Estate planning for expats in Dubai: wills, inheritance tax and succession planning

I've sat with families in Dubai after a death in the family more times than I'd like.

Nobody is thinking clearly.

Bank accounts are frozen.

Nobody knows where the will is, or whether it even applies here.

And in the middle of grief, someone has to start making decisions about probate in two or three countries at once.

Most of that distress is avoidable.

The rules are genuinely complex. But the mistakes that cause the worst outcomes are the same handful of mistakes, made by otherwise careful, intelligent people who assumed their situation was simpler than it was.

If you're an expat in Dubai with assets, children, or a spouse who depends on you, this is worthy of your time.

Before the detail, the points that matter most:

• Without a registered UAE will, your estate is distributed under local intestacy rules. Since 2023, non-Muslims fall under civil rules by default rather than Sharia principles, but those rules still may not match your wishes, and bank accounts, including joint accounts, are typically frozen until the courts resolve the estate.
• A will registered through the DIFC Wills Service Centre now benefits from exclusive DIFC Courts jurisdiction under Dubai Law No. 2 of 2025, which has made probate faster and cheaper.
• Since 6 April 2025, UK inheritance tax follows residence, not domicile. Leave the UK after ten or more years of residence and your worldwide estate can stay in scope for up to ten years afterwards.
• From 6 April 2027, unused pensions, including SIPPs and QROPS, come into the UK inheritance tax estate. Any estate plan built around pension wealth needs reviewing before then.
• A will is one document. An estate plan coordinates your wills, pensions, trusts, powers of attorney and tax position across every country where you hold assets. 

Why estate planning in Dubai follows different rules 

Why an expat estate plan isn't the same as a normal one

Living across borders means your estate sits inside more than one legal system at once.

Succession law, tax treatment, and inheritance rules don't automatically defer to each other, and they very often conflict.

Without proper structuring, an estate can end up tangled in cross-border legal disputes, taxed in more than one jurisdiction, or frozen entirely while courts in different countries work out who has jurisdiction.

In the UAE specifically, local law can override a foreign will if you haven't taken the right steps.

That single fact catches out more well-prepared, financially sophisticated expats than almost anything else on this list.

What does UAE inheritance law say happens without a local will?

This is the part most expats genuinely don't understand until it's too late.

For years, UAE courts applied Sharia inheritance principles by default to any estate without a registered will, distributing assets among family members in fixed shares regardless of the deceased's nationality or religion. That changed with the Civil Personal Status Law (Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2022). For non-Muslim residents who die without a will, UAE inheritance law now applies civil intestacy rules instead: broadly, half to the surviving spouse and half to the children, with equal shares regardless of gender.

That's an improvement. It's not a substitute for a plan.

Civil intestacy rules are still fixed rules, and they may bear little resemblance to what you'd have chosen. They say nothing about guardianship of your children, nothing about assets in other countries, and nothing about the practical problem that dominates the first weeks after a death: accounts frozen while the courts work through the estate. Non-Muslims can also elect for their home country's law to apply, but that election needs to be made properly and in advance, not assumed. Many expats believe their UK or other home-country will simply travels with them. It generally doesn't, at least not automatically, and UAE courts aren't obliged to recognise it.

The practical fix is registering a will specifically for your UAE assets, most commonly through the DIFC Wills Service Centre, which operates on common law principles and is built specifically for non-Muslim expats, or through the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department, which accepts wills in English and Arabic. Since March 2025, under Dubai Law No. 2 of 2025, the DIFC Courts have exclusive jurisdiction over the enforcement of DIFC-registered wills, wherever in the UAE the assets sit, which has made probate through this route noticeably faster and less expensive than it used to be.

Dubai Courts can also register a will, though this route is narrower and covers Dubai assets only.

If you hold assets in more than one country, you typically need international wills, one for each jurisdiction, carefully drafted so they don't accidentally contradict or revoke each other.

Will my bank account and property automatically pass to my spouse in Dubai?

No, and this is one of the most common and most damaging assumptions expats make.

Joint bank accounts in the UAE can be frozen until legal formalities are completed, even when the surviving spouse is named on the account.

Property registered solely in your name doesn't automatically transfer to your spouse either; without a registered will applying your chosen law, distribution can default to local inheritance rules, which may not match what either of you intended.

What happens if I die in Dubai without an estate plan?

Your assets are distributed according to local inheritance law, which may bear no resemblance to what you'd have chosen.

Bank accounts can be frozen pending legal resolution, property transfer can be delayed for months, business shares can become subject to rules you never anticipated, and in the worst cases, dependants can face complications with their own visa status while the estate is unresolved.

None of this requires anything unusual to happen. It's simply the default outcome when no plan exists.

Do I need a UAE will if I already have one in my home country?

