Egypt’s government submits new draft Rent Law to resolve landlord-tenant dispute

CAIRO – 26 June 2025: In an effort to resolve ongoing disputes surrounding the controversial new Rent Law, the Egyptian government has submitted a revised draft of the legislation to Parliament. The updated version aims to strike a balance between the rights of landlords and tenants.

According to Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Housing Committee of the House of Representatives has recently approved the new draft, which seeks to regulate the relationship between property owners and renters, particularly in cases involving old rent contracts.

Under the proposed legislation, residential leases under the old rent system will expire after a seven-year transitional period. During this time, rents will increase gradually, with set minimums depending on the property's location: EGP 250 per unit in economic areas, EGP 400 in middle-income areas, and EGP 1,000 in upscale districts, with an annual increase rate of 15%.

Additionally, the law grants tenants the right to obtain an alternative residential or non-residential unit—either for rent or ownership—from state-allocated housing options before the end of the seven-year period.

This move represents a step toward addressing longstanding tensions between landlords seeking fair market returns and tenants protected under older rental agreements with fixed, often outdated, rates.

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.

Additional reporting by Samar Samir