DHA facility license: Which category, what it costs, and how to get active

Key takeaways

A DHA facility license covers the premises, and every practitioner working inside still needs a separate professional license.

DHA issues the license inactive first, and it only turns active after a site inspection you pay for on top.

The initial approval fee of AED 500 to AED 2,000 is the smallest of three separate charges.

First-year cost lands near AED 8,000 for a general clinic and AED 46,000 for a hospital over 100 beds.

Renewal opens 90 days before expiry, and a license left expired past six months can no longer be renewed.

A DHA facility license is the Dubai Health Authority’s permit for the premises of a healthcare business in mainland Dubai. It licenses the place, not the people. Every clinician working there still holds a separate professional license.

That distinction is where cost estimates usually go wrong. Guides quote a single figure and call it the license fee. DHA charges at three separate points, and the figure most often quoted is the smallest of the three.

This guide works from DHA’s own published fees, its Sheryan service pages, and its Manual for Licensing Health Facility. It sets out the fee ladder by facility type, the two document sets, and the route from application to an active license.

What is a DHA facility license, and who needs one?

A DHA facility license is the Dubai Health Authority’s mandatory permit for the physical premises of a healthcare business in mainland Dubai.

DHA’s licensing manual defines a health facility as any place prepared to examine, diagnose, treat, nurse, or house patients. A physiotherapy room and a 200-bed hospital both sit inside that definition. Two applicant types may apply on Sheryan: investors, and the delegated representatives a facility nominates.

The professional license is a different product entirely. It licenses one named clinician to practice, and our DHA license guide covers that route. The two are linked, though. Professional licenses attached to a facility stay inactive until the facility license itself goes active.

The new facility license DHA issues at the end of the first application is inactive. During that initial approval period DHA does not allow the facility to provide any healthcare service, receive or treat a patient, or advertise. Opening comes later, after activation.

A DHA license also stops at the Dubai mainland border. Abu Dhabi facilities answer to the Department of Health, and the northern emirates to MOHAP. Dubai Healthcare City and other free zones run their own regulators too.

DHA facility categories and activity codes

DHA’s licensing manual sorts every facility into eight categories, each holding its own subcategories. The category you land in decides the fee, the inspection standard, and the layout rules your build has to satisfy.

• Hospital — general or specialty, licensed in three bands: under 50 beds, 50 to 100 beds, and over 100 beds.
• Outpatient health facility — general clinics, specialty clinics, polyclinics, dental clinics, fertility centers, day surgery centers, telehealth centers.
• Diagnostic center — medical laboratories, radio-diagnostic centers, and multi-specialty diagnostic centers.
• Pharmacy — community and retail pharmacies, hospital and ambulatory pharmacies, compounding pharmacies, drug stores.
• Specialized units — mobile facilities, first aid units, blood bank centers, cord blood and stem cell centers, patient transfer services.
• Traditional, complementary and alternative medicine — acupuncture, ayurveda, chiropractic, osteopathy, naturopathy, homeopathy, hijama and related specialties.
• Clinical support facility — physiotherapy, occupational therapy, audiology, prosthetics and orthotics, dental laboratories, optical, psychology, dietetics, podiatry.
• Long-term residential healthcare — convalescence houses, nursing homes, hospice facilities, addiction treatment and rehabilitation centers.

Your activity code sits one level below the category. Sheryan’s facility application lists the subcategory options, and DHA’s fee pages confirm which one you have selected.

Definitions matter more than the names suggest. DHA defines a polyclinic as an outpatient facility covering a minimum of two different specialties. A specialty clinic provides a single health service.

That one word changes the first-year license fee by AED 6,000. DHA prices a polyclinic by the number of specialties it runs, so the count on your application matters.

Third-party guides often compress this into seven or so headline types. That reads well as an introduction and hides subcategories priced very differently. Confirm your exact activity code on Sheryan before you budget anything.

DHA facility license requirements and documents

A DHA facility license application needs owner identification, a location record, an approved layout, and a facility proposal, with the trade license optional until activation.

The DHA facility license requirements arrive in two waves, months apart. The first set gets you an inactive license. The second set is what an inspector expects to find in the finished premises before that license goes active.

Five items in the second wave trip people up, and each one has its own lead time.

• The layout — DHA accepts a floor plan only from a prequalified health facility design consultant. Room and bed counts have to match its Health Facility Guidelines. Dubai Municipality and Civil Defence sign-off run alongside it.
• The location record — you file the Makani number, the Dubai Municipality plot certificate, and the Ejari tenancy registration with the application.
• The medical director — appointed before activation, from the facility’s own licensed professionals. A director may cover several facilities inside one group registered on Sheryan, but not a facility outside it.
• A NABIDH-ready EMR — DHA lists an electronic medical record meeting the NABIDH Minimum Data Set as a prerequisite. The tested-connectivity approval email is checked at inspection.
• FANR registration — required before you install radiology equipment. After installation you submit a radiation safety assessment request, and DHA inspects the X-ray facilities.

