UAE Construction 2026: Notices Now Decide Your Claim

The notice that was never sent

Ask a UAE commercial manager how site events get reported to the employer and you will usually hear the same answer: the project manager mentions it at the weekly meeting, sends a WhatsApp to the consultant, and writes it in the site diary. If it is serious, someone sends an email.

That arrangement has worked for years, in the sense that nothing visibly broke. Since 1 June 2026 it carries a consequence it did not carry before.

The new UAE Civil Transactions Law introduced an express duty on the contractor to notify the employer of events that may impede proper execution of the works — a duty the 1985 Civil Code did not contain. A contractor that fails to give notice bears the consequences, and those consequences can include losing entitlement to the extra time or payment it would otherwise have had.

The law does not say what proper notice looks like. That sounds like a gap. In practice it is the problem, because an undefined standard means the question in any dispute becomes evidential: can you show that you notified, when you notified, and what you notified of?

This article is for the people who answer that question — commercial managers, contracts managers, project directors and the managing directors who find out when a claim fails. It covers what changed, what a defensible notice record has to contain, and what it takes to produce one in a system rather than reconstruct it from a phone.

Techvaria is a Zoho implementation and consulting partner, not a law firm. Every legal statement below is attributed to its published source, and contract positions should be confirmed with qualified UAE construction counsel.

What changed on 1 June 2026

Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025 came into force on 1 June 2026, repealing and replacing Federal Law No. 5 of 1985. Construction contracts — muqawala — moved from Articles 872 to 896 of the old code into Articles 812 to 839 of the new one.

The provisions that bear on contract administration:

Two qualifications matter as much as the provisions themselves.

It is not retrospective. Contracts concluded before 1 June 2026 remain under the 1985 Code. Contracts concluded on or after that date fall under the new one. A contractor running a mixed portfolio is administering two regimes at once, and needs to know which is which.

Most of these provisions are non-mandatory. Per K&L Gates, the muqawala provisions largely apply only where the parties’ contract is silent. That cuts both ways, and the second direction is the one that catches people out — covered below.

Why this matters more than it reads

The burden sits with the contractor. Because “immediately” and “proper notice” are undefined, a contractor asserting entitlement is asserting that it notified adequately. The employer does not have to prove the notice was absent; the contractor has to show it was present, timely and sufficient. A site diary entry and a recollection of a conversation are a weak position from which to argue that.

Your own contract may be stricter than the statute. This is the point most commentary skips. Since the muqawala provisions apply mainly where the contract is silent, a well-drafted FIDIC-based or bespoke UAE contract will usually contain its own notice regime — often with a defined period and an express time bar. The statutory duty does not displace that; it sits underneath it as a baseline. So the real exposure for most contractors is not the new article in isolation. It is the gap between what the contract already required and what the site has actually been doing — a gap the new law has now made more expensive.

Claims are decided long after the event. The value of a notice is realised months or years later, usually by someone who was not there. If the record does not reconstruct the sequence, the claim is argued on narrative rather than evidence.

Cash follows entitlement. Losing entitlement to an extension of time exposes a contractor to delay damages under Article 340. Losing entitlement to additional payment on a variation under Article 829 turns a cost into an absorbed loss. Neither shows up in management accounts as a notice failure. They show up as margin erosion with no obvious cause.

What a defensible notice record contains

Strip away the legal framing and the operational requirement is specific. For each event that might affect time or cost, you should be able to produce:

• What happened, described factually, with the date it occurred
• When it was identified, which is often not the same date and is frequently the weakest link
• When notice was issued, to whom, and by what means
• Evidence of receipt — not just that it was sent
• What it related to: the contract, the specific clause relied on, the affected activity
• Supporting material attached at the time, not assembled later: photographs, instructions, correspondence, programme extracts
• What followed: the employer’s response, any instruction, and how the event was closed out
• The link to any resulting claim, so that a variation or extension-of-time submission traces back to the originating notice

Written out, this is an issue register with document control and an audit trail. It is not an accounting function, and it is not a document folder. It is a workflow.

The second item on that list deserves emphasis. Disputes about whether notice was given “immediately” turn on when the contractor knew, and most contractors have no record of that at all, because awareness arrives in conversation. A register that captures the date an event was identified — separately from when it was notified — is doing something a shared drive cannot.

Where Zoho fits, and where it does not

Let us be clear at the outset, consistent with what Techvaria has published before: no Zoho product is a construction contract administration system out of the box. Our own guide to construction ERP limitations makes the same point about BOQ, retention and claims, and it remains true here. What follows is about configuring a workflow, not installing a solution.

Zoho Projects documents the relevant building blocks on its own features page: milestones, task lists, tasks and subtasks with Gantt views; issue tracking, where issues can be logged, assigned and followed to resolution; baselines set at intervals to compare progress against the original schedule; document management with version control; custom fields added to layouts; blueprints and workflow rules automating processes, field updates and status-change alerts; notifications to assignees, clients or specific users on status change; timesheets with approval; and reporting including planned versus actual cost and earned value management. It integrates with Zoho Sign, WorkDrive, Analytics, CRM and Books.

Mapped to the requirement:

Four limitations, stated plainly

• It will not do BOQ-based progress certification or retention. That is the subject of the article linked above and remains a configuration or specialist-system question.
• Zoho Sign is not a TDRA-accredited qualified trust service provider, and nothing published by Zoho claims it is — our electronic signature guide covers the distinction. For a notice served under a contract between commercial parties that is usually immaterial, but if your contract specifies a service method, follow the contract rather than the convenient tool.
• Nothing here determines whether your notice was legally sufficient. The system records what was done and when. Whether that satisfies Article 816(3) or your contract’s own notice clause is a legal question for counsel.
• Blueprint and custom field work is implementation, not setup. The register described above does not exist by default. It is configured.

