The duration of reduced fees is determined by the Supreme Fiscal Committee. We went looking for its decisions and found not them but the reason they are not public: decree 24/2007, which created the committee, says nothing about publishing decisions, and the committee reports to the Ruler. So the question 'until what date does 7% apply' has no publicly documented answer — and that is a fact about the system, not a gap in our search.
Verified against official sources on 2026-09-16: the texts of decree No. 24 of 2007, decrees No. 27 and No. 28 of 2019 and law No. 8 of 2022 come from the Dubai Legislation Portal (dlp.dubai.gov.ae), attribution to the Supreme Legislation Committee of the Emirate. Every address was checked twice: by response code and by matching the document title. The portal states that the English version is a translation and that the Arabic text prevails in case of conflict. This is not legal advice.
Three articles in a row ran into the same question. Decree 27/2019 cut the municipality fee on hotel establishments' sales from 10% to 7%, but in paragraph 1(d) it handed the duration of that cut to the Supreme Fiscal Committee. We checked the wording verbatim and recorded the debt: we had not seen the committee's decisions. Today we went after them.
We did not find the decisions. We found the reason instead — and it is more interesting than the decisions would have been.
What the body is
Decree No. 24 of 2007 was issued by the Ruler of Dubai on 23 October 2007 and forms the permanent Supreme Fiscal Committee of the Emirate of Dubai, chaired by Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, with five members named individually. The decree repealed Executive Council resolutions No. 18 and No. 19 of 2005 concerning the former General Budget Committee.
Article 2 sets out its powers. The committee:
- discusses and approves the financial policy of the Emirate and submits it to the Executive Council for final approval;
- approves appropriate methods of financing major government projects;
- sets priorities for public development projects;
- deals with the debt ceiling, economic recommendations and the financing of budget deficits.
Article 6: the committee submits periodic reports on its recommendations and the outcomes of its work to the Ruler.
The 2009 amendment: composition replaced, powers untouched
Decree No. 53 of 2009, issued by the Ruler of Dubai on 28 October 2009, replaces article 1 of decree 24/2007 in full — that is, the committee's composition:
- chairman — Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum (unchanged);
- vice chairman — Mohammed Ibrahim Al Shaibani, Director of the Ruler's Court;
- members — Abdullah Abdul Rahman Al Shaibani, Secretary General of the Executive Council; Abdulrahman Saleh Al Saleh, Director General of the Department of Finance; Abdul Aziz Rahma Al Muhairi, representing the Investment Corporation of Dubai.
What matters for this article's conclusions: the amendment touches composition only. Article 2 (powers) and article 6 (reporting to the Ruler) are unchanged, and the amendment says nothing about publishing decisions either. Everything said above about the non-publication of the committee's decisions therefore stands.
The decisive absence
Now let us gather what the decree does not contain:
| Question | What decree 24/2007 says |
|---|---|
| How decisions are taken — quorum, voting | not described |
| Whether the committee's decisions are published | nothing at all |
| To whom the committee reports | to the Ruler (article 6) |
| Any provisions on fees or charges | none |
The founding instrument makes no provision for publishing the committee's decisions, and its reporting runs upward, not outward. The direct consequence: the decision that fixes how long a reduced fee applies is under no obligation to appear in the public legislation register — and it does not.
What this means in practice
The question "until what date does the 7% rate apply" has an answer — the committee knows it. But there is no publicly documented answer, and that is a property of the system rather than a gap in our search. For a reader budgeting a hotel project the conclusion is concrete:
- the rate is known and verifiable — it is stated verbatim in decree 27/2019 and we quoted it with the source;
- its duration cannot be established from open sources — it must be confirmed with the department, not searched for in legislation;
- planning multi-year economics on the assumption that 7% will persist is not safe: the decree expressly made the figure time-bound by handing its duration to another body.
The same applies to the 2025 initiative refunding fees in full: the resolution itself is published and states its duration, but the refund procedure is delegated to a separate Department of Finance resolution — which we likewise have not read and about which we claim nothing.
What we did not find — and we say so plainly
- Not a single decision of the Supreme Fiscal Committee was found on the legislation portal. Neither on the duration of reductions nor on anything else.
- Amendments to decree 24/2007 — debt closed. When this article was written we knew of amendments only from the reference in law No. 8 of 2022 ("…and its amendments") and said plainly that the composition was given as of the 2007 edition. The amendment has now been found and read: it is decree No. 53 of 2009, analysed above. The current composition is given from it. Whether amendments exist LATER than 2009 we do not know — we found none on the portal and assert none.
- A document that one search listing called "decree No. 59 of 2023 on the Supreme Fiscal Committee". We checked the addresses — they do not exist (404), and no primary source we reached cites that number: law 8/2022, writing in 2022, refers precisely to 24/2007 as amended. We therefore do not assert that such a decree exists and build no conclusion on it. We mention it only so the reader knows such a reference circulates and that we found no confirmation of it.
Why we did not fill the gap
The temptation was obvious: assemble a "likely" expiry date from secondary sources and present it as fact. We do not, by the same rule under which we left two cells of the table empty in the article on the municipality fee and wrote not a line about the calculation base. What was not found is called not found. A reader is better served by knowing exactly where the boundary of the verifiable runs than by a plausible figure with no source.
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