The concessional gift route is not limited to family transfers. An individual may gift property to a company they wholly own, and a wholly-owned company may gift property to its sole shareholder — both directions at the 0.125% rate. It is the standard mechanism for moving a personally held property into a corporate structure, or consolidating a corporate-held property back into personal ownership, without triggering the 4% sale fee.
The concession turns on one fact: sole ownership. The individual must be the only shareholder of the company. The position is evidenced through the constitutional documents — trade licence, certificate of incorporation, share certificate, memorandum and articles of association — and any authorised signatory acting for the company must be identified by board resolution. A company with two shareholders, however aligned, is outside the route.
The company must be registered with DLD before the gift application is submitted. This is a prerequisite, not a parallel step — an application filed for an unregistered company does not enter the queue. For structures being created for the purpose, the company formation and DLD registration belong at the front of the project plan, ahead of valuation and NOC.
Where the company is registered outside the UAE, its corporate documents must be made usable in Dubai before anything else happens: authentication in the country of registration, legalisation by the UAE embassy there, MOFAIC attestation in the UAE, and sworn Arabic translation. The UAE is not an Apostille Convention party, so an apostille alone is insufficient — where the registry’s country uses apostilles, the apostille serves only as the first authentication step. The full chain is described on the Documents and Attestation page.
The recurring purposes: asset protection and liability separation; estate structuring, where a holding company simplifies eventual succession compared with fragmented personal title; consolidation, where properties accumulated personally are brought under one vehicle; and unwinding, where a company holding a single property is collapsed back to its shareholder. The transfer itself is processed under the gift category with the same fee structure, valuation requirement and trustee mechanics as a family gift — set out on the Process and Timeline page.
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Last reviewed: July 2026