Insurance billing adds one more layer. Dubai’s coding guidelines require providers to submit claims through eClaimLink using ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes and CPT procedure codes. Every service line has to carry at least one supporting diagnosis code.

So the record system you pick has to do two regulated jobs at once. Choosing it early is worth the effort, and our guide to EHR security covers what to check before you sign anything.

The DHA Facility Fee Ladder: What each stage costs

DHA’s published initial approval fee runs AED 500 to AED 2,000 by facility type, and the license issuance fee that follows runs far higher.

We call the whole thing the DHA Facility Fee Ladder, because the money leaves in three steps rather than one. Initial approval comes with the application. Inspection and license issuance both land at activation, months later.

Plotted out, the shape of the ladder is hard to miss.

Four things change those totals, and it is worth pricing all four before you commit.

• The license term. Two and three-year terms cost less per year. A general clinic pays AED 8,750 for two years or AED 12,500 for three, against AED 5,000 annually.
• Knowledge and Innovation Fees. DHA adds these at checkout and publishes no amount, so treat every total above as a floor rather than a quote.
• A failed inspection. Re-inspection costs AED 1,000 for most clinic categories and AED 2,000 for a hospital, and you pay it each time.
• Yearly add-ons. Home healthcare, telehealth and a mobile unit each carry an extra AED 2,000 a year on top of the license fee.

Third-party figures drift from DHA’s own schedule. Consultancy pages commonly quote a polyclinic at a flat AED 18,000, where DHA prices by specialty count and charges AED 12,000 for two specialties. Where a guide and the Sheryan fee page disagree, the fee page is the one your card gets charged against.

From application to an active license: The DHA approval timeline

DHA reviews a new facility license application in about five working days, but the full route from application to an active license usually runs months.

Those two numbers get merged constantly, and they measure different clocks. DHA publishes a processing time for each of its own services, and none of them cover your build.

1. Create a Sheryan account on the DHA website and wait for the activation email.
2. Submit the new facility license application with the documents for your category, then pay. DHA quotes five working days to review it.
3. Receive the inactive license. It is valid for one year and does not permit any patient contact or advertising.
4. Build the facility. Fit-out, Municipality and Civil Defence approvals, equipment, staff licensing and NABIDH connectivity all happen here.
5. Finalize the trade license and appoint your medical director. Both are prerequisites for the next step.
6. Apply to activate and pay the license and inspection fees. DHA quotes one working day for its own processing.
7. Pass the site inspection. On a pass, the license goes active and every linked professional license activates automatically.

Step 4 is the one that decides your opening date. Consultancy guides put a full build at one to six months, and DHA’s five-day figure does not cover it. Licensing fees paid to DHA are also non-refundable, so a stalled build is expensive.

The one-year inactive license is a hard deadline. Fail to complete the licensing requirements inside that year and DHA cancels the process. You then re-apply from the beginning, and pay again.

Sheryan is where all of this happens, and our guide to the Sheryan portal walks through the account setup. Budget the licensing fees alongside rent, fit-out and staffing before you sign a lease.

What happens during the DHA site inspection?

DHA’s licensing manual sets out what the facility has to have ready when the inspector arrives.

• A copy of the approved engineering layout, matching what was built.
• Enough licensed professionals on the roster to deliver the service you applied for.
• An assigned medical director.
• A list of all medical equipment, installed and ready.
• The Civil Defence certificate.
• Approved facility policies and procedures.
• A third-party insurance contract and a waste management contract.
• A copy of the trade license.
• The approval email confirming tested connectivity with NABIDH.

That list is a document exercise as much as a building one. Policies, contracts and certificates are quicker to produce on the day when they sit in a single compliance record. Chasing them across separate folders and inboxes costs time you will not have.

A failed inspection does not end the application. DHA sends you to the amend facility license service to fix what was flagged, then charges for a re-inspection. Inspectors can also visit at their discretion once the license is active.

In practices we onboard in Dubai, the NABIDH tested-connectivity email is usually the last item to arrive. Starting that integration when the fit-out starts, rather than when the inspection is booked, takes weeks off the schedule.

Renewing, transferring, and checking a facility license

Three jobs come up after activation. DHA runs each as its own Sheryan service, with its own fee, documents and eligibility rules.

Renewal: the 90-day window and what it costs

A DHA facility license can be renewed from 90 days before it expires, and Sheryan blocks the application before that window opens.

