Dubai service charges: nothing is payable until RERA approves the budget

Under Article 27 of Law No. 6 of 2019, a Management Entity must not charge Owners, or collect from them, any amount for managing, operating, maintaining or repairing Common Parts or Common Facilities until RERA has approved the budget, a fact most owners never see spelled out on an invoice, and one that no confident AED-per-square-foot table on a property portal ever mentions. Anyone researching service charges in Dubai will instead find dozens of pages quoting a specific figure for their community, sourced to nothing in particular. This guide takes a different approach: it explains what Law No. 6 of 2019 actually says about how these charges are set, approved, collected and disputed, is explicit about the parts of the market conversation that could not be verified against a primary source, and shows how to pull your own building's approved figure in a couple of minutes rather than trust someone else's table.

Two Charges, Not One: Service Charges vs. Usage Charges

Most explainers on this topic talk about "service charges" as a single line item. Law No. 6 of 2019 actually separates two distinct charges, and a single property can be liable for both at once.

Under Article 25, an Owner pays the Management Entity a share of the annual Service Charges for managing, operating, maintaining and repairing the Common Parts of the building. That share is calculated using the ratio of the Owner's Unit area, as recorded in the Real Property Register, to the total area of the Jointly Owned Real Property. Where units remain unsold, the Developer covers that share, and continues to do so on a purchaser's behalf if the sale contract says so.

Article 26 covers a different charge entirely: Usage Charges, collected by a Master Developer from Owners or Sub-developers for managing, operating, maintaining or repairing the Common Parts of a Master Project under Article 26 (the community-wide infrastructure, rather than a single building's own Common Parts under Article 25). This charge applies whether the buildings in the master community are completed, still under construction, or sit as vacant land. A villa owner in a large master-planned community, for example, can face a building- or plot-level Service Charge and a separate master-community Usage Charge on the same annual bill.

Nothing Can Be Charged Until RERA Approves It

The single most useful fact in this entire area of law sits in Article 27: a Management Entity must not charge Owners, or collect from them, any amount for managing, operating, maintaining or repairing Common Parts or Common Facilities without RERA's prior approval of the budget. That approval gate covers both charges described above: the building-level Service Charge and the master-community Usage Charge move through that same mechanism rather than two separate processes. RERA itself may not approve or ratify a budget unless a certified audit firm it recognises has already signed off on it, though it can approve a temporary budget while that process runs.

The Owners Committee has a role here, but it is narrower than many owners assume. Under Article 24(2), the Committee reviews the annual Common Parts maintenance budget, can request the property's financial reports to do so, and makes recommendations. It does not approve the budget itself. Approval authority sits with RERA alone, after the audit sign-off required by Article 27.

Mollak is the system that carries this out in practice. It is the Dubai Land Department and RERA's electronic platform for regulating service charges on jointly owned property: it processes the budget approvals just described, manages the regulated collection accounts, delivers service-charge invoices to registered owners, and requires management companies to upload financial statements and maintenance contracts, which registered owners can then access and review for themselves rather than take a management company's word for.

Where the Money Sits, and the Reserve Fund Nobody Can Size Correctly

Article 30 requires the Management Entity to open a Service Charges account for each Jointly Owned Real Property with a bank licensed to operate in the Emirate and recognised by RERA (not an account controlled by the manager itself) and to deposit collected charges into it within 7 working days of collection. Once there, the money cannot be attached by the Management Entity's own creditors for any reason, which matters if a management company runs into financial trouble: the owners' collective funds are legally separated from the manager's balance sheet.

Article 30(e)(8) adds a second requirement: the Management Entity must build a cash reserve, held separately from the main account, to cover emergency expenses or replace Common Parts equipment. That reserve cannot be touched except in a critical emergency, and only with RERA's prior approval. Here is where the law and the market conversation diverge. Property-portal and brokerage pages commonly cite a reserve contribution set at a share of the annual budget, and separately claim that developers must put in a minimum share of a building's construction value during its early years. Neither figure could be traced to Law No. 6 of 2019 or to a published RERA resolution during the research for this article. The law requires the reserve to exist; it does not legislate how large it has to be. Treat any specific percentage quoted online as a market convention at best rather than a legal minimum, until it can be checked against an actual RERA resolution.

What Happens If You Don't Pay

Unpaid Service Charges are not a minor administrative matter. Article 32 gives the Management Entity a lien on the Unit, meaning it cannot be sold or otherwise disposed of until the charges are cleared. On default, the Owner must first be served a RERA-approved written notice of 30 days. After that, the claim becomes enforceable through the Rental Disputes Settlement Centre's execution judge, a process that can end in the Unit's public auction to recover the charges, plus court fees, costs and advocates' fees.

If the dispute is about the budget itself rather than a failure to pay, Article 46 gives any affected Owner a grievance route: a written submission to the DLD Director General within 30 days of being notified of the decision, with a committee formed by the Director General required to decide within 30 days of that submission. That decision is final, though it does not remove the grievant's right to go to the Rental Disputes Settlement Centre, which under Article 42 holds exclusive jurisdiction over disputes concerning rights and obligations under this law.

Several property-management and legal-marketing blogs describe a further, separate complaint route directly to RERA, with its own stated fee and decision window, and quote specific figures for how many service-charge disputes RERA handled last year and how many resulted in an adjustment. None of that could be confirmed against Law No. 6 of 2019 or against any published DLD or RERA fee schedule found during this research. It may describe a genuine administrative step that sits alongside the Article 46 grievance, or it may be an inaccurate retelling of the same process. The research could not settle which, so treat the fee, the timeline and the dispute counts as unconfirmed until you can check them against RERA directly.