In most cases, yes. A home-country will isn't automatically recognised by UAE courts, and relying on one can mean months of delay while documents are attested, translated and argued over. A UAE-registered will covering your UAE assets, drafted alongside your home-country will so the two don't conflict, is the standard approach for Dubai estate planning.

How much does it cost to register a will in Dubai?

Costs vary by route and complexity. DIFC registration fees currently run to a few thousand dirhams for a single will, with reduced rates for mirror wills for couples, plus drafting costs if you use a lawyer. Against the cost of cross-border probate disputes or a frozen estate, it is one of the cheapest pieces of financial protection available to an expat family. Check current fees directly with the DIFC Wills Service Centre, as they change.

UK inheritance tax for Dubai expats: what's changed?

The UK inheritance tax question most British expats still get wrong

There's no inheritance or estate tax in the UAE. That much is true, and it leads a lot of British expats to a dangerous conclusion: that moving to Dubai removed their UK inheritance tax exposure too.

For most of the last fifty years, the answer depended on a notoriously sticky concept called domicile, and many long-term expats genuinely remained within the UK IHT net for decades after leaving, simply because their domicile never formally changed.

As of 6 April 2025, that's no longer how it works. Domicile has been scrapped as the test for UK inheritance tax and replaced with a residence-based system.

We've written about exactly how this works, and what it means for trusts and timing, in our guide to UK tax and trusts, and it's worth reading in full if you've spent any meaningful time in the UK over the past two decades.

The short version: you're now treated as a long-term UK resident, and therefore exposed to UK inheritance tax on your worldwide estate, once you've been UK tax resident for ten consecutive years, or ten of the previous twenty tax years.

Spend less time than that as a UK resident, and only your UK-situated assets, things like UK property, fall within scope.

There's also a tail of between three and ten years after you leave, depending on your residency history, so becoming non-resident doesn't switch off your exposure overnight.

For estates that do fall within scope, the standard nil-rate band remains £325,000, with a further £175,000 residence nil-rate band available where a qualifying home passes to direct descendants, taking a couple's combined tax-free threshold up to £1 million in the right circumstances.

Both bands have now been frozen until April 2031, meaning more estates will be drawn into the tax each year simply through rising asset values, a process often called fiscal drag. Anything above the available threshold is taxed at 40%.

What gifts can I make that are automatically free from UK inheritance tax?

A handful of exemptions exist regardless of your residence status.

Gifts to a UK-domiciled spouse or civil partner, and gifts to registered charities, are exempt without limit. You can give away up to £3,000 a year as an annual exemption, which can be carried forward one tax year if unused, alongside unlimited small gifts of up to £250 per person.

Wedding gifts are also exempt up to specific limits depending on the relationship, and leaving 10% or more of your net estate to charity reduces the rate on the rest from 40% to 36%.

Beyond these, larger lifetime gifts to individuals become fully exempt only if you survive seven years from the date of the gift, with reducing relief, known as taper relief, if you die between three and seven years afterward. Tax treatment depends on your individual circumstances and the rules can change - nothing here is personal tax advice. 

The pension change most estate plans haven't caught up with yet

If your estate planning has, at any point, treated your pension as a way to pass wealth down free of inheritance tax, this needs your attention now, not later.

From 6 April 2027, most unused pension funds and death benefits, in both UK SIPPs and overseas QROPS, will be brought within the value of a deceased person's estate for UK inheritance tax purposes, regardless of whether the scheme trustees previously had discretion over who received them.

Benefits passing to a surviving spouse or civil partner, and to registered charities, remain exempt.

For everyone else, a pension that has historically been one of the most tax-efficient ways to pass on wealth is becoming one of the least.

We go into the detail of what this means for SIPPs and QROPS specifically, including a real client case, in our piece on QROPS versus SIPP for Dubai executives, but the headline for estate planning purposes is simple: a 2027 review of any plan built around pension wealth as inheritance is no longer optional.

What should an international estate plan include?

A well-built plan for wills for expats and cross-border estates typically draws on a handful of components working together, rather than any single document doing all the work.

A will is the foundation, but only if it's actionable.

Plenty of expats have a will sitting in a drawer that nobody else knows exists, naming an executor who doesn't know what to do, or referencing assets that have since changed.

A good will protects a surviving spouse's interests, opens up tax planning opportunities that are often missed in larger estates, and gives your family and advisers a clear, current map to follow.

If you have young children, guardianship documentation needs to sit alongside it, since without a UAE-registered will addressing guardianship, decisions about your children's care can default to the courts rather than your wishes.

The starting point for most of this is proper financial planning that treats your estate as part of the wider picture, not a separate exercise tackled in isolation.

What is a power of attorney, and does an expat family in Dubai need one?

A power of attorney is a legal document that nominates someone to make financial or medical decisions on your behalf if you're unable to.

