Schools, Nurseries and Training Institutes in Dubai: KHDA Premises Requirements for Investors

KHDA approves the education use; other authorities approve the building. Dubai's private education sector sits with the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, which operates under Law No. (2) of 2021. That law is where the breadth of the remit is actually fixed, and it is worth reading rather than assuming: Article 2 defines the educational stages within KHDA's scope to run from kindergarten and early education through school education, higher education, vocational training and continuing education; Article 3 applies the law to educational institutions licensed to operate in the emirate, including those in special development zones and free zones such as the Dubai International Financial Centre; and Article 6 gives KHDA the power to issue permits for educational institutions to conduct their education and academic activities in the emirate, in coordination with the concerned federal and local entities where required. The 2026 resolutions then show KHDA issuing binding rules for early childhood centres inside that framework. On the school side, the UAE Government portal's page on licensing private educational institutes treats private education under Federal Decree-Law No. 18 of 2020 and points to KHDA's building regulations for the Dubai position — so the federal framework and the emirate-level regulator both sit on the file.

For early childhood centres specifically, the operative instrument named in the preamble of KHDA's 2026 resolutions is Executive Council Resolution No. (35) of 2020 Regulating Early Childhood Centres in the Emirate of Dubai, as amended by Executive Council Resolution No. (26) of 2023, which replaced Articles (2) and (4) of the original and left the fines schedule untouched.

There is a federal layer on the nursery side as well, and it is worth naming even though the published sources do not resolve how it interacts with the Dubai regime. The UAE Government portal's early childhood page lists Federal Decree-Law No. 51 of 2022 Regulating Nurseries among the regulations concerning nurseries and links it on the federal legislation platform. Its operative provisions are not accessible on that platform as at 17 August 2026, so the published record does not settle whether, or how, the federal law bears on premises for a Dubai early childhood centre holding a KHDA permit. Put the question to counsel rather than assuming the emirate-level instruments are the whole of the law.

KHDA is not the whole file. A commercial unit still needs its trade licence route through DET, a Dubai Municipality building or fit-out permit where works are involved, and fire and life-safety sign-off. That layered pattern — sector regulator on top, premises authorities underneath — is the same one described in our guide to external government approvals for Dubai business licences and mapped across the sector-specific premises approvals hub. The mechanics of the fire and life-safety layer are set out in Dubai Civil Defence approval: fire and life safety requirements, and the building-permit route in the Dubai Municipality building permit process for commercial fit-out.

For early childhood centres, the free-zone question is settled rather than open. Article 2 of Executive Council Resolution No. (35) of 2020, in the form substituted by the 2023 amending resolution, applies the resolution to all persons conducting the activity in the emirate, including in special development zones and free zones such as the Dubai International Financial Centre. The substituted Article carries no exclusions at all: the carve-outs for establishments affiliated to government entities and for private schools sat in paragraph (b) of the original Article 2, which the 2023 resolution superseded in its entirety. So a DIFC or free-zone nursery deal does not escape the approval-before-lease rule. For the other education uses, check the zone authority's own position before assuming the mainland sequence applies unaltered.

Yes — for an early childhood centre, KHDA's approval of the specific building should come before the lease, not after it. The prohibition itself sits in the 2020 resolution, not merely in the 2026 violations list. Obligation 21 in Article 13 of Executive Council Resolution No. (35) of 2020 requires a centre to "not construct any building; add any facility; close down any existing facility; or take lease of any new building for the purpose of conducting the Activity without first obtaining the relevant approval of the KHDA and the Concerned Government Entities". Item 22 of the Schedule to the same resolution prices that breach at AED 50,000. Administrative Resolution No. (35) of 2026 then lists the identical conduct among the administrative violations that attract a written warning before the fine is imposed. Separately, both instruments cover changing the name, address or any other detail stated in the centre's permit without KHDA's prior approval — Schedule item 11, AED 30,000.

For a landlord, three practical consequences follow.

First, an unconditional lease signed ahead of KHDA's view puts your tenant in breach on day one — which is not a strong foundation for a fifteen-year income stream. Second, the approval belongs to the operator, not to you, so your leverage is limited to how the agreement is structured. Third, the sensible instrument is a conditional agreement for lease or a defined exclusivity period, with the unconditional lease and Ejari registration triggered only once KHDA has signed off on that address. Where a tenant needs the space to be handed over early for approval-related surveys, price that period explicitly rather than letting it drift into rent-free.

A Dubai nursery needs indoor space and a dedicated, safe outdoor area scaled to the number and ages of the children it takes. The UAE Government portal describes the standard qualitatively: a safe and healthy setting with ample indoor and outdoor areas proportional to the number and ages of children.