Dubai and UAE considerations

Two regimes, one portfolio. Projects whose contracts were concluded before 1 June 2026 sit under the 1985 Code; those after sit under the new one. Record the contract conclusion date as a field on the project, not as a line in a document, so that you can tell which rules apply to which job.

Arabic matters if it ends up in court. Proceedings before onshore UAE courts are conducted in Arabic and documents are generally required in Arabic translation. That does not change how notices are issued day to day, but it affects what you keep and in what form. Decide this at contract stage.

The consultant is usually in the middle. Most UAE contracts route notices through the engineer or consultant rather than directly to the employer. Your register needs to reflect the contractual route, including where a copy to the employer is required.

Subcontractor notices run the other way. A main contractor receiving late notice from a subcontractor faces the mirror-image problem. Decennial liability under Articles 821 to 824 is carried over, and Global Law Experts notes that the statutory warranty does not govern contractor recourse against subcontractors — which makes the back-to-back notice chain a matter of contract and of record-keeping rather than statute.

Free zone and offshore contracts. DIFC and ADGM operate separate legal regimes. Confirm which law governs each contract rather than assuming the federal position applies across a portfolio.

Best practices

• Read your own notice clause first. Before changing any system, establish what your contracts already require — period, form, addressee, and whether there is a time bar. The statute is the floor; your contract is usually the real standard.
• Separate “identified” from “notified”. Capture both dates. The gap between them is what “immediately” will be measured against.
• Make the register the only route. A notice that exists only in an inbox is not in the record.
• Attach evidence at the moment, not at claim time. Photographs and instructions gathered contemporaneously carry weight that the same material assembled a year later does not.
• Review open notices weekly. An unanswered notice is a live commercial position, not an administrative loose end.
• Baseline the programme and keep the baselines. Delay arguments depend on a recorded original.
• Train the site team on the trigger, not the form. The hard part is recognising that an event is notifiable. The form is the easy part.

Common implementation mistakes

• Building a document library and calling it a register. Folders hold files. They do not hold dates, sequences or status.
• Configuring for the statute and ignoring the contract. If your contract imposes a 14-day notice period, a workflow built to a vague statutory standard will quietly miss it.
• Letting WhatsApp remain the real channel. It is where site communication happens, and pretending otherwise fails. Use it to prompt the register entry, not to replace it.
• Over-engineering the first version. A register with forty fields will not be completed on site. Start with the eight that matter and extend once it is being used.
• No owner. Contract administration without a named owner reverts to the project manager, who is busy building.
• Treating this as a one-project pilot forever. The value compounds across a portfolio, because claims cluster where practice is weakest.

An illustrative scenario

The following example is entirely fictional. It is not a Techvaria client, and the details are invented to illustrate the mechanics described above.

A Dubai fit-out contractor is working on a commercial interiors package under a contract concluded in August 2026. Access to two floors is delayed because the main contractor’s MEP works overrun. The project manager raises it at the weekly site meeting, sends the consultant a WhatsApp with photographs, and records it in the site diary. Everyone agrees it is the main contractor’s problem.

Four months later the project finishes late and delay damages are levied. The fit-out contractor claims an extension of time for the access delay.

The claim is not weak on the facts. It is weak on the record. The WhatsApp thread exists but the phone belongs to a project manager who has left. The site diary entry says “no access L4/L5” with no date of first awareness. The weekly meeting minutes, issued by the consultant, summarise the discussion but do not record a notice. There is no document that says, on a date, that the contractor was giving notice of an event affecting time under a specific clause.

The commercial manager spends three weeks assembling a chronology from emails and photographs. The claim is eventually settled for less than it was worth, and nobody can say precisely why.

What would have changed the outcome is not a better argument. It is an entry made on the day access was first refused, recording the date it was identified, the notice issued the following morning, the clause relied on, the photographs attached, and the consultant’s response logged against the same record. That is five minutes of work at the time and the difference between an evidenced claim and a narrative one.

Where this applies beyond main contracting

• MEP and specialist subcontractors, who are most often on the receiving end of access and coordination delays and least often equipped to evidence them.
• Fit-out and joinery contractors, working to short programmes where a two-week delay is material and variations are constant.
• Civil and infrastructure contractors, where unforeseen ground conditions sit squarely within the Article 829(3) unforeseeable-circumstances route.
• Consultants and project managers, who administer notices on the employer’s behalf and carry their own record-keeping exposure.
• Facilities and maintenance contractors working under term contracts, where the same notice discipline applies to scope and access disputes.

Implementation guidance

1. Map the contractual requirement first. Extract the notice provisions from your standard contracts — period, form, addressee, time bar — and treat the statutory duty as the baseline beneath them.
2. Design the register before configuring anything. The fields listed earlier, and no more. Agree them with your commercial team, not your IT team.
3. Configure the workflow. Custom fields on the issue record; a blueprint enforcing identification, review, issue and close-out; notifications on status change; document attachment made mandatory before an issue can move to “notified”.
4. Set the project-level data. Contract conclusion date, governing law, notice route and period, as fields on the project.
5. Baseline the programme and set the cadence for subsequent baselines.
6. Define roles and permissions. Who can raise, who reviews, who issues. Site staff raise; commercial issues.
7. Integrate deliberately, not fully. Sign for acknowledgement where the contract permits, WorkDrive for the document set, Analytics for the open-notice report. Resist connecting everything at once.
8. Test with a real historical event. Take a notice from a past project and run it through the new workflow. If the output would not have supported the claim, the design is wrong.
9. Train on recognition. Site teams need to know what triggers a notice, which is judgement, not data entry.
10. Review after one project cycle and tighten — then roll across the portfolio, where our Zoho implementation services for the UAE page covers how the sequencing usually runs.

Approaches compared