The dangerous misconception, and it's startlingly common among British expats specifically, is the belief that a spouse can automatically step in and manage your affairs if you become mentally incapacitated.

They generally can't.

Without a power of attorney in place, your family can face a real delay while applying to the relevant court for the authority to act, at exactly the moment they can least afford one.

A lasting power of attorney, properly drafted and registered, removes that gap entirely.

What is a trust, and what can it actually do for an expat family's estate plan?

A trust is a legal arrangement where you transfer cash, property or investments to a trustee, who manages them for the benefit of a beneficiary you've named.

Once assets are properly placed into a trust, you generally no longer own them personally, which is part of why they can sit outside the value of your estate for inheritance tax purposes, depending on how and when they were structured and who the settlor is under the current rules.

Trusts are genuinely useful for expat families, but the scope to use them well is more limited than older marketing material sometimes suggests, particularly given the shift from domicile to residence for UK inheritance tax.

Some structures, discretionary trusts in particular, offer real flexibility in how and when wealth is distributed, which matters when you want to protect a beneficiary from inheriting too early or losing an inheritance through divorce or poor decisions.

Bare trusts pass assets more directly, which can simplify things but removes flexibility.

None of this is a do-it-yourself exercise: a structure that worked perfectly under the old domicile-based rules can need a serious rethink under the current residence-based regime.

What is a living will, and does it actually work in the UAE?

A living will, or advance directive, sets out your medical treatment preferences if you're unable to communicate them yourself.

In the UAE, living wills don't carry formal legal recognition; medical decisions follow local law and principles that generally prioritise life-preserving treatment.

Some international hospitals may informally acknowledge a living will registered in another country, but there's no guarantee.

The more reliable approach for UAE-based expats is a health and welfare lasting power of attorney registered in your home country, combined with a clear, documented conversation with both family and healthcare providers about your wishes.

Why a will on its own isn't an estate plan

Everything above might read like a checklist: register a will, add a power of attorney, consider a trust, review the pension. Work through the list and the estate is planned.

That's how most expat estates end up in trouble.

Each document interacts with the others, and with rules in more than one country. The 2027 pension change alters what your will should do with everything else. The shift to residence-based UK inheritance tax changes whether a trust set up five years ago still works. A DIFC will drafted without sight of your UK will can accidentally revoke it. A lawyer drafts the wills, an accountant handles the tax, a pension provider holds the SIPP, and each does their piece competently. What's missing is anyone looking at the whole.

That coordination is the actual work of expatriate inheritance planning, and it's what AES delivers as Financial Life Management: your wills, pensions, trusts, tax position and protection treated as one connected plan rather than a drawer of separate documents, reviewed as the rules change and as your life does. The documents are tools. The plan is the decisions, made in the right order, by someone accountable for the whole picture.

A will is a document. An estate plan is the coordination of every document, across every border, against the rules as they stand today. 

The risks a bespoke plan is actually built to address

Beyond the basic mechanics of a will and a power of attorney, a properly built international estate plan needs to think several steps ahead.

What happens to your wealth if your surviving spouse remarries? Whether ineffective structuring means valuable tax allowances simply go unused. Whether a surviving spouse later updates their own will in a way that excludes the beneficiaries you originally intended. How a beneficiary's own divorce might expose an inheritance to a settlement they were never part of. And whether wealth erodes across generations through inadequate management long after you're no longer there to oversee it.

None of these are exotic scenarios. They're the ordinary, predictable ways that even a reasonably well-intentioned estate plan can fail to do what it was meant to, simply because nobody thought through the second and third order consequences at the time it was written.

This is also why reviewing and updating an estate plan regularly matters as much as setting one up in the first place.

A plan that was right for your family five years ago isn't automatically right today.

Cross-border divorce and your estate plan

An international divorce complicates an estate plan in ways that are easy to underestimate.

Pension sharing arrangements need to account for schemes potentially held in more than one country.

Currency movements can materially change the real value of a settlement over time.

Remarriage and step-children change who depends on you and how your existing will should account for them.

And any trusts, property, or business assets need re-examining, since a divorce can change who has a legitimate claim to wealth that was previously protected.

If you're navigating a cross-border divorce, your estate plan needs revisiting as part of that process, not afterward.

Where this leaves you

Estate planning isn't only for ultra-high-net-worth families.

If you have dependants of any age, assets in more than one country, or a spouse who'd struggle without quick access to funds, the absence of a plan is itself a decision, just not one you'd consciously choose.

Frozen accounts, costly probate, disputes between people who loved you, and outcomes that don't match your actual wishes are all, in the overwhelming majority of cases, avoidable.

Good financial advice in Dubai starts with an honest look at what would actually happen to your estate today, under the rules as they currently stand, not the rules you remember from when you first arrived.

If you'd like to talk through your own estate plan, book a 15-minute discovery call.