The 2020 resolution makes the premises a condition of the permit rather than an afterthought — Article 8 conditions the issuance of a permit on, first, providing appropriate premises for conducting the activity in accordance with the requirements adopted by KHDA and the concerned government entities, and separately on obtaining the required approvals from those entities. But it delegates the requirements themselves rather than stating them, and that is as far as the published position goes in English. The only detailed document the portal points to is a KHDA regulation of building conditions and specifications, published in Arabic, linked from the portal's page on licensing private educational institutes. Its contents are not available from KHDA's own material as at 17 August 2026, and neither is KHDA's own index of Dubai education legislation, which is where the UAE Government portal sends readers for the Dubai instruments.

So this guide gives you no square-metre-per-child figure, no outdoor-area ratio, and no fencing or shading specification. Per-child areas are widely quoted on company-formation and nursery-consultancy websites; none of those quotes could be traced to KHDA, and a number you cannot trace is worse than a blank in an appraisal. If you are underwriting a unit, ask KHDA in writing for the current building conditions and specifications document and for its view on the specific address, and treat any figure your fit-out contractor or the operator's consultant offers as unsourced until KHDA confirms it. It is also worth noting that the portal's own framing is proportional — space scaled to the number and ages of the children — which means a unit is not simply nursery-capable or not; it is capable of a particular roll size, and that is the number your rent depends on.

The same gap covers floor level. Market practice in Dubai is that units traded for nursery use are ground floor, with a controllable entrance, a drop-off arrangement that does not conflict with retail servicing, and direct access to a fenced outdoor area that belongs to the demise rather than to the building's communal amenity. That is an observation about how the market behaves, not a rule that can be cited. Whether KHDA's conditions make ground-floor location an absolute requirement, and whether podium or upper-floor arrangements are ever accepted, sits in the document that is not publicly available. Do not rule a first-floor unit out, or a ground-floor unit in, on the strength of it — get KHDA's written view on the actual address.

What an owner should price, regardless of the exact standards, is the fit-out consequence: sanitary provision scaled to small children rather than adults, a milk-preparation or food-handling area, nappy-change and sleep rooms, sightlines that allow supervision across the whole floorplate, shading over the external area, and an electrical and cooling load that reflects a densely occupied daytime use. Those are the items that turn a shell-and-core allowance into a real capital number, and they interact with the wider fit-out approval timeline and responsibilities. If the scheme includes any food preparation beyond milk warming, the food-safety layer described in our food and beverage premises approvals guide may engage as well, and the cooling and small-power load should be tested against the connection route in DEWA load and connection requirements before you commit to a handover date.

Scale matters when you assess the tenant pool: the UAE Government portal reports more than 120 early childhood education centres registered in Dubai. This is a small, specialist market, and demand for it tracks family household formation rather than office absorption — one reason the population growth story running against oversupply is the right demand lens for these units rather than headline commercial take-up.

Commercially, no — a school is a different asset class, not a larger nursery. It implies site area, playground or sports provision, assembly space and vehicle stacking for drop-off that a converted commercial shell will not supply, which is why school deals are land-and-build transactions far more often than they are lettings of existing commercial stock.

The legal position is less tidy than the commercial one, and it has to be stated carefully. Until 2023, Executive Council Resolution No. (35) of 2020 drew the line expressly: paragraph (b) of its original Article 2 disapplied the resolution to private schools conducting the activity and to establishments affiliated to government entities. Executive Council Resolution No. (26) of 2023 superseded that Article in its entirety and put in its place a scope provision carrying no exclusions at all — the resolution applies to all persons conducting the activity in the emirate, including in special development zones and free zones. Its substituted Article (4) moves in the opposite direction on one of the two former carve-outs, directing KHDA to establish the conditions, rules and procedures for conducting the activity by establishments affiliated to government entities and by centres established within government premises. On private schools, the 2023 text is silent. One trap for anyone checking this: the Dubai Legislation portal's page for the 2020 resolution still carries the original unconsolidated text, so its Article 2 shows the repealed paragraph (b) rather than the provision actually in force.

So it is unsettled on the published text whether the 2020 resolution as amended reaches a private school conducting the activity. What is certain is that the exclusion previously relied on to say it does not was repealed in 2023. Do not read the early childhood centre fines schedule and the approval-before-lease obligation across to a school deal — and do not assume they are inapplicable either. Establish which instrument governs the specific school with KHDA before anyone drafts around the answer.

One point of housekeeping on the building standards. The KHDA building-regulations document linked from the UAE Government portal sits on the portal's private-school licensing page, and its contents are not available, so the published material does not show whether schools and early childhood centres are governed by that same document or by separate ones. Do not assume either way when you brief a designer; ask KHDA which document applies to your use.

