Ejar is the Saudi government's infrastructure for the rental market, supervised by the Real Estate General Authority (REGA). Its function is to document unified lease contracts and regulate the landlord–tenant relationship. Yet many agencies assume that registering on Ejar means the rental cycle is "managed" — an assumption that costs time and money, because Ejar is a documentation and regulation layer, not an operational management system.
This article separates precisely what the platform covers from what it does not, and reviews the regulatory changes introduced in 2025 and 2026 that many professionals in the sector are still unaware of.
The legal basis: why registration is not optional
Cabinet Resolution No. 405 dated 22/9/1437H required licensed real estate brokers to register all residential and commercial leases electronically on the Ejar network. Cabinet Resolution No. 292 dated 16/5/1438H then ruled that an unregistered lease contract is not recognised as a valid contract producing administrative or judicial effects.
The practical consequence of that wording matters more than it appears: an undocumented contract does not merely lose standing between the parties — it loses your ability to rely on it before administrative and judicial bodies. You hold a document without its effect.
Documentation carries a defined fee: 125 SAR per contract year for a residential lease, and 200 SAR for a commercial lease in its first year, rising to 400 SAR for each additional year.
What Ejar actually covers
The platform's scope is specific and clearly bounded:
- Registering lease contracts, residential and commercial, in the approved unified form
- Renewing or re-executing contracts, including automatic renewal
- Cancelling contracts by mutual or unilateral termination under defined rules
- Registering accredited brokerage companies and brokers
- Contract data enquiry by external entities without visiting an office
A broker practising this activity requires a Fal licence, priced at 300 SAR per year for an individual. Operating without a licence is a violation under the Real Estate Brokerage Law issued by Royal Decree M/130 dated 30/11/1443H, carrying penalties that include warning, licence suspension, licence revocation, or a fine not exceeding 200,000 SAR.
The new rules that changed the game
This is where professional knowledge in the market is currently weakest.
Automatic renewal is now the default. A lease is treated as automatically renewed unless one party notifies the other of an intention not to renew at least 60 days before the contract ends. Silence means renewal, not expiry.
Rent adjustment requests have a strict window. The landlord submits the request through Ejar at least 90 days before the contract expires. If the tenant neither accepts nor rejects it before the notice period begins (60 days before contract end), that counts as a rejection, which cancels automatic renewal and ends the contract at its term.
Cancelling automatic renewal in Riyadh is restricted to specific grounds. A landlord in Riyadh may cancel automatic renewal provided the tenant is notified at least 60 days in advance, and provided one of only three grounds applies: tenant delay or failure to pay; structural defects in the unit affecting safety; or the landlord's wish to use the unit personally or for a first-degree relative (a ground that applies to residential units only).
A five-year rent freeze in Riyadh. A directive was issued halting annual rent increases on residential and commercial properties inside Riyadh for five years, effective 25 September 2025, covering both existing and new contracts. As a result, the rent adjustment service in Riyadh is currently limited to reduction requests only.
An incentive for reporting violations was also introduced, reaching up to 20% of collected fines.
The practical timeline: a contract ending 31 December
The rules above stay abstract until you map them onto a real date. Take a contract ending 31 December:
- 2 October (90 days before expiry): the last day for the landlord to submit a rent adjustment request through Ejar. After this, the right lapses for that cycle.
- 1 November (60 days before expiry): the notice period begins. This is the last day for either party to notify the other of an intention not to renew.
- If 1 November passes with no tenant response to the adjustment request, it counts as a rejection — automatic renewal is cancelled and the contract ends on term.
- If 1 November passes with no notice from either party, the contract renews automatically on its existing terms.
The operational takeaway: the real decision window is not one month before expiry as many still assume — it opens three months out. An agency whose alerts are set to "one month before" has already missed the entire rent-adjustment window.
In Riyadh specifically, remember that adjustment requests are currently limited to reductions under the freeze directive.
The executive deed: what it means in practice
A unified residential lease contract registered on Ejar qualifies as an executive deed (unless non-standard terms added to it cost it that status), meaning it does not require a prior court judgment to establish the claim. The enforcement request is filed directly with the Execution Court, and once the debtor is served with the enforcement order, a five-day period (which the judge may extend) runs before eviction can proceed.
Substantive disputes — disagreement over the rent amount itself, or over contract termination — go to the General Court instead. An optional conciliation route is available through the Saudi Center for Real Estate Arbitration.
A common and costly error is filing an eviction case before the General Court while already holding an executive deed, which wastes months unnecessarily.
What Ejar does not cover
This is where most of the confusion sits. Ejar documents the contract but does not run the daily operation that follows it. Specifically, these responsibilities remain outside its scope:
- Day-to-day collection and arrears tracking, with alerts before and after due dates
- Partial-payment allocation when a tenant pays less than a full instalment
- Tax invoicing: applying 15% VAT on commercial rent against the residential exemption (0%)
- Accounting and owner settlement: what each owner is owed after expenses and commission
- Multi-owner portfolio management with each owner's data isolated from the others
- Maintenance requests and unit condition records
This operational layer is what property management systems handle, and it is complementary to Ejar, not a substitute for it. The useful system is one that keeps contract data documentation-ready rather than making you enter it twice — specialised platforms such as Amlakire let you submit an Ejar documentation request from inside the system, which a licensed real estate office then documents while the platform's team follows up.
Accounting obligations beyond the documentation layer
Beyond the above, there are obligations Ejar has nothing to do with, falling entirely on the agency:
Real Estate Transaction Tax at 5%, whose implementing regulation took effect on 10 April 2025. It is entirely separate from VAT and must not be combined with it in filings.
Owners' associations: where the number of owners of partitioned units in a jointly owned property reaches three or more, an owners' association must be established and registered with REGA, under the Law of Ownership, Partition and Management of Real Estate Units issued by Royal Decree M/85 dated 2/7/1441H.
These obligations require a system that tracks them and issues the supporting documents — platforms such as Amlakire calculate both VAT categories automatically at unit level and produce ready accounting reports.
Practical summary
The correct mental model is this: Ejar is an official registry, not an operating system. It establishes the contractual relationship, gives it enforcement power, and governs renewal and rent-adjustment rules. What happens between signature and expiry — collection, invoicing, accounting, maintenance — remains your responsibility.
Three practical steps for an agency today: review your current contracts against the 60-day notice rule; make sure your alert schedule starts 90 days before each contract ends rather than one month; and separate transaction tax from VAT in your books starting now.