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Gifting
A gift transfer — hiba — moves title now, for love and affection rather than price. Dubai gives it a privileged fee treatment between first-degree relatives, which makes it the working instrument of family property planning: it is how parents settle property on children, and spouses on each other, with certainty the succession process cannot offer.
Plain-language explainer of the frame. Whether to gift is a planning question — advocates’ territory where estates, minors or cross-border facts are involved. Executing a chosen gift is procedural.
No price; a transfer grounded in the qualifying relationship, evidenced to the registrar. That is why the document chain is relationship documents — marriage certificates, birth certificates, attested and translated where foreign — and why the registrar’s scrutiny sits on the relationship, not the consideration.
The privileged treatment runs between first-degree relations — spouses, parents and children — with the fee assessed at 0.125% of the valuation, minimum AED 2,000, against the standard 4%. Structures outside first degree do not enjoy the concession, and attempts to dress a sale as a gift meet the scrutiny the concession invites.
They do different work. A gift is certain and immediate: title moves today, outside any future succession process. A will directs tomorrow, through the succession machinery, with everything that entails. Families commonly use both — gifts for the assets that must be certain, wills for the rest. The planning choice belongs with an advocate; the inheritance frame is on this site’s Inheritance page.
Valuation, relationship documents, developer NOC, and registration — a defined procedural sequence. Eligibility, the fee anatomy, the risks and the full process are maintained at giftingproperty.ae.
First-degree relations — spouse, parent, child — evidenced to the registrar.
Sibling transfers sit outside the first-degree concession’s core; confirm current treatment before structuring.
Title that moved in life is not in the estate — which is precisely the certainty gifting buys; contested facts belong with an advocate.
Reversal is exceptional and fact-dependent — treat a gift as final and take advice before granting.
Last updated: 28 July 2026 · Editorial method