Can decennial liability be excluded in the contract?

No. It arises under the UAE Civil Code rather than the appointment, and an agreement that purports to exclude or limit it is void to that extent. Caps, exclusions and a contractual defects liability period are all effective between the parties on ordinary defects, and none of them reaches the ten-year liability for collapse or for defects threatening the building's stability or safety.

When does the ten years start?

From handover of the works, not from the date of the appointment, the start on site or practical completion as a UK contract would define it. Where handover is staged or disputed, the start date becomes the first thing worth establishing, because it decides whether a claim is inside the window at all.

Does it apply to the engineer as well as the contractor?

Yes, where the engineer supervised construction. Contractor and supervising engineer are jointly liable, so an owner may pursue either. An architect or engineer engaged for design only, with no site supervision role, is in a narrower position, which is why the appointment should state clearly which role is being taken.

How long does an owner have to bring a claim?

The ten-year liability period and the time limit for suing are two different clocks. The liability covers defects appearing within ten years of handover, and a claim then has to be brought within a defined period after the collapse or the discovery of the defect. An owner who finds a structural problem and spends two years negotiating can lose a claim that was well inside the ten years.

Does UK professional indemnity insurance cover it?

Not reliably. Cover is written on a claims-made basis, so what matters is whether a policy is in force when the claim is made. A consultancy that closes its UAE operation or stops renewing has no cover in year eight even though the liability continues. An express obligation to maintain cover, including run-off, for ten years from handover is what closes the gap.

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09 Nov 2026 · 6 min

Decennial liability when you build in the UAE

Ten years from handover for collapse or anything threatening the structure, owed by the contractor and the supervising engineer, and it does not come from the contract. Which is why no clause in the contract gets rid of it.

The UK–UAE corridor · Part of Legal Counsel Dubai: Outsourced General Counsel for UAE Businesses

By Sam Ansloos · Managing Partner

A high aerial view over Dubai Marina shrouded in low fog, rendered in monochrome sepia-grey tones. Dense clusters of high-rise residential and office towers rise through the mist on both sides of a cu

In short

In the UAE a contractor and the supervising engineer are liable for ten years from handover for collapse, or for any defect threatening a building's stability or safety. That liability comes from the Civil Code rather than from the appointment, and the appointment cannot exclude it. Dinmore Bell reads appointments against that exposure before they are signed.

A British business building in the UAE reads the appointment it is asked to sign, negotiates the limitation of liability, agrees a defects liability period of twelve months, and believes it has drawn the edges of its exposure. It has drawn the edges of its contractual exposure. Sitting underneath that, untouched by any of it, is a ten-year liability that comes from the law rather than the agreement.

It is usually called decennial liability, and it is the single most commonly missed feature of building in the Emirates.

What is decennial liability in the UAE?

It is a liability imposed by the UAE Civil Code on the contractor and the supervising engineer, running for ten years from handover of the works, for total or partial collapse of what they built and for any defect that threatens the building's stability or safety.

Three features make it behave unlike anything in a UK building contract.

The first is that it does not depend on proving anyone did anything wrong. An owner does not have to establish negligence or a breach of the appointment. The defect and the ten-year window are, in substance, the case. This is why it is described as strict.

The second is that it is joint. The contractor and the engineer supervising construction are both on the hook, which means an owner can pursue whichever of them is still solvent, still insured, or still in the country.

The third, and the one that matters commercially, is that it cannot be contracted out of. A clause capping liability at the value of the appointment, or excluding liability after practical completion, or stating that the defects liability period is the owner's sole remedy, does not reach it. Those clauses are not merely ineffective against the ten-year liability. To the extent they try to exclude it, they are void.

Does it cover every defect in the building?

No. It covers collapse, whether total or partial, and defects that threaten the stability or the safety of the structure. Ordinary snagging, finishes, and things that are merely wrong rather than dangerous fall outside it.

This distinction is where most arguments actually happen, and it cuts both ways.

An owner who discovers cracked tiling, a failed air-conditioning commissioning or a lift that keeps tripping is in the territory of the contract: the defects liability period, the retention, the performance security. Those are the mechanisms that were negotiated, and they are the ones that apply.

An owner who discovers movement in a slab, water reaching reinforcement, a façade fixing system that is not doing what the design assumed, or settlement that is still progressing, is in different territory entirely. The question stops being what the contract allowed and becomes whether the defect threatens stability or safety. If it does, the ten years applies and the negotiated limits do not.

The practical consequence is that the same building can carry two completely different liability regimes at the same time, decided not by the paperwork but by the nature of what went wrong.

The recodification, and why older advice reads oddly now

There is a complication worth knowing about before anybody relies on a memo written a couple of years ago.

The UAE replaced its civil code outright. Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025 took effect on 1 June 2026 and, as Squire Patton Boggs put it, it is "a wholesale legislative re-codification of UAE civil law, replacing the prior framework in its entirety rather than amending it selectively". The 1985 code that practitioners had cited by article number for forty years is gone.

