Read this first
Claim value is not the same as frozen money or confirmed loss. These figures represent claims and applications registered with the DIFC Courts, including enforcement proceedings. They cannot be used to estimate how much money UAE banks or the Central Bank have frozen or held.
In an announcement dated 11 February 2026, the DIFC Courts reported that 1,509 claims were filed across all divisions during the 2025 calendar year, with a total claim value of AED 18.6 billion. The comparable 2024 figures were 1,056 claims and a total value of AED 7.7 billion. In a further release published on 13 July 2026, the Courts reported 810 cases for the first half of 2026, with a combined claim value of AED 10.02 billion — half-year data, not an annual total.
Figures of this size are easy to misread. What follows is a plain reading of what the published statistics describe. This article is an independent commentary on public information. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the DIFC Courts, and it does not constitute legal advice or legal representation.
The headline figures in context
| Period | Total claim value | Volume |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 — full year | AED 7.7 billion | 1,056 claims |
| 2025 — full year | AED 18.6 billion | 1,509 claims |
| 2026 — January to June (half-year) | AED 10.02 billion | 810 cases |
Source: official DIFC Courts announcements, 11 February 2026 (full-year 2025 and 2024 comparatives) and 13 July 2026 (January–June 2026). The 2026 row covers six months only and is not comparable with a full year.
Why 2024 and 2025 are not a like-for-like comparison
It is tempting to read AED 7.7 billion rising to AED 18.6 billion as evidence that disputes, financial problems or losses grew roughly 2.4 times in a single year. That reading is not supported by the published tables.
Of the 2025 total, AED 10.9 billion is Enforcement Division claim value. In the official 2024 division table, Enforcement Division values are shown as “—”. The two totals therefore measure different things, and the year-on-year difference cannot be treated as a clean measure of underlying dispute growth. Claim counts — 1,056 to 1,509 — are the more stable comparison, and they tell a far more moderate story than the value figures suggest.
The 2025 breakdown by division
| Division | Claim value (2025) | Claims |
|---|---|---|
| Court of First Instance and specialised divisions | about AED 7.6 billion | 173 |
| Enforcement Division | AED 10.9 billion | 341 |
| Small Claims Tribunal | AED 83.1 million | 995 |
Source: official DIFC Courts announcement, 11 February 2026. Published figures are rounded and should not be added together as though exact.
Within those divisions, the Court of First Instance and the specialised divisions recorded 173 claims with a total value of AED 7.6 billion and an average of AED 68.2 million per claim. The Arbitration Division recorded 53 claims with a value of AED 4.95 billion. At the other end of the scale, the Small Claims Tribunal handled the largest number of matters — 995 claims — with a total value of AED 83.1 million and an average of roughly AED 84,000. Volume and value sit in almost inverse relation to one another.
These are not banking-only statistics
The Court of First Instance matters spanned manufacturing, retail, banking and finance, real estate and crypto. The issues involved included insolvency, breach of contract, employment disputes and disputes over arbitration arrangements. Any reading that treats the AED 18.6 billion as a banking figure, a frozen-funds figure or a measure of financial distress in the UAE banking system is simply reading the wrong dataset.
Why enforcement is analytically different
An enforcement claim is not the start of a dispute. It is a step taken after a judgment, award or order already exists, to give effect to it. The value attached to an enforcement application therefore reflects an amount already determined elsewhere — sometimes by another court or an arbitral tribunal — rather than a newly contested sum. Counting enforcement value alongside first-instance claim value in a single total mixes two analytically distinct stages, which is precisely why the AED 10.9 billion enforcement component deserves to be read separately.
Opt-in jurisdiction, in plain English
Thirty-one per cent of 2025 Court of First Instance claims were opt-in. In plain terms, opt-in means the parties agreed — usually in their contract — that the DIFC Courts would hear any dispute between them, even where the matter has no other geographic connection to the DIFC. It is a choice made in advance, not a jurisdiction imposed after a dispute arises. A substantial opt-in share indicates that commercial parties are actively selecting this forum when they draft their agreements.
A further operational data point: 99 per cent of 2025 hearings were conducted digitally.
What the figures actually demonstrate
Read carefully, these statistics describe the scale and capability of Dubai's institutional infrastructure for complex commercial disputes and enforcement — a court system handling high-value international matters across several industries, chosen voluntarily by many of the parties before it, and operating almost entirely on digital hearings. They do not describe the amount of financial distress in the market, and they do not describe money that has been frozen or lost.
For readers whose own concern is a specific banking or compliance question rather than a court statistic, our UAE banking compliance guide sets out how such matters are usually organised, and separate pages cover Source of Funds and Source of Wealth requests and a transfer that is being held or delayed. Those are different subjects from the caseload data above.
Primary sources
The underlying announcements and caseload releases are published by the DIFC Courts themselves. Readers are encouraged to consult the DIFC Courts website and its news and media centre directly rather than relying on secondary summaries, including this one.