The Chiller Question

One of the more confusing parts of a Dubai service-charge statement is cooling. Article 7(a)(4) defines a building's heating and cooling systems and equipment, including air conditioning systems serving the building, as Common Parts, meaning that where a building runs its own chiller plant for common areas, that plant's cost properly belongs inside the Service Charges set under Article 25. Article 2, separately, defines "Utility Services" to include air conditioning as an individually connected or supplied service, alongside water, gas, electricity and telecoms. The law does not say which model applies to a given building; that depends on the building's actual cooling infrastructure rather than on a general rule.

Multiple property-management sources describe a market convention that follows from this split: buildings served by a third-party district-cooling network, such as Empower or Emicool, typically have that consumption billed directly to, and shown separately on, the occupant's own utility account, while buildings running an in-house chiller plant typically fold that cost into the published Service Charge figure. This is a described convention rather than a codified rule, and it means two headline AED-per-square-foot figures for otherwise similar buildings can be misleading unless you also check how each building's cooling is billed.

Service Charges and Your Net Yield

For an owner renting out a unit, service charges sit directly between gross rent and net yield, and Article 16(b) closes a loophole some landlords assume exists. Unless the lease agreement says otherwise, the Owner is liable for Service Charges and Usage Charges, and even where a tenancy agreement does shift that cost onto the tenant, the Owner can never be discharged from the liability if the tenant fails to pay. In practice, that means a landlord cannot fully contract away service-charge exposure by writing it into the lease. If the tenant does not pay, the Management Entity's lien under Article 32 still attaches to the Owner's unit, not the tenant's. Anyone modelling net yield on a Dubai purchase should treat the service charge as an owner-side cost first, and only a tenant-side pass-through second.

Why There Is No Verified AED-per-Square-Foot Table Here

This is the section most competing pages leave out. A large number of property-portal and brokerage pages publish a specific per-square-foot range for the emirate as a whole, and separate figures for named communities such as Downtown, Dubai Marina, Business Bay, Emirates Hills and Palm Jumeirah villas. None of the versions found for this research cite the underlying Mollak or DLD Service Charge Index records, and attempting to query that index directly, at mollak.dubailand.gov.ae, produced a blank page with an Angular routing error rather than any data, so current figures could not be obtained for this article.

The one dated, named-project dataset that traces to a source beyond an uncredited blog comes from Gulf News, reporting on a RERA-driven reduction in service fees in November 2018:

Source: Gulf News, "Updated service fees costs in all of Dubai homes," reporting figures current as of November 2018.

These numbers are eight years old. Budgets go through the annual RERA-approval cycle described above, so the current figure for any one of these communities has almost certainly moved since, and this table should not be read as today's rate for any of them. It exists to show that named, dated, regulator-linked figures are possible to find; it does not tell you what your building costs now.

This portal-sourced range, commonly repeated across brokerage pages for Dubai as a whole, is wider than these seven figures and disagrees with itself from page to page, with some sources citing a lower band and others quoting figures several times higher for branded or luxury towers; none of the versions checked for this research pointed back to a Mollak or DLD record. A similar problem shows up in the widely repeated comparison between Emirates Hills and Palm Jumeirah villas, sometimes presented as a spread of roughly thirty times between the two. Portal sources broadly agree with each other on Emirates Hills, but disagree with each other by two to three times on Palm Jumeirah villas depending on which page is read, before the two communities are even compared against one another. A headline spread built from a roughly agreed low figure and an internally disputed high figure is not a spread that can be relied on at either end, and it is not repeated here as if it were confirmed.

Palm Jumeirah's New Three-Year Budget

On 10 December 2025, the Dubai Land Department, through RERA, approved a change that has not applied anywhere else in Dubai before: a three-year fixed service-fees budget for the Palm Jumeirah Master Community, agreed in partnership with Dubai Holding Community Management and processed through Mollak. Every other jointly owned property in Dubai still runs on the standard annual budget-approval cycle described under Article 27; Palm Jumeirah's master community is, for now, the only one with a multi-year figure locked in. Neither the DLD's announcement nor the coverage of it gave a specific AED-per-square-foot rate for the new three-year budget, only that the structure itself had changed. If you own in that master community, the fixed-budget approval is confirmed, but the actual rate still needs to come from Mollak directly, the same as anywhere else.

How to Find Your Building's Actual Figure

Instead of trusting an uncredited table, including the historical one above, the Dubai Land Department publishes a purpose-built tool for this exact question. The DLD Service Charge Index, run jointly with RERA, provides the approved service fees for jointly owned properties for a specific project, usage type and year. It is queried by selecting the project name, the property-use type, and the year wanted, and it is accessible through the Mollak platform, the Dubai Land Department's own website, and the Dubai REST app. Results come back immediately, and the tool does not require the requester to be a UAE resident.

To check your own building, or one you are considering buying into:

1. Open the Dubai REST app, the DLD website, or Mollak, and find the Service Charge Index tool.
2. Search using the exact project name rather than the general community name, since two towers in the same community can carry different approved rates.
3. Select the correct usage type, such as residential or commercial, and the year to check.
4. Read the approved figure directly from the result, rather than from a secondhand summary.
5. If the building runs district cooling, check separately whether that consumption is billed on the service charge statement or on a distinct utility account, since the two can be structured differently even within the same community.

That sequence takes a few minutes and returns a number tied to an actual RERA-approved budget for the year asked about, something no aggregated table, including the historical one in this article, can promise.