The ten-year liability itself is a long-standing feature of UAE law and is not the sort of protection a recodification removes. But the article numbers in older guidance no longer necessarily point where they used to, and other parts of the construction regime did move: K&L Gates has set out changes to termination for convenience, to the court's power to adjust agreed damages, and to lump sum contracts.

So the honest position for a business signing this year is that the exposure is real and the citation needs checking against the current text rather than copied from a template. Dinmore Bell treats a confident article reference in a 2024 memo as something to verify, not something to repeat.

Why UK professional indemnity cover leaves a gap

Under English law, a claim on a simple contract becomes time-barred after six years, and twelve where the contract was executed as a deed. A UK consultancy's internal sense of how long its exposure lasts is calibrated to that, and so, frequently, is its insurance planning.

A ten-year liability arising in the UAE does not care about any of it. It runs from handover, it runs against the entity that supervised, and it keeps running after the appointment has been closed, the project team has moved on, and in many cases after the UAE entity that did the work has been wound up or let its licence lapse.

Professional indemnity cover is written on a claims-made basis, which means what matters is whether a policy is in force when the claim arrives, not whether one was in force when the work was done. A consultancy that stops renewing, or that closes its UAE branch without putting run-off cover in place, has no answer to a claim in year eight even though the liability plainly exists. That is not a drafting problem. It is an insurance programme problem that only becomes visible when somebody reads the two things together.

What to check before signing an appointment

The exposure cannot be removed, so the work is about knowing where it lands and making sure somebody is standing behind it.

Is the consultant supervising, or only designing? The ten-year liability attaches to supervision of construction. A designer who hands over drawings and has no site role is in a materially different position from one named as supervising engineer. The appointment should say which it is, deliberately, rather than leaving it to be inferred from what people actually did.

Who is the contracting entity, and will it still exist? A liability that outlives the company owing it is worth nothing. For an owner, this is the question that decides whether the ten years has any value: a branch of a substantial group is a different prospect from a project-specific vehicle.

Is there run-off cover, and for how long? This is the clause that is almost never in a UAE appointment and almost always should be. An obligation to maintain professional indemnity cover for ten years from handover, including after termination, costs nothing to insert and is the only thing that turns the liability into a recovery.

Does the decennial position sit anywhere in the contract at all? It applies whether or not it is mentioned. But an appointment that says nothing about it tends to be an appointment where nobody priced it, which means the insurance, the parent company support and the entity choice were all decided without it.

What do the sale documents promise onwards? A developer selling units carries its own obligations to buyers. Those have to line up with what it can actually recover up the chain, and they frequently do not.

Where a specialist is needed

Bringing or defending a claim before the UAE courts requires a UAE-licensed advocate with rights of audience, and Dinmore Bell instructs and manages one where a matter reaches that point. Placing or restructuring professional indemnity or decennial insurance is a broker's work, and the engineering question of whether a defect threatens stability is for a structural engineer, usually an independent one.

What Dinmore Bell owns is the commercial layer: reading the appointments and the sale documents together, finding where the ten-year exposure has been assumed away, negotiating the entity, insurance and run-off terms before signature, and holding the resulting obligations and dates in one place through contract lifecycle management so that a renewal, a licence lapse or a policy that stops being maintained is noticed in year three rather than in year eight.

For a British business running a project in the Emirates while the company stays in England, this sits alongside the other questions the corridor produces, including employing people in the UAE while the company stays British. Both come from the same place: a document drafted for one jurisdiction doing work in another.

For how this is run on the ground, see outsourced General Counsel in Dubai.

Common questions

Can decennial liability be excluded in the contract?: No. It arises under the UAE Civil Code rather than the appointment, and an agreement that purports to exclude or limit it is void to that extent. Caps, exclusions and a contractual defects liability period are all effective between the parties on ordinary defects, and none of them reaches the ten-year liability for collapse or for defects threatening the building's stability or safety.
When does the ten years start?: From handover of the works, not from the date of the appointment, the start on site or practical completion as a UK contract would define it. Where handover is staged or disputed, the start date becomes the first thing worth establishing, because it decides whether a claim is inside the window at all.
Does it apply to the engineer as well as the contractor?: Yes, where the engineer supervised construction. Contractor and supervising engineer are jointly liable, so an owner may pursue either. An architect or engineer engaged for design only, with no site supervision role, is in a narrower position, which is why the appointment should state clearly which role is being taken.
How long does an owner have to bring a claim?: The ten-year liability period and the time limit for suing are two different clocks. The liability covers defects appearing within ten years of handover, and a claim then has to be brought within a defined period after the collapse or the discovery of the defect. An owner who finds a structural problem and spends two years negotiating can lose a claim that was well inside the ten years.
Does UK professional indemnity insurance cover it?: Not reliably. Cover is written on a claims-made basis, so what matters is whether a policy is in force when the claim is made. A consultancy that closes its UAE operation or stops renewing has no cover in year eight even though the liability continues. An express obligation to maintain cover, including run-off, for ten years from handover is what closes the gap.