Personal Injury Claims in the UAE: What an Injured Claimant Should Know
A personal injury claim is a civil-law claim brought by someone who has been injured, but not killed, in a road accident, a workplace accident, a slip-and-fall, or by a defective product, seeking compensation from the person or business legally responsible for causing the harm.
This guide explains, in general terms, how UAE law treats a non-fatal personal injury claim: the legal basis for holding someone responsible, what compensation can and cannot cover, how long a claimant has to act, and where a claim is filed. It focuses on the mainland UAE civil-law framework, with a separate structural note on the DIFC and ADGM free zones, which run their own courts and, to a significant degree, their own law. It does not cover medical malpractice or fatal accidents, both of which sit under different legal frameworks and different LEXNOVA content. LEXNOVA is a UAE lawyer-matching service, not a law firm, and this guide is general background information, not legal advice on any specific situation. LEXNOVA cannot guarantee any outcome, and a lawyer licensed in the relevant emirate or free zone should always be consulted before any decision is made about a claim.
LAST REVIEWED 23 SEPTEMBER 2026
WHO THIS GUIDE IS FOR
Anyone injured, but not killed, in a UAE road traffic accident, a workplace incident, a slip-and-fall, or by a defective product, who wants a general understanding of their legal options before speaking with a lawyer. It is not written for a medical malpractice claim or for a family pursuing a claim following a death, both of which follow separate legal frameworks that LEXNOVA addresses elsewhere.
The Legal Basis: The Civil Transactions Law’s Harmful Act Chapter
As of 1 June 2026, the general civil law governing tort and personal injury in the UAE is set out in Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025, which promulgates the current Civil Transactions Law and formally repealed the previous Federal Law No. 5 of 1985. The tortious-liability rules sit in a chapter of the law headed "Harmful Act." Under Article 245, causing harm to another obligates the person who caused it to compensate for the damage.
Article 246 makes clear that this obligation attaches to the harmful act itself: a person who causes harm must compensate for it even if they lacked legal discernment at the time. Article 247 distinguishes harm caused directly from harm caused indirectly, or "by causation," and provides that where harm is direct, liability follows without any condition being attached, once direct causation of the harm is shown.
This general Harmful Act framework is broad enough, in principle, to cover a road accident, a workplace accident, a slip-and-fall, and an injury caused by a defective product. A more specific basis under the UAE’s Consumer Protection Law may also apply to a defective-product injury, but the exact provisions were not part of the research behind this guide, so a lawyer should be asked to confirm whether that additional route applies to a particular case. Medical malpractice claims follow an entirely separate liability and complaints framework and are not addressed here.
What Has to Be Shown: Harm, Damage and a Causal Link
Read together, the Harmful Act provisions point to three elements a claimant generally needs: a harmful act, resulting damage, and a causal link connecting the two. This is broadly consistent with the fault, damage and causal-link formula familiar from other civil-law systems.
Article 247’s language on direct harm, however, suggests the new law may lean toward something closer to strict liability once direct causation is shown, rather than always requiring a claimant to separately prove fault in the way a common-law negligence claim would. Exactly which fact patterns count as "direct" harm, as opposed to harm caused indirectly or "by causation," is not something the publicly available text fully spells out, and it is a genuinely important distinction for how a specific case is argued.
Because of that, this is an area where a claimant should not assume how their case will be characterised. A UAE-qualified lawyer, reviewing the actual facts, medical evidence and any police or incident report, is best placed to say whether a claim is likely to be treated as direct harm or as harm by causation, and what that means for what needs to be proven.
Who Can Be Held Liable: Joint Responsibility and Its Limits
Where more than one person or party contributed to causing the harm, Article 253(1) of the Civil Transactions Law provides that each is liable in proportion to their share of responsibility, and that a court may hold them liable equally or jointly and severally. This is relevant, for example, where more than one driver contributed to a road accident, or where a contractor and a subcontractor both had a hand in a workplace injury.
Liability for the acts of an employee or agent (often called vicarious liability), and liability for things, animals or buildings in a person’s custody, are recognised in principle in many civil-law systems and would be expected to appear elsewhere in the same chapter of the Civil Transactions Law. The exact provisions and article numbers for these specific forms of liability were not able to be confirmed for this guide, so no article number is given here. If a case turns on holding an employer, owner or custodian responsible rather than the individual who directly caused the harm, this is a point to raise directly with a lawyer.
