Sharjah Holiday Home Permit — SCTDA Process and Reported Fees

The official framework — SCTDA's Holiday Homes system

Sharjah's Commerce and Tourism Development Authority runs the emirate's Holiday Homes framework, phased in from August 2022 under SCTDA's tourism licensing powers, covering registration, inspection and classification of units. The Authority's current homes are sharjahtourism.ae and its e-services portal eservices.sharjahtourism.ae — the old sctda.gov.ae domain no longer resolves, so older blog links quoting it are usually stale.

The official application process

SCTDA's service pages describe a two-step path. First, Holiday Home Registration creates the operator account in the e-services portal. Then the operator permit application runs: sign in to the portal, complete the permit form and upload the unit documents, pay the permit fees where required, and SCTDA reviews the file and inspects the unit before issuing the permit. Both service pages live under eservices.sharjahtourism.ae/Services — that portal is the single front door for the whole process.

Where the fees live — and why we don't quote them as fact

SCTDA's Service Guide lists a "cost of this service" line per transaction, linking through to Sharjah's e-government payment pages at ec.shj.ae — the amounts sit per-transaction rather than in one published schedule. At review (November 2026) the emirate's portals were reachable only from inside the UAE, and we could not verify a single figure on an official page. So this guide quotes no Sharjah amount as fact — everything numeric below is explicitly labeled as third-party reporting, and the Service Guide / ec.shj.ae remain the authoritative source.

What third-party guides report (unverified)

A 2026 short-term-rental guide (bnbcalc.com) reports for Sharjah: an operator's permit around AED 500; a unit permit around AED 300 per bedroom; an inspection fee around AED 300; a classification certificate around AED 50; an e-programme subscription around AED 1,000; and an occupancy fee around AED 15 per night (deluxe) or AED 10 (standard). Consultancies additionally estimate a Sharjah trade licence at roughly AED 18,000–20,000 for company setups. Note the per-bedroom ladder matches Dubai's, Ajman's and RAK's official tables — plausible, but plausible is not verified: treat every figure in this paragraph as an estimate until SCTDA's own pages confirm it.

Budgeting Sharjah sensibly

Two planning anchors. First, if you operate as an individual owner, the permit-side costs reported across the UAE cluster in the hundreds of dirhams per unit per year — Dubai's official first-year figure is AED 370, Ajman's AED 500, RAK's AED 400 — so Sharjah is unlikely to be an order of magnitude away. Second, if you operate as a company, the SEDD trade licence dominates the budget, not the permit. Pull the exact figures from the SCTDA Service Guide or ec.shj.ae before committing, and never budget Sharjah from another emirate's schedule.

Compliance readiness checklist

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