Shared accommodation in Dubai: what Law No. 4 of 2026 changes for owners and sublets

Is shared accommodation banned in Dubai?

No. Pavel puts it plainly: nobody is going to shut sharing down, but it will be regulated far more carefully and within the law. What disappears is the informal version with no legal basis.

Under the new rules there always has to be a defined number of people in an apartment and a legal basis for the arrangement. Either the owner runs it himself, or a company with the proper permit does. Everyone living in the unit has to be registered.

In other words, the market is being made stricter rather than closed. Oleg Svyatenko, who hosts the interview, sums it up the same way: the new licensing does not remove sharing as such, it moves it into the open.

What is Law No. 4 of 2026?

It is the Dubai law that regulates the management and occupancy of shared housing, issued by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid in 2026 and in force from 26 August 2026. Pavel calls it one big law that covers all shared property in every building in Dubai without exception.

Its central point is a single authority. Dubai Municipality issues the permits for the activity and sets how many people may live in each property, how much space each resident must have and which shared facilities the unit has to provide.

Operators who were already running shared units were given one year from the date the law took effect to bring them into line, according to published coverage of the law.

Were there rules on sharing before the new law?

Yes, and that is the part people tend to miss. Pavel says the same restrictions existed before, they were simply spread across different authorities. Civil Defence had its norms and approvals for partitions, and Dubai Municipality always had rules on the number of occupants.

The building code already set a standard back in 2021 or even earlier: one person per 5 square metres of living space. RERA was involved too. What the new law does is gather all of this into one framework, so that nobody can speculate on the market unfairly.

For an owner, that means the ceiling on occupancy is not new. What is new is that the same ceiling now comes with a permit, registration of residents and one regulator that checks it.

Can an owner still run a shared apartment or building?

Yes. If you own the unit or the building, Pavel says, you can basically do all the same as before. The only change is that under the new law you need a permit from Dubai Municipality.

The owner still has to respect the permitted number of residents for the floor area, and every resident has to be registered. A building that was already run within the civil defence and municipality norms should find that the permit formalises what it was doing.

This is where the law tilts the market toward owners. The person holding the title deed keeps the right to share, while the people who only rented the flat lose the easy version of it.