When Someone May Escape Liability: The Statutory Defenses
Article 249 of the Civil Transactions Law provides that a person is not liable for harm that arose from a cause beyond their control: an act of God, a sudden accident, force majeure, the act of a third party, or the act of the injured person themselves.
In practice, this means the party a claimant is pursuing may argue that the accident was unavoidable, that another party entirely caused it, or that the claimant’s own conduct contributed to or caused the harm. How much weight any of these defenses carries depends heavily on the specific facts, the available evidence, and how a court assesses causation in the case, none of which a general guide like this one can predict.
Compensation for Material Losses: Medical Costs, Lost Income and More
Article 255 of the Civil Transactions Law states that compensation is assessed based on the extent of the loss the injured party has suffered and the loss of profit they can show, provided the loss is a natural consequence of the harmful act. In practical terms, this is the general basis for claiming medical costs, lost income, and, in principle, a loss of future earning capacity.
Importantly, no fixed public table of compensation figures for general personal injury claims, covering medical costs, lost income or pain and suffering from a road accident, slip-and-fall or defective product, was identified for this guide. The court assesses these losses case by case, typically informed by medical-expert reports and the evidence each party puts forward, rather than by applying a published schedule.
Compensation for Moral (Non-Material) Harm
A common assumption is that UAE law only compensates measurable financial loss. That is not correct. Article 254(1) of the Civil Transactions Law expressly states that liability includes moral harm, and defines an infringement on another’s freedom, honour, reputation, social standing or financial status as constituting moral harm.
Article 254(2) goes further, providing that compensation may also be awarded to a spouse and relatives up to the second degree for the moral harm they themselves suffer as a result of the primary victim’s incapacity, not only their death. In other words, close family members of someone seriously and permanently injured may, in principle, have their own claim for the distress that injury causes them, separate from the injured person’s own claim.
Bodily Injury, Diya and Arsh: A Careful Note on a Widely Misunderstood Overlay
Article 259(1) of the Civil Transactions Law separately confirms that compensation is required for bodily harm inflicted on a person. Article 259(2) adds that, in cases where Diya (blood money) or Arsh is due, a court may still award compensation where death or injury results in material and moral harm that the Diya or Arsh amount does not cover.
What this establishes is that Diya, which applies to a death, and Arsh, a Sharia-derived concept applied to an injury short of death, function as a floor rather than a ceiling on compensation: a claimant is not limited to whatever a Diya or Arsh amount provides, and can, in principle, recover further material and moral compensation on top of it. Diya itself relates to fatal accidents, a separate topic that LEXNOVA addresses in its own dedicated content, and it has no application to a non-fatal injury claim, so this guide does not restate a Diya figure here.
On Arsh specifically: this guide could not locate a publicly confirmed schedule setting out fixed Arsh percentages for particular non-fatal injuries, such as the loss of an eye, a hand, a finger or hearing, under the criminal-law framework where such a schedule would be expected to sit. Anyone who encounters a specific Arsh percentage elsewhere should treat it with caution and ask a lawyer to confirm it directly, rather than relying on a figure that was not independently verified for this guide.
Why There Is No Public Injury Compensation Calculator
Given the above, a general non-fatal personal injury claim in the UAE, arising from a road accident, workplace accident, slip-and-fall or defective product, is not decided by plugging facts into a published compensation table. Material damages are assessed under Article 255 on the evidence in each case, moral damages under Article 254 are similarly assessed rather than fixed, and no confirmed Arsh percentage schedule exists in the general civil framework to fall back on.
Anyone who sees a confident percentage or a fixed compensation figure quoted online for a general, non-employment injury claim should treat it with real caution. The only percentage-based, publicly documented compensation schedule identified in the research behind this guide applies specifically to workplace injuries, described in the next section, and it is a different legal scheme entirely.