There is also a counterparty constraint worth knowing before you spend time on a school deal. The UAE Government portal states plainly that only UAE nationals, and companies where a national is the 51 per cent owner, can apply to start a school. That is a shareholder-level rule rather than a premises one, but it shapes who can sit on the other side of your lease and how covenant strength and guarantees are structured.

Two honest caveats on that. First, it is a government-portal summary, not the operative text: the portal attributes private education to Federal Decree-Law No. 18 of 2020 on Private Education and its executive regulation, and neither text is accessible on the federal legislation platform it links to as at 17 August 2026. Second, the UAE has since reformed foreign ownership across much of the economy, and whether education remains carved out — and whether the same restriction reaches early childhood centres and training institutes, which the portal does not address — is not settled by any available primary source. Treat the 51 per cent position as the published starting point, and have a corporate lawyer confirm it with KHDA before you structure a school lease around a particular shareholder.

Training institutes are the least physically constrained of the three education uses, which is why a far wider range of standard commercial floorplates can accommodate them. The sector approval still applies, and it has its own instrument: Executive Council Resolution No. (30) of 2021 Regulating Vocational Education in the Emirate of Dubai, issued on 14 September 2021, provides that — without prejudice to the federal legislation in force concerning vocational qualifications — KHDA oversees vocational education in the emirate, with the duties and powers to issue and renew permits and to inspect permit holders for compliance. Article 5 is the operative one for a landlord: no person may conduct any vocational activity in the emirate without first obtaining a permit. Schedule (1) to the same resolution prices the failures an owner should care about — conducting a vocational activity without a permit, AED 50,000; failure to comply with the terms of the permit, AED 50,000; conducting the activity outside the premises of the vocational education institution without being authorised to do so under the permit or by a KHDA approval, AED 20,000; and using those premises for other than their intended purpose, AED 20,000. Article 20 doubles a repeat of the same violation within one year, to a ceiling of AED 100,000, and allows KHDA to suspend the vocational activity for up to six months alongside the fine. The last two Schedule items are premises clauses in all but name: they make the extent of the demise and the permitted-use wording in your lease a compliance instrument rather than a drafting convention. But the building here is being asked to behave like an office or a serviced teaching suite rather than a childcare facility, so the constraints are closer to those in a conventional business-activity and premises match.

Two vocabulary points matter when you read a heads of terms. The resolution's operative term is not "training institute" but vocational education institution — an independent institution, or an institution affiliated to an Educational Institution, authorised by KHDA to deliver a vocational qualification and conduct the examinations required for obtaining it, or to conduct only the examinations required for awarding it. The affiliated limb matters: a training arm attached to an existing school or college is inside the definition, not outside it. And the permit attaches to the vocational activity, which the resolution describes as designing, developing and delivering vocational qualifications, running the associated examinations and their quality assurance, and delivering vocational apprenticeship programmes. Whether a particular operator's courses fall inside that definition or under a different KHDA permit route is a question for KHDA, not for the lease, and it determines which permit your tenant is actually renewing. Article 9 of the resolution sets that cycle: permits run for one year, renewable for the same period, with the renewal application due at least thirty days before expiry, and KHDA may on a renewal request increase the validity period to no more than three years per request where the holder meets the standards set by the Director General and pays the applicable fees. Article 7 puts initial approvals at one year for vocational education institution applicants and three months for applicants to conduct other vocational activities. Early childhood centres run the same annual rhythm under Executive Council Resolution No. (35) of 2020 — Article 10 gives one-year permits renewable for the same period on thirty days' notice, and Article 7 gives initial approvals one year, extendable by up to six months on a request made at least thirty days before expiry. For a landlord that matters at both ends of a lease: a three-year vocational permit and a one-year permit imply very different renewal risk over a ten-year term, and an initial approval that lapses before fit-out completes puts the whole application back to the start.

Higher education is the one use where the emirate-level position is not the whole answer. Law No. (2) of 2021 includes higher education among the stages within KHDA's scope, but Article 3 applies the law to higher-education institutions located outside the emirate's free zones only to the extent that its provisions do not contradict federal legislation — and it does not name the federal instrument that takes precedence. The UAE Government portal, separately, states that the Ministry of Education licenses higher educational institutes across all emirates. Read together, those two texts mean a higher-education tenant sits under a federal licensing layer as well as KHDA's emirate-level permit, and the published sources do not say exactly where the boundary falls for a given institution or a given campus location. Establish which body is licensing your counterparty, and for which activity, before you treat a single approval as clearing the use.

