Inheriting or receiving a gift from India as a UAE resident

On tax, this is one of the easy cases. India has no inheritance tax and no gift tax, and the income-tax law exempts anything you receive under a will, by inheritance, or as a gift from a relative, under the proviso to Section 56(2)(x), so the Indian receipt is tax-free. The UAE matches that: it has no personal income tax, no inheritance or estate tax, and no capital gains tax on individuals, so receiving an Indian inheritance, holding it, and later selling it all fall outside UAE tax. The 9 per cent federal corporate tax that came in during 2023 sometimes causes confusion, but it applies to business profits above a threshold, not to personal wealth or to an inheritance you receive, so it does not touch this.

So on the pure tax question there is nothing to pay in the UAE and nothing to pay in India. What people actually worry about with the UAE is something different, and it is not a tax at all. It is succession law.

The concern you may have heard is that the UAE applies Sharia inheritance rules, which divide an estate in fixed shares that can differ from what a person intended. That is a real feature of UAE law, but it is important to see its limits: it concerns how assets located in the UAE pass on death. It is why non-Muslim expats in the UAE are commonly advised to register a will, through the DIFC Wills service or the Abu Dhabi non-Muslim wills registry, so that their home-country rules, rather than Sharia default rules, apply to their UAE property. That is sensible planning for your own UAE assets.

But it does not reach an inheritance coming from India. Succession to property follows the law of the place where the property is situated, and Indian law provides that succession to Indian immovable property is governed by Indian law regardless of where the deceased lived. So your parents' flat, land, bank accounts and investments in India pass under Indian succession law, through an Indian will or the Indian rules of intestate succession, not under UAE Sharia rules. The UAE Sharia point and your Indian inheritance are simply two separate things, and the first does not affect the second. So there is no UAE tax and no UAE succession complication on the Indian inheritance itself. Our role is the Indian end: the legal heir or succession documents, a valuation, a certificate confirming no Indian tax is due, and repatriation of the funds to you.