Guardianship for expat children in the UAE explained

By MyHaven Team·Published 7 September 2026·6 minute read

For most expat parents in the UAE, guardianship is the real reason to make a will. The money can be worked out. Who looks after your children, and how quickly they can act, cannot be worked out afterwards. This guide explains how guardianship is set out in a UAE will and how to decide what to put in it.

Why a will names guardians at all

If both parents die and no guardian has been named, the question of who cares for the children is answered through a process rather than by the parents. That is difficult anywhere. It is harder in an expat family, where the people who would obviously step in are frequently in another country, several flights and a visa away.

A will closes that gap by naming, in writing and on the register, who should take responsibility. It is one of the few things in estate planning where the value is not financial at all.

Interim and permanent guardians

A UAE will typically names two roles rather than one, and the distinction is practical rather than legal jargon.

Naming both is the point. The person you want raising your children for the next fifteen years may be in London or Mumbai, and cannot be at a school gate in Dubai tomorrow morning. The person who can be there tomorrow morning may not be the person you want raising them for fifteen years. A will that names only one of the two leaves a gap at exactly the moment the gap is worst.

Who can be a guardian

The practical bar is low and the practical questions are the ones worth thinking about.

• An adult you trust. Someone able to take on the responsibility, and willing to.
• Someone who has agreed. Ask them first. A guardian who finds out from a document is a guardian who might say no.
• Someone identifiable.The will identifies every person by name and identity details rather than by relationship, so full name as on the passport, date of birth, nationality and address. “My sister” is not enough on its own.
• A backup. Name an alternate for each role. People move, fall ill and change their minds, and a will with one name in it depends on that name still working years from now.

A person can hold more than one role. Your executor can also be a guardian, and often is. The one arrangement a will cannot make is a person appointing themselves as guardian in their own will, which is why couples name each other: each will reads the shared plan with its own author left out, and the appointment appears in the other will.

The ages that matter

Three different ages come up, and they answer three different questions. Mixing them up is the most common source of confusion, so here they are separately.

So a parent of a sixteen year old and a twenty year old names a guardian for one of them and not the other, while both can still inherit. MyHaven works the guardianship question out from the dates of birth you enter rather than asking you to do the arithmetic.

Who raises them, and who holds the money

Care and money are two jobs, and they do not have to sit with the same person. A guardian raises the children. A trustee holds and manages what the children inherit until they are old enough to manage it themselves.

In many families the same person does both, and that is fine. In others, splitting the roles is deliberate: the sibling you want raising your children is not necessarily the person you want administering a property. Under the template MyHaven drafts, a gift to a child is held on trust however it reaches them, whether as a specific gift or as a share of the rest of the estate, and it comes out of trust at eighteen.

How MyHaven asks for it

In the drafting wizard, children come first and guardians sit inside each child’s card rather than in a separate list. You add each child with their name and date of birth, and guardianship is asked about there, beside the child it concerns.

That shape exists for blended and separated families. If your children have different arrangements, you can give one child a different guardian team from another rather than being forced into a single answer for everybody. The will is then drafted with one appointment block per arrangement. The rest of the flow is described in how it works.

Mistakes worth avoiding

• Naming only an overseas guardian. The right long-term choice with nobody who can act on the day.
• Not asking the person. The conversation is awkward for about ninety seconds and saves everything after that.
• Naming a couple as one guardian. Say what happens if they separate or if one of them cannot act. Name them individually and set an order.
• Never revisiting it. The friend who was two streets away when you wrote the will may have left the country since.
• Leaving it drafted but unregistered. A document that never reached the register is a plan, not a will.

Getting it written down

Guardianship is one of the reasons a will stops being an item on a list and becomes something you finish. The assessment asks about your children early and tells you what you need before you pay anything, and pricing shows the service fee and the court fee separately.

Related reading: what happens if you die without a will in the UAE and mirror wills in the UAE, which is how most couples handle a shared guardianship plan. Common questions are answered in the FAQ.

MyHaven is not a law firm and this guide is not legal advice. It explains how the process works so you can make your own decisions. What that means