Notary Public in Dubai

Most of what is published about Dubai notary fees is somebody’s estimate. The actual numbers are set by law and have been public since 2014, in Executive Council Resolution No. (4) of 2014, which approves the fees and fines related to notaries public in the Emirate of Dubai. The remote and video-call procedures are set out separately in Resolution No. (137) of 2022. This page quotes both, and it is straight with you about one thing: the Dubai Courts service pages at dc.gov.ae could not be reached from outside the country while this was written on 8 August 2026, so the figures come from the legislation itself rather than from the counter, and the amount the portal shows you before payment is the one that binds.

The fee schedule as enacted

Two things to read carefully. Almost every line is charged per party or per page, so a four-shareholder document is four fees and a twenty page contract registered by the notary is twenty. And the percentage line applies to the value of the instrument, which means a share transfer or a high-value contract can reach the AED 15,000 ceiling where a power of attorney costs a hundred dirhams. Applications submitted by federal or local government entities in the Emirate are exempt from these fees.

Government notary or private notary

Dubai runs both. Government notaries public sit inside the courts; private notaries are authorised individuals practising in licensed firms under Law No. (4) of 2013 as amended by Law No. (26) of 2021. Both have the duty and power to register documents and contracts of the types prescribed by law or requested by the parties, and to attest the signatures of the parties. What differs is convenience and availability, not the legal effect of the attestation. The costs of being a private notary are also fixed by the same resolution: AED 2,000 to issue an authorisation and AED 500 to renew it, AED 1,000 to enter a private notary on the roll and AED 300 to renew that. Fines for the 23 listed violations run from AED 2,000 to AED 20,000 and double on repetition, capped at AED 50,000.

Notarising without going anywhere

Resolution No. (137) of 2022 created two distinct digital routes and they are not the same thing.

The identity rule is the useful detail for anyone outside the country: a non-resident can be onboarded on the unified number of a UAE entry permit, so a shareholder who has visited the Emirates is not necessarily forced to fly back to sign. Fees are paid during the electronic registration step, and the resolution states them as the fees prescribed for the service rather than adding a separate digital charge.

Making a Dubai notarisation work in another country

A notarised document is only the first link. To be accepted abroad it normally needs attestation by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, billed at AED 2,000 where the paper is commercial and AED 150 where it is personal, and then legalisation by the destination country’s mission. Because the UAE is not a party to the Apostille Convention, no apostille route shortens this in either direction. The sequence and the traps are set out in our MOFA attestation guide.

Who can do this for you

Being direct about our own data: 0 companies in the directory are recorded specifically under notary and attestation support. 27 firms cover PRO services in Dubai and 20 record translation and document support, which is the adjacent work, and a translator’s signature attested by the notary is its own AED 50 per page line. For a single power of attorney at AED 100 per party, using an agent costs more than the fee. The case for help is a document set going to another country on a deadline, or a signatory who cannot attend. Name the document and the destination country when you ask, rather than assuming any firm runs notary errands.

Where you actually go, and the register we will not reprint

The choice between a Dubai Courts notary and a private notary office is set out above. What that section does not answer is the practical half of it: which building, and how you know the office in front of you is really authorised.

Dubai Courts publishes a register of the private notary offices it has licensed. It sits on the Dubai Courts website under the name Private Notary Offices, and it is the only list that settles the question. We are not reproducing it here, and the reason is worth stating rather than hiding: the Dubai Courts site did not answer a single one of our requests on 8 August 2026, from any route we have. A list of notary offices copied out of a blog is exactly the kind of thing that sends somebody to an office that has since lost its licence, so this page would rather have no list than that one.

So the check is yours to make, and it is a short one. Ask the office for its Dubai Courts licence, then confirm the name against the Private Notary Offices page on the Dubai Courts site before you hand over a document or pay a fee. An office that is on that register will not mind the question.

One thing the register does not change: a private notary office and the court itself do not overlap completely, so confirm that the office can handle your particular document before you travel, not after.

Since that was written the register has been read, from the Internet Archive rather than from Dubai Courts, and what it holds is worth knowing even though the list itself stays off this page. The most recent capture is dated 9 January 2026. On it the register runs to 96 private notary offices across seven pages, and it carries five fields for each one: the office, the registered private notary by personal name, a phone number, an email address and an address down to the floor and office number. It is published in Arabic only. It has also been growing steadily: three pages from 2019 through 2022, five by December 2023, six through 2024 and early 2025, seven by January 2026.

Fifteen of the ninety six can be read and eighty one cannot, and the reason is structural rather than bad luck. The page numbers on that register are not links; they are form postbacks, so no page after the first has an address of its own, no crawler has ever archived one, and replaying the request needs the live server that will not answer. Ten archived copies spanning 2019 to 2026 were checked and every single one captures the first fifteen and stops.

So the fifteen stay unpublished, and not only because they are stale. Fifteen named firms out of ninety six is a shortlist nobody chose, and on a page that exists to point at official sources it would read as a recommendation. What the numbers do give you is a sharper version of the check: the register names the individual notary, not just the firm, so ask which named person on it will sign, and confirm that name rather than the sign above the door.