The DHA facility license renewal fee matches the activation fee for the same term. A general clinic pays AED 5,000 for one year, AED 8,750 for two, or AED 12,500 for three. Renewing an inactive license is far cheaper, at AED 500 to AED 2,000, and DHA grants those for one year only.

Late renewal carries a monthly penalty that scales with facility size. DHA lists AED 1,000 a month for a general clinic, AED 3,000 for a polyclinic, and AED 8,000 for a hospital over 100 beds.

Two limits are worth putting in the calendar. All outstanding fines have to be cleared before DHA will process a renewal. And a license expired for more than six months cannot be renewed at all, so the facility starts over.

Transferring a DHA license to a new address

Moving a licensed facility to a new address is a change of location request on Sheryan, and it needs a fresh layout approval.

A DHA license transfer to another facility address is not the same as amending the one you have. DHA treats relocation as its own service, and the requirements read like a compressed version of the original application.

• The facility needs a valid active license before it can apply. An inactive license does not qualify.
• You submit an updated floor plan or layout for the new site, plus an updated trade license.
• The request runs through initial approval again, with engineering plans for the new premises.
• DHA conducts a field inspection at the new site before granting final approval.
• Specialties can be added or removed at the same time, and DHA then asks for a detailed proposal plan.

The expiry date usually carries over unchanged. It only resets when the amendment changes your facility category, in which case DHA issues a new license from the activation date.

Moving out of a free zone is a different exercise, and not a transfer at all. You request a No Objection Certificate from the free zone authority, then register the facility as a new entity in Dubai mainland.

How to check if a facility license is active

Anyone can check a Dubai facility’s license status in the Dubai Medical Registry on Sheryan, which lists the facilities registered with DHA.

Open Sheryan, go to the Dubai Medical Registry, and search by facility name. For your own premises, the Sheryan facility account holds the license record with its status and expiry date.

Read the status line and the expiry date together. Inactive means the license exists but the facility cannot open. Active means it passed inspection and can treat patients. Practicing on an expired facility license creates a violation against the facility and its practitioners.

One Sheryan habit is worth knowing if your application is still in progress. Draft applications left inactive for more than three months get cleared from the account. DHA sends a 15-day reminder to the registered email first.

How Pabau keeps a newly licensed Dubai facility inspection-ready

DHA treats the record system as a licensing requirement, not a preference. The inspector wants an electronic medical record that meets the NABIDH Minimum Data Set, plus the email confirming tested connectivity. Most practices reach that point with three tools and a monthly export.

Practice management software like Pabau puts scheduling, client records, treatment notes, consent forms and payments in one system, and Pabau is DHA NABIDH-approved. Pabau’s NABIDH integration is built against the DHA HL7 v2.5.1 specification, so messages are generated as registrations, visits and notes happen.

Pabau validates Emirates ID formats, UAE phone numbers, and the seven-digit facility and eight-digit clinician IDs before a message leaves. A mistyped ID surfaces at the front desk instead of at DHA. Every message is logged with its delivery status, which is what you show an inspector.

The same record then carries the coding your billing needs. Diagnoses and procedures sit against the visit that generated them, so claims going to eClaimLink are built from the note rather than retyped from it.

Open your Dubai facility with records DHA will accept

Pabau brings scheduling, client records, treatment notes and payments into one system, and reports to NABIDH against the DHA HL7 v2.5.1 specification. Delivery status is logged for every message, so connectivity evidence is ready before your inspection.

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Conclusion

Price the whole ladder before you sign a lease. A general clinic that budgets AED 1,000 for its license is short by AED 7,000 in year one. Knowledge and Innovation Fees widen that shortfall at checkout.

The bigger risk is the calendar rather than the money. That inactive license runs for one year. The fit-out, the Municipality and Civil Defence approvals, the medical director and the NABIDH connection all have to fit inside it. Order those in parallel, not in sequence.

Get the record system chosen early and one inspection item stops being a risk. Book a demo to see how Pabau keeps a Dubai practice reporting to NABIDH from the day it opens.

Continue your research

Opening an aesthetic practice specifically? Aesthetic clinic license Dubai covers the category choice and the treatment approvals that come with it.

Licensing outside Dubai as well? MOHAP license explains the northern emirates equivalent, and why a DHA license does not travel.

Need the record system side of the inspection? What is NABIDH sets out the Minimum Data Set and the connectivity approval DHA checks.

Hiring clinicians for the new site? DHA license requirements for nurses sets out the professional side of the paperwork.

Stuck inside the licensing portal? Sheryan DHA walks through the account, the dashboard and the services you will use most.

Frequently asked questions