Dubai Court Website: How to Actually Use It in 2025

If you're trying to file a case, check a hearing date, or pay a court fee in Dubai, the Dubai Court website is where most of it happens now. The portal has replaced counter visits for nearly every routine task. But it's not always obvious where to click, and the English version sometimes lags the Arabic one.

Quick answer

The official Dubai Court website is dubaicourts.gov.ae, run by Dubai Courts (the local courts for non-DIFC matters). You can file civil, commercial, personal status, and labour claims through it; pay fees by card; track hearings; download judgments; and request notarisations. You'll need a UAE Pass account to log in. The smart services portal handles filings, while a separate page (case enquiry) lets the public check case status with the case number and year. DIFC matters go through a different system entirely.

What the Dubai Court website actually covers

Dubai Courts handles civil, commercial, criminal, personal status, real estate, and labour cases that fall outside the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). If your contract picks DIFC Courts as the forum, or your dispute is between DIFC-registered entities, the Dubai Court website isn't where you go — you'd use the DIFC Courts e-Registry instead. Same goes for ADGM matters in Abu Dhabi.

Honestly, this is where most people lose a week. They file in the wrong court, get rejected, and start over.

The portal itself is organised into a few buckets: smart services (filing, payments, case tracking), notary public services, judicial inquiries (public case lookup), and translation and expert directories. The Arabic interface usually has more options live than the English one, so if a service looks missing in English, switch the language toggle before assuming it doesn't exist.

A practical test before you file: search the public case enquiry tool with any party's name to confirm you can see existing cases. If you can, the system's working for you that day.

Logging in and filing a case

You log in with UAE Pass — the federal digital ID. No UAE Pass, no filing. Setting one up takes about 10 minutes if you have an Emirates ID and a UAE mobile number; you'll verify at a kiosk or through the app's facial-recognition flow.

Once you're in, filing a civil case runs roughly like this:

1. Pick the case type (civil partial, civil full, commercial, labour, personal status, etc.).
2. Enter the parties' details — full legal names, Emirates ID or trade licence number, addresses.
3. Upload the statement of claim in Arabic. This is non-negotiable. Federal Law No. 5 of 2017 on Arabic in court still applies; English-only filings get rejected at intake. [1]
4. Attach supporting documents (contracts, invoices, correspondence) as PDFs.
5. Pay the filing fee.

Court fees follow the schedule under Dubai Local Order No. 30 of 2013 and its amendments. For civil claims, you're looking at roughly 6% of the claim value, capped at AED 40,000 for first-instance filings, plus smaller fees for service and expert appointments. [2] Labour cases up to AED 100,000 are exempt from court fees under Article 54 of Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021. [3]

A small detail that catches people: the system asks for the defendant's address for service. If you put a vague address, the bailiff can't serve, and your case stalls for weeks. Use the trade licence address for companies and the Emirates ID address for individuals — both pull from federal databases the court trusts.

Paying fees, tracking hearings, getting judgments

Payment is card-only on the portal (Visa, Mastercard, sometimes Apple Pay). There's no bank transfer option for routine filings, and cash payments at the courthouse cashier have been phased out for most services.

After filing, you get a case number formatted like 1234/2025 Civil Partial. Save it. Every subsequent action — adding documents, paying expert fees, scheduling hearings — runs off that number.

Hearings show up in the "My Cases" dashboard once scheduled, usually within 7 to 14 days of filing for civil cases. You'll get SMS and email notifications, but don't rely on them alone — check the dashboard weekly. In my experience, notifications sometimes arrive the morning of the hearing, which is useless if you needed to brief a lawyer.

Judgments get uploaded to the same case file once issued. You can download the certified PDF directly. For enforcement, you file a separate execution case through the portal, again with its own fee (typically around AED 1,000 to AED 3,000 depending on the judgment value).

Watch out: The Dubai Court website's session times out fast — about 15 minutes of inactivity and you lose unsaved work. Draft your statement of claim in Word first, then paste it in. I've watched clients lose two hours of typing because they got a phone call mid-filing.

Notary services and other tools worth knowing

The notary public section lets you book appointments at any Dubai notary office and prepare documents in advance. Powers of attorney, declarations, company resolutions, and acknowledgments of debt all run through here. Fees range from AED 100 for simple acknowledgments to around AED 2,000 for complex POAs, plus a small per-page typing fee.

Remote notarisation is also available for some document types — you do the session over video with a notary, valid under Cabinet Resolution No. 33 of 2020 on notary services. [4] Useful if you're outside the UAE but need a POA notarised quickly.

The site also hosts directories of court-approved translators and experts, the cause list (daily hearing schedule by judge), and a "judgment enforcement" tracker. If you've won a judgment and need to chase assets, the enforcement portal lets you request travel bans, bank account freezes, and salary attachments without separate paper applications — though each request needs supporting reasons and triggers its own fee.

For broader context on how Dubai's civil courts fit with federal procedure, see our guide on civil litigation in the UAE.

Common problems and how to handle them

Three things go wrong most often on the Dubai Court website:

Login fails or UAE Pass won't link. Usually a mismatch between your Emirates ID details and the UAE Pass profile. Update the Emirates ID through ICP first, wait 24 hours, then retry.

Arabic translation rejected. The court accepts translations only from registered legal translators (the directory is on the site itself). A translation done by a non-registered translator — even a fluent one — gets bounced. Budget AED 80 to AED 150 per page.

Wrong case type selected. If you file a "commercial full" case when it should be "commercial partial" (the threshold is AED 500,000 in claim value under current Dubai Courts practice), the case gets transferred internally, but you may pay the wrong fee and need to top up. Check the threshold before filing.

If something goes properly sideways — a rejected filing, a misapplied fee, a missing hearing notice — the contact centre on 800-4444 is more useful than the chatbot. Frankly, the chatbot is fine for "what are your hours" and not much else.

One more thing: every action on the portal generates a transaction reference. Keep them. If a payment doesn't reflect or a document doesn't appear in the case file, that reference is what the helpdesk needs to trace it.

When to skip the portal and get help

Self-filing works well for straightforward debt claims under AED 100,000, simple labour cases, and routine notarisations. It breaks down fast for anything involving multiple defendants, foreign judgments, urgent injunctions, or technical commercial disputes where the statement of claim needs careful drafting in Arabic.

The portal makes filing easier. It doesn't make litigation easier.

If your case involves precautionary attachment, evidence preservation, or a hearing within days, you want a lawyer drafting and filing — not because the website is hard, but because the substance matters more than the upload.

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Sources:

[1] Federal Law No. 5 of 2017 concerning the use of the Arabic language in federal entities and courts.

[2] Dubai Local Order No. 30 of 2013 on the regulation of court fees in Dubai Courts (as amended). See dubaicourts.gov.ae fees schedule.

[3] Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 on the Regulation of Labour Relations, Article 54 (court fee exemption for labour claims up to AED 100,000).

[4] Cabinet Resolution No. 33 of 2020 on Notary Services Fees and remote notarisation procedures.

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