the court applies Sharia-based shares once the heirs are identified. For a non-Muslim owner without a registered will, UAE courts have in the past applied Sharia principles by default in the absence of documented alternative instructions, even though the 2022 civil personal status law was intended partly to reduce reliance on that default for non-Muslims who have not proactively registered their preference. Either way, the property sits in legal limbo during this process: it cannot be sold, and depending on how rental income is structured, that income may also be frozen pending resolution.
Registering a will through the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department's non-Muslim wills registry, or the equivalent ADGM Courts framework, is a defined process rather than an open-ended legal project. It requires drafting the will (commonly in English with an Arabic translation), appearing in person or through appropriately attested channels to execute it before the relevant registry, and paying a registration fee that has historically run in the range of roughly AED 950 to AED 2,000 depending on the registry and complexity, a modest cost relative to the property values typically involved on Al Maryah Island. The will can name specific beneficiaries for the property, appoint an executor to handle the transfer process, and, where children are involved, nominate a guardian, all enforceable directly by UAE courts without needing separate validation of a foreign document. It should be revisited after major life events: marriage, divorce, a new child, or a significant change in what is owned.
Some buyers, particularly those holding property alongside other UAE or regional assets, use a holding structure instead of or alongside a registered will, most commonly a company registered in ADGM or DIFC that holds title to the property, with the buyer holding shares in that company rather than the property directly. On death, the shares pass according to succession rules that can be set out in the company's own constitutional documents rather than through a property-specific probate process, and in some structures via straightforward share transfer once corporate formalities are met. This adds genuine cost, typically several thousand AED a year in company registration, registered agent, and compliance fees, so it tends to make sense for larger portfolios rather than a single apartment, and it requires proper corporate and estate legal advice to set up correctly rather than being a simple substitute for a will.
The practical friction while an estate is unresolved is worth naming plainly rather than treating as a minor administrative delay. DMT will not register a transfer of the property to heirs, or authorize its sale, without a UAE court-issued succession certificate confirming who the legal heirs are and what they are entitled to. A straightforward case, particularly one with a properly registered non-Muslim will naming clear beneficiaries, can move through this process in a matter of a few weeks to a couple of months. A contested case, one involving an undocumented estate, disputes among heirs, or a foreign will that has not been registered in the UAE and must instead be validated through the courts from scratch, can take considerably longer, sometimes well over a year, during which the family may also find rental income tied to the unit held up pending resolution.
A foreign will, one drafted and executed entirely outside the UAE without local registration, is not automatically disregarded, but relying on it is a meaningfully slower and less certain path than registering a UAE will directly. It generally needs to be submitted to a UAE court, translated and attested, and the court then determines whether and how to recognize it, a process that can involve proving the will's validity under the law of the country where it was made. This is a real option for owners who already have a comprehensive will at home and do not want to draft a separate UAE-specific one, but it should not be assumed to apply automatically or quickly, and it is a materially weaker position than a will registered directly with the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department or ADGM Courts, which UAE authorities and DMT recognize without that additional validation step.
The timing point worth emphasizing is that this is worth arranging at or shortly after purchase, not deferred to some point once things feel more settled. Buyers committing AED 3 million to 5 million or more to a unit at Jumeirah Residences Al Maryah Island are, by definition, making decisions that matter to their families, and the will registration process itself takes days to a few weeks and costs a small fraction of a percent of the property's value. In our experience, clients who arrange the will alongside the purchase treat it as a routine part of closing, similar to arranging insurance, while clients who defer it often do so simply because estate planning felt disconnected from the excitement of the purchase itself, right up until it becomes urgent for reasons no one wants to encounter.
We want to state this plainly rather than bury it in a footnote: everything above is general information based on current UAE and Abu Dhabi practice, not legal advice, and inheritance law in this jurisdiction is genuinely complex, intersects with the owner's religion and nationality in ways that materially change the outcome, and changes over time as new decree-laws and court practices develop. A home-country will does not automatically govern a UAE property, Sharia-based default rules can apply even to owners who did not expect them to, and the specific registry, documentation, and process that applies to your situation depends on facts a general guide cannot account for. Anyone holding, or planning to hold, Abu Dhabi property should have a qualified UAE-licensed lawyer review their specific succession position, ideally at the time of purchase rather than after a life event makes it urgent.
Our advisors are not lawyers and do not draft wills, but we routinely flag this gap for clients during the purchase process and can refer buyers to independent UAE-licensed estate lawyers who handle registration through the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department's non-Muslim wills registry or ADGM Courts, as well as corporate structuring where that fits a client's broader portfolio. The property itself, whether a one-bedroom at Jumeirah Residences Al Maryah Island or a larger family unit, is often one of the more valuable and least liquid assets in a family's estate precisely because of the succession friction described here, which makes proactive planning worth more than its modest cost would suggest. Handling this alongside the purchase, rather than after, is one of the more consequential but least expensive decisions a buyer makes in the entire process.