Off-Plan Delays in Dubai: What Buyers Can and Cannot Do

The handover date in your contract passed eighteen months ago. Since then there have been two revised dates, a construction update with photographs and an email asking for the next instalment. You are still paying for something you cannot see, let out or sell without a discount.

Off-plan delays in Dubai are governed by a framework that is genuinely protective of buyers, at specific moments and in specific ways. Much of what circulates online about buyer rights in a delay appears in none of the instruments. Acting on it makes the position worse.

The Grace Period Comes From Your Contract, Not From the Law

The most repeated claim about off-plan delays in Dubai is that Executive Council Resolution No. 6 of 2010 gives developers a twelve month grace period after the anticipated completion date, with the buyer's rights beginning when it expires.

That Resolution is the Implementing Bylaw of Law No. 13 of 2008 and runs to twenty-eight articles. It contains no twelve month grace period. The only grace period in it is thirty days, running the other way: Article 15 gives a defaulting purchaser thirty days from the developer's notice to put his position right.

Grace periods after the anticipated completion date are contractual, sitting in the sale and purchase agreement in whatever length the developer put there. The twelve month figure is not invented. It is the extension commonly written into the standard off-plan sale and purchase agreement, which is why it appears in project after project and why people assume it must come from a law. The distinction matters. A statutory period would be uniform and could not be varied. A contractual one is whatever your own document says.

What a Buyer Cannot Do Is Stop Paying

Withholding payment is the single most damaging response to a delay and the most common. Article 11 of Law No. 13 of 2008, as replaced by Law No. 19 of 2020, together with Article 15 of the Implementing Bylaw, gives the developer a defined route when a purchaser stops performing. The developer notifies the Land Department. The Land Department serves the purchaser with a notice giving thirty days to comply. Once that period passes the developer may act without going to court.

What he may do depends on how far the project has progressed. Above eighty percent complete he may retain everything paid and claim the balance, ask for the unit to be sold at auction to recover what he is owed or terminate and retain up to forty percent of the unit price. Between sixty and eighty percent he may terminate and retain up to forty percent. Below sixty percent, with construction commenced, he may terminate and retain up to twenty-five percent. Where the project never started for reasons outside his control, he may terminate and retain up to thirty percent of the amounts paid.

Those percentages are of the unit price rather than of what the buyer has paid. A buyer who has paid thirty percent and then withholds an instalment out of frustration can lose all of it and still owe money.

The delay may be entirely the developer's fault. It still does not create a right to suspend payment. Exercising one anyway converts the wronged party into the defaulting party.

The Grounds That Let a Buyer Go to Court

Article 20 of the Implementing Bylaw sets out when a purchaser may ask the competent court to terminate the relationship with a developer.

1. The developer refuses, without a reason the Land Department accepts, to deliver the final sale agreement for the unit
2. The developer declines to link payments to the construction milestones proposed by RERA
3. The developer materially deviates from the specifications agreed in the contract
4. It is proven after handover that the unit is unfit for use because of material construction defects
5. Any other circumstances requiring termination under the general legal rules

Delay is not on that list by name. It falls under the fifth ground, which routes to the Civil Transactions Law. Which version of that law applies turns on the date of the sale and purchase agreement. Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025 came into force on 1 June 2026 and governs contracts entered into from that date. Agreements concluded earlier remain under Federal Law No. 5 of 1985. Most off-plan agreements now in delay were signed years ago, so the relevant provision for those buyers is Article 272 of the older code rather than Article 234 of the new one. Both require formal notice before a party can demand performance or termination. That notice is what turns a frustrated buyer into a claimant.

The provision also explains something buyers find hard to accept. A court is not obliged to terminate a contract because a breach has been proven. It may order the developer to perform instead and award compensation for the delay. That discretion is why a modest delay rarely produces rescission of a sale. A claim built on delay alone tends to end in a compensation award rather than the exit the buyer wanted.

When the Building Is Finished and the Keys Still Do Not Come

Once the project is complete and the completion certificate issued, Article 7 of the Implementing Bylaw provides that the developer may not refuse to hand over a unit or to register it in the purchaser's name, provided the purchaser has met all his contractual obligations. It goes further. Where the developer refuses for any reason whatsoever, the Land Department may register the unit in the purchaser's name on the purchaser's application or on its own initiative.

The same article closes a familiar tactic. The obligation applies even where the purchaser owes the developer money on something other than that unit, so handover cannot be held hostage to unrelated debts.

If RERA Cancels the Project

Article 23 lets RERA cancel a project by reasoned technical report, on grounds including unjustified failure to commence construction, gross negligence, insolvency and a finding that the developer has no genuine intention to build.

Article 25 then requires RERA to appoint an auditor at the developer's expense and to instruct the escrow agent to refund those entitled within fourteen days. Article 26 gives the developer sixty days to cover any shortfall. Article 27 requires RERA to act to preserve purchaser rights if he does not. Disputes over cancelled projects sit with the Special Tribunal established by Decree No. 33 of 2020.

This is the strongest protection in the framework and the slowest. It answers a failed project rather than a late one.

A File That Turns on the Notice

A buyer purchases off-plan with an anticipated completion date in 2024. Two revised dates come and go. He stops paying in month fourteen, tells the developer he will resume when he sees progress and waits. Eleven months later a Land Department notice arrives giving him thirty days.

He arrives with a real grievance and a weak position, because he answered a breach with a breach. When a matter like this reaches me as a Legal Consultant, the assessment runs in this order:

1. The anticipated completion date in the agreement, plus whatever extension the developer wrote into it
2. Whether any formal notice was ever served on the developer, with the date it went out
3. The payment record, showing whether the buyer remained compliant throughout
4. The RERA completion percentage from an approved consultant's report rather than the developer's own figure
5. Whether the unit as built matches the specifications and the net area in the contract
6. Whether the project is delayed or is in substance no longer being built

The buyers who do best in these matters are rarely the ones with the longest delay. They are the ones who kept paying, put the developer on notice in writing and can produce a file showing both.

There is more on how these matters are assessed on the page covering property disputes in Dubai.