The Workplace Disability Schedule: A Separate, Employment-Only Framework
Where an injury happens within an employment relationship, a distinct and better-documented compensation scheme applies under Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 on Labour Relations, together with its executive regulation, Cabinet Resolution No. 33 of 2022, on work diseases and occupational injuries. The formula is the employee’s assessed disability percentage multiplied by 24 months of basic wage, with the resulting payment capped between AED 18,000 and AED 200,000; permanent total disability pays the full 24-months amount, subject to the same cap.
Two schedules attached to the Cabinet Resolution set out the percentages. One lists conditions rated at 100 percent, permanent total disability, such as the loss of both arms from the shoulder or the loss of any two or more body parts. The other is a graduated list of roughly 45 specific injuries with individual percentages, including examples such as loss of sight in one eye at 45 percent, loss of the right hand from the wrist at 38 percent, loss of the right hand’s middle finger at 6 percent, and loss of one molar tooth at 3 percent. Where an injury is not listed, Article 7(3) of the Resolution provides that the competent medical committee assesses the degree of disability, and Article 5(2) requires the underlying medical report to be approved by the relevant health authority based on a specialised medical committee’s recommendation.
This scheme is self-contained and employment-specific: nothing in the Resolution cross-references Diya, Arsh or the Crimes and Penalties Law, and it should not be assumed to apply, even by analogy, to a non-employment injury such as a pedestrian, a shopper or an ordinary driver with no employment relationship to the party at fault. Whether courts ever apply these percentages by analogy in a general civil injury case was not established one way or the other in the research behind this guide. This AED 18,000 to AED 200,000 figure is also unrelated to, and must not be confused with, the separate Diya figure that applies specifically to a fatal accident — that figure belongs to LEXNOVA’s content on fatal accidents, not to this page.
How Long You Have to File: The Limitation Period
Article 258(1) of the current Civil Transactions Law provides that a claim for compensation arising from a harmful act is not admissible after three years from the day the injured party became aware of the damage and of the person responsible for it. Article 258(3) sets an absolute longstop: in all cases, a claim is not admissible after fifteen years from the date the harmful act occurred, regardless of when it was discovered.
It is worth correcting a likely assumption here: this three-year and fifteen-year structure is not new. The previous Civil Transactions Law, Federal Law No. 5 of 1985, contained substantively the same wording in its own Article 298. The tort and personal injury limitation period did not shorten with the 2025 recodification.
In practice, this means a claimant should not delay simply because the underlying law changed in 2026. Evidence, particularly medical evidence and any accident report, is always easier to gather and more persuasive when a claim is pursued promptly, well before either limitation period is at risk of expiring.
Where a Claim Is Filed, Police Reports, and the Criminal-Law Overlay
A general personal injury claim is heard by the ordinary civil Court of First Instance in the relevant emirate, under Article 24(1) of the Civil Procedure Law, Federal Decree-Law No. 42 of 2022; there is no separate specialist personal injury court. A related rule, Article 29(1)(b) of the same law, makes a "minor circuit" judgment final, without an ordinary appeal, where the claim value does not exceed AED 50,000 — a general civil-procedure rule affecting the appeal route for a lower-value claim, which was not specifically confirmed to work any differently for a personal injury claim.
A frequently repeated assumption is that a civil claim cannot proceed without a police report. No primary legal text was found making a police report a formal legal precondition to filing a civil personal injury claim, so that should not be treated, or relied on, as settled law. What is confirmed is narrower: under Article 5(1)(c) of the Traffic Regulation Law, a driver involved in an accident must report it to the police, or to a party approved by the Traffic Control Authority, within three hours — a duty placed on the driver, not, on the text available, an explicit gateway the injured party must pass through. In practice a police report remains valuable evidence of fault, and UAE criminal law separately treats negligently causing bodily harm as an offense in its own right, so the police and Public Prosecution are often involved as a matter of course once an injury-causing accident is reported.
An injured person has two available routes to compensation. Article 23 of the Criminal Procedures Law, Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2022, allows a person who suffers direct personal harm from a crime to attach a civil compensation claim to the criminal case against the accused, at any point up until the closing of pleadings, subject to the applicable court fees. Equally, the injured person can instead file a standalone civil lawsuit in the Court of First Instance, independent of any criminal case against the at-fault party. Neither route is described in the primary law as mandatory, and a lawyer can advise which route suits a specific case.
