Egypt’s Parliament discusses amendments to decades-long Rent Laws

CAIRO – 5 May 2025: Egypt’s House of Representatives (the lower house of the Parliament) has started the discussion of the government-drafted amendments to the decades-long Rent Laws, which give tenants the right to occupy housing units for life.

The Housing and Public Utilities Committee opened the discussion among the lawmakers in presence of the Minister of Housing on May 4, 2025. This comes in response to a a ruling by the High Constitutional Court in November 2024. The Court mandated- in its ruling- the parliament to issue an amended law regulating the relations between the owner and the tenant in a period of seven or eight months to put an end to a controversy between the two parties who subject to the terms of the Rent Laws of 1977 and 1981. The court in its ruling also said that setting a fixed rental value is unconstitutional. 

In Egypt, old Rent Laws of 1977 and 1981 stipulate that the tenant has the right to reside in the housing unit for life and his heirs have the right to live in it after his death -provided that they were residing with him- without paying any increase in the rental value. However, under the amendments introduced in the law of 1996, the owner was given the right to terminate the rent contract after the end of the rental period; the 1996 amendments also allowed annual rent increases.

Under the longstanding laws, thousands of housing units have been rented hundreds of years ago for quite small and nominal monthly fees such as 5 or 10 EGP (approximately US $0.10–$0.20), especially in downtown Cairo and upscale districts. So, the owners of these units argue that they find themselves, nowadays, own nothing under the old laws. On the other side, tenants cling to these laws as they fear that owners could exploit their need for the house and impose unaffordable rent values.

Egypt has about 3 million rented houses and apartments, including 1,990,426 units in only Cairo, as per the latest data of 2017, said Advisory to the head of the state-owned Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) Abdel-Hamid Sharf El-Din, in a speech at the parliament on May 5 ,2025.

The new amendments

The tenant is obligated to vacate the rented unit and hand it over to the owner or lessor after the expire of the lease . In case the tenant refused to vacant, the owner or lessor may request the judge of the court of urgent matters to issue an order to evict the tenant, without prejudice to the right to compensation, if there is a reason for it.

The draft law sets a minimum rent of 1,000 EGP (US $19.74) for urban properties and 500 EGP (US $9.87) for rural homes.

The value of the rent shall be increased annually by 15 percent. If the lease period was not included in the contract, it shall be terminated after five years from signing it. The new law annuls the old laws of 1977 and 1981.

Tenants will be given priority access to government-built housing units, along with additional support, according to the new amendments.