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More than 20 amendments raise heights, permit mezzanines and cut setbacks, and every one of them lands on a drawing board rather than a procurement desk.
Qatar has rewritten the rules governing how its citizens may build their houses, in the most extensive revision of those rules in decades. In early June the Minister of Municipality, Abdullah bin Hamad bin Abdullah Al Attiyah, issued an amendment to Ministerial Decision No. 7 of 1989, the instrument that has governed architectural requirements and technical specifications for villas since before most of Doha’s current housing stock existed. The Qatar Society of Engineers identified it as Decision No. 108 of 2026 and called it a significant shift in residential urban planning.
More than 20 changes follow. Maximum villa height rises to 16 metres including the warish privacy wall, and palaces are permitted between 17 and 25 metres depending on plot size. For the first time, a single internal mezzanine floor is allowed inside villas and palaces. Owners may extend the ground floor to the neighbour’s boundary under controls, add a first floor above the external majlis or annex, and create an internal wing dedicated to family members. A first floor may project up to two metres into the front setback, side and rear setbacks are reduced, and boundary walls may rise to 3.40 metres for villas and 5 metres for palaces. The requirements take effect on publication in the Official Gazette, and the Ministry said a workshop would be held for consultants and engineering offices.
Why the Timing Is Not Accidental
Apartment sale contracts in Doha fell 46 percent year on year to 326 in the first half of 2026 while villa sales rose 28 percent to 468, on Qatar Real Estate Platform figures. Nationally, residential sales volumes rose 23.6 percent quarter on quarter and 15.8 percent year on year in the second quarter, with the median ticket up 8.2 percent annually to roughly QR 3 million, according to ValuStrat.
Supply says the same thing from the other side. Qatar took delivery of 957 apartments and 173 villas in the first quarter. The apartment is a developer product delivered in batches. The villa is commissioned one at a time, by a family, through a consultancy office. Every one of those 468 Doha sales, and every expansion the new decision has just legalised, is a separate brief.
More Allowances, Harder Problem
That is the part the announcement obscures. Loosening a residential code does not simplify the design. It adds variables competing for the same plot. Hamed Zubaid, the Kuwaiti architect behind Dar HZMB, describes the underlying task in terms that carry straight across to Doha.
“I take all of this and put it into a thousand metres,” he says of a family’s full requirement list. “I want it to look good and different and enjoyable, and to create a wider view outward, and from the outside for the building to be distinctive. Putting all of that together is a very difficult equation.”
Qatar has just added a mezzanine, a family wing, a two storey annex and a taller majlis to that equation, on a plot whose setbacks have simultaneously been cut. None of those are procurement decisions. They are drawing problems, resolved individually and defended at permit stage, which is why the Ministry’s first move after publication was to schedule a technical workshop for the offices that will have to draw them.
Zubaid is direct about what that demands. “It needs talent, and someone who specialises in it and works in it in Kuwait for a long time,” he says, “not someone who works for a short period and then hands the job to somebody else.”
He is equally direct about where practices lose the work. “This is expensive, and people may not be convinced to spend those amounts, so the work ends up costly for them.”
His firm describes more than 35 years on villas, compounds, large family estates and townhouses in the Gulf, running from concept plans through construction drawings and municipal permitting to site supervision, and says it is now working on projects in Qatar. Kuwait ran a comparable exercise recently, when its Municipal Council raised the maximum private housing height to 20 metres from 15 and excluded basements, lifts, covered corridors, staircases and machine rooms from the counted building area, forcing every local office to reconsider what a plot could carry.
The Honest Caveat
None of this makes a bigger villa a better asset. Residential gross yields in Qatar averaged 5.6 percent in the second quarter, but villas returned 4.4 percent against 8 percent for apartments, and average villa prices fell 3.5 percent year on year to QR 6,626 a square metre in the first quarter. ValuStrat’s residential index stood at 97.8 against a first quarter 2021 baseline of 100, which is five years of capital values going nowhere. An owner adding a mezzanine and a family wing is buying use, not return. The requirements are also new, and their interpretation across eight municipalities is untested.
The direction is set regardless. Qatar has told its citizens what they may now build. Nobody has told them what they should.