Insurance: What Motor Cover Confirms, and Where the Gaps Are Unclear
For road accidents specifically, compulsory motor insurance is a significant practical backstop. Under Article 19(1) of the Traffic Regulation Law, a vehicle must be insured by a company licensed in the UAE before it can be licensed or have its licence renewed. Article 19(2) goes further, confirming that insurers may not include a policy condition that reduces or prevents coverage of their full civil liability for death, bodily injury or material damage caused by the vehicle.
That is a direct, on-point confirmation that compulsory UAE motor insurance is required to cover bodily injury, not only death or property damage, and that this coverage cannot be contracted around. Claims-handling mechanics, such as reporting deadlines and dispute routes under the unified motor policy, are a detailed topic in their own right and are not repeated in full here.
Outside motor insurance, the research behind this guide did not locate a general, UAE-wide compulsory personal-accident or public-liability insurance requirement covering injury to a visitor or passer-by in a shop, mall or construction site, but it also did not find anything ruling one out. Whether a specific business carries such cover, and whether an employer is required to insure its workplace-injury liability under the labour-law scheme described earlier, rather than self-funding it, are both questions to put directly to a lawyer or to the business concerned, since neither was established either way in the research behind this guide.
Court Fees for a Personal Injury Claim
Dubai’s Law No. 21 of 2015 Concerning Judicial Fees of the Dubai Courts, Article 14(a), sets a court fee of 6 percent of the claim value for a lawsuit filed with the Court of First Instance, subject to a minimum fee of AED 500. A maximum cap also applies, reported to sit roughly in the AED 20,000 to AED 40,000 range depending on the claim-value band, though the exact intermediate fee tiers between the AED 500 floor and that upper band were not confirmed in detail for this guide and should be checked against the current fee schedule, or with a lawyer, before relying on a specific number.
A separate exemption in Article 9(1) of the same law waives court fees entirely for labour claims up to AED 100,000. That exemption is specific to labour claims and does not extend to a general road-accident, slip-and-fall or product-liability personal injury claim, so it should not be assumed to apply.
Fee schedules for the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department and for the DIFC Courts were not verified for this guide, so no figure is given for either. Anyone filing outside Dubai, or considering the DIFC Courts, should confirm the applicable fee schedule directly with the relevant court or a lawyer before filing.
DIFC and ADGM: When the Free-Zone Courts Might Apply
The DIFC and the ADGM are structurally separate from the mainland court and legal system, each running its own courts and, to a significant degree, its own substantive law. DIFC Law No. 5 of 2005, the Law of Obligations, is reported to set out an express negligence regime: a defendant is liable in negligence where they owed the claimant a duty of care, breached it, and that breach caused the claimant’s loss, with duty of care assessed by asking whether loss was reasonably foreseeable, whether there was sufficient proximity between the parties, and whether imposing a duty would be fair, just and reasonable. A separate limitation rule for a DIFC negligence claim is reported to run from when the claimant knew, or ought reasonably to have known, of the loss, subject to an absolute fifteen-year longstop. These DIFC provisions should be reconfirmed as currently in force with a DIFC-qualified lawyer before being relied on, since whether they have been amended since 2005 was not independently confirmed for this guide.
In ADGM, the Application of English Law Regulations 2015 make English common law, including a wide-ranging set of established English civil statutes, directly applicable, so a tort or negligence claim connected to ADGM would, in principle, be governed by English common-law negligence principles rather than the mainland Civil Transactions Law. No specific cut-off date for which vintage of English law applies was identified for this guide, so none is stated here.
Both free zones’ courts generally take a case only where there is a genuine jurisdictional connection. The DIFC Courts describe an opt-in gateway, allowing parties to bring a civil or commercial claim there where they agree in writing to do so, whether before or after a dispute arises. A general personal injury claim between parties with no DIFC or ADGM connection — no DIFC-registered employer, no DIFC-situated incident, and no contract naming the DIFC Courts — would ordinarily be expected to fall to the mainland civil courts described earlier in this guide, rather than to either free-zone court. Other jurisdictional gateways beyond the opt-in route likely exist for both DIFC and ADGM, but were not exhaustively confirmed for this guide, so anyone with a possible free-zone connection to their injury should raise it directly with a lawyer rather than assume either way.
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