Permit and renewal fees and the premises document checklist are the obvious things an occupier will want costed, and neither is published for any of the three education uses: no KHDA fee schedule, service page or permit guide is available as at 17 August 2026, so this guide quotes no fee. Timelines are a partial exception, and the distinction is worth holding. The permit and initial-approval periods set out above are fixed in the resolutions themselves, and a centre name decision carries a six-working-day statutory window. What is not published is how long KHDA actually takes to issue a first permit against a complete file — the number that drives your handover date. Fee and lead-time figures circulating on company-formation and advisory marketing pages are not a safe basis for a budget line; see the section below for what to ask KHDA for instead.

The activity match matters more here than the physical fit-out. A training institute's exposure is that the courses actually delivered drift away from the activity on the trade licence, which for an early childhood centre is an expressly listed violation and for any occupier is a licensing problem. Settle the activity wording before the lease rather than after, following the sequence in the trade licence process and initial approval.

Each of those is a separate KHDA approval, and doing any of them first is a listed violation. Administrative Resolution No. (35) of 2026, issued on 13 May 2026, sets out twelve of them. The ones a landlord will recognise are changing the name, address or any other detail stated in the permit without KHDA's approval; constructing new buildings, adding new facilities, closing down an existing facility or taking a lease of any new building for the activity without the approval of KHDA and the concerned government entities; conducting any activity other than the centre's authorised activity; running any programme other than those KHDA approved; and advertising the centre's services in any manner whatsoever without KHDA's approval first.

The rest of the list shows how far into the operation the regulator reaches: parent contracts must be concluded in Arabic or English and approved by KHDA, the centre must maintain a website carrying its curriculum, fees, staff and development plans, it must follow KHDA's approved annual calendar, and it must obtain KHDA's approval before admitting a child. None of those are your obligations as an owner, but they tell you how tightly the tenant's revenue is regulated, which is a covenant question as much as a compliance one.

On branding, the 2026 naming resolution requires a branch to carry the same name as the parent centre followed by the word "Branch" or the name of the geographical area, with the necessary approvals from the concerned entities obtained first. Approved names must be displayed in Arabic and English in a prominent place, used across correspondence, publications, advertisements and official letterhead, and reflected in all records, licences, official documents, signage and advertisements — which puts the tenant's signage obligations and your building's signage consents on the same critical path. There is a timing rule too: a name change must take effect at the end of the school year in which it is requested and before the new one starts, so a rebrand you agree to in a lease variation cannot simply be executed on completion.

Enforcement runs in two stages. For the listed violations, KHDA serves a written warning and allows a period to rectify — a period KHDA prescribes case by case, not one fixed in the resolution — before imposing the fine prescribed under Executive Council Resolution No. (35) of 2020, alongside any other administrative measures that resolution allows. But it may go straight to the fine, having regard to the severity of the violation and its potential consequences, within the controls set by Law No. (6) of 2026 on administrative violations, penalties and measures.

The 2026 resolution states no fine amounts of its own. It refers them back to the Schedule attached to Executive Council Resolution No. (35) of 2020, which is published in English on the Dubai Legislation portal and sets thirty-three of them. The ones a landlord's deal is exposed to are: conducting the activity without a permit, AED 100,000; failure to comply with the terms of the permit, AED 100,000; constructing a building, adding a facility, closing an existing facility or taking lease of a new building for the activity without the approval of KHDA and the concerned government entities, AED 50,000; failure to meet the health, environmental and safety requirements within the centre's premises, AED 50,000; changing the name, address or other permit details without approval, AED 30,000; conducting an activity other than the centre's authorised activity, AED 30,000; running a programme or activity KHDA has not approved, AED 30,000; admitting a child without KHDA's approval, AED 50,000 per child; and advertising the centre's services without approval, AED 5,000.

Article 27 of the 2020 resolution adds the sting. A written warning and a period to rectify come first for violations determined by a Director General resolution; a repeat of the same violation within one year doubles the fine, to a ceiling of AED 150,000; and in addition to the fine KHDA may suspend all the centre's applications for up to six months, suspend enrolment of children for the coming year, suspend its right to expand or to change its fees, or revoke the permit and notify the licensing authority to revoke the trade licence with it. That last measure is the one to model rather than the fines. A revoked permit ends the tenant's ability to trade from your building, and it is an administrative step rather than a court process — which is why the covenant question on an education letting is really a compliance question. If the exposure is being allocated in your documents — an operator indemnity, or who bears the cost of a compliance failure caused by the building — these are the numbers to draft against, and it is still worth asking KHDA to confirm the current schedule before signing.

Two of those are worth reading against the wider legal framework: the allocation of delay risk and the consequences of a failed approval sit within Dubai commercial landlord and tenant law, and the diligence habit generalises to every regulated use, as our healthcare premises approvals guide shows for clinics. If you are running the numbers on whether a specialist covenant justifies its longer lead time, the method in how commercial properties are valued in Dubai is the right starting point.