For years, Nihal Mustafa’s father paid five Egyptian pounds a month for an apartment in Heliopolis. Her mother continued paying after his death. Then, in 2025, the rent rose in a single step to EGP 1,000 after committees classified neighbourhoods containing old-rent properties as premium, middle-tier or economic. In September 2026, it rose again to EGP 1,150 under the 15% annual increase prescribed by Article 6 of Law 164 of 2025. Nihal’s name has been changed.
For her 73-year-old mother, a nominal payment that had carried purchasing power when the family rented the apartment in the 1970s has become an expense consuming approximately 36% of her pension. She receives no more than EGP 3,200 a month. That money also pays for medication and other needs for her children with intellectual disabilities, as well as treatment for her own heart condition, high blood pressure and diabetes, Nihal tells Zawia3.
Nihal, 49, works in online marketing. She moved into her mother’s home with her children ten years ago following her divorce, but her income barely covers her daughter’s secondary-school expenses. Her younger son helps by working in a shop. As a freelancer, she loses income whenever work dries up. “Caring for my siblings with intellectual disabilities also takes up most of my time. I cannot work regularly, so my circumstances do not allow me to contribute to the rent or household expenses,” she says. “Living in my mother’s home is a lifeline for two families.”
Law 164 of 2025 triggered widespread anger among old-rent tenants. They objected to having to vacate their homes after seven years, arguing that the change threatened millions of families with displacement. Some appealed to the authorities through Facebook groups, including one opposing changes to old-rent legislation and the displacement of tenants.
Tenants also objected to linking the new rent to a neighbourhood’s classification. Article 4 sets rent in premium areas at twenty times the current lawful rent, subject to a minimum of EGP 1,000. For middle-tier and economic areas, it sets ten times the current lawful rent, with minimums of EGP 400 and EGP 250 respectively. The calculation uses the lawful rent currently in force, which is not necessarily the original figure written into a lease before any earlier statutory increases.
Pending completion of the classification process, the law established a temporary monthly payment of EGP 250. Once the relevant governor’s classification decision is published, any outstanding differences are payable in monthly instalments over a period equal to that for which they accrued. The temporary payment therefore differs both from the final assessed rent and from the minimum applicable to each category.
The latest increase has deepened payment difficulties for pensioners and pension beneficiaries whose resources fall short of the new rent. Nihal says her family had accumulated three months of unpaid rent when she was interviewed in September 2026 because other needs could not be postponed. Afraid of an eviction case, she asks: “How will we bear the annual rent increases over the next six years?”
Selling gold to pay the rent
Other tenants interviewed by Zawia3 describe similar pressures. Sayed Gaber, 65, rents an apartment in the Imbaba Airport area opposite the Kamal Amer road corridor. Before Law 164 of 2025, he paid EGP 150 a month, the amount recorded in his contract. That rose tenfold to EGP 1,500 in 2025. He says he is now being asked to pay EGP 1,750 with the latest increase. However, increasing EGP 1,500 by 15% produces EGP 1,725, which is EGP 25 below the amount he reported. Documents explaining the difference were not available.
The sum now consumes almost half a pension of no more than EGP 4,000. Sayed says he and his wife face two painful possibilities: selling her gold to pay the rent, or risking the loss of their home. He describes his fear as one of “immediate eviction.” He still supports two sons. One is in secondary school and needs money for private lessons; the other studies physical education and has a training arrangement at a youth centre involving EGP 3,500 a month, according to his account.
Sayed’s fear does not give a landlord the right to carry out an immediate, unilateral eviction. Eviction is governed by legal grounds and procedures, distinct from a demand for payment or a threat to bring a case.
Nihal’s mother and Sayed are among the pensioners and pension beneficiaries living under the old-rent system who came within the scope of Law 164 of 2025. Its provisions provoked intense debate when adopted, and their effects continue as annual increases take hold.
Figures published on 12 February 2025 recorded 4,665,086 pensioners and 6,668,719 beneficiaries. These indicate the scale of the broader pension population, rather than the number living in old-rent homes. They are dated figures, not an updated count for September 2026.
During the 2025 debate, MP Ehab Mansour estimated that pensioners accounted for approximately 33% of old-rent tenants, according to the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies’ account of its June 2025 seminar. The percentage describes the composition of the tenant population. It does not mean that one-third of all pensioners in Egypt live under old-rent contracts.
The rent increases have arrived while the pensioners interviewed struggle to meet living costs, even after a 15% pension increase.
Ibrahim Abul Atta, secretary of the pensioners’ union, criticised low pensions during an appearance on MBC Masr’s Al-Hekaya programme. He said that EGP 1,755, the minimum pension, could not cover medication, let alone housing, gas, water and electricity. The material cited for this report also referred to an employee’s pension of around EGP 5,300. That figure cannot be presented as a general statutory maximum: the National Organisation for Social Insurance announced a maximum of EGP 13,360 and a minimum of EGP 1,755 for people whose employment ends from January 2026. Those are pension assessment limits for the specified group, not a uniform description of what every existing pensioner receives.
Against this burden, affected residents and MPs are calling for financial assistance for people unable to afford the new rent. Such support differs from the route for applying for alternative housing. One addresses the immediate ability to remain in a home and pay its rent; the other concerns another property, the conditions for receiving it and the timing of allocation.
Mansour says he proposed during the 2025 parliamentary debate that the state cover 85% of the rent for people unable to pay, leaving the tenant responsible for 15%. The proposal targeted pensioners, Takaful and Karama beneficiaries, people with disabilities and women supporting households. He says the House of Representatives rejected it.
He tells Zawia3 that the intention was to ensure landlords received the full amount due while the state covered the difference for households most in need. Illustrating what he sees as a contradiction, he asks how the government can provide a household with a Takaful and Karama payment of EGP 800 and then require rent approaching EGP 1,000. The EGP 800 is the figure in his example, not a statement that all current beneficiaries receive a uniform amount.
Mansour argues that the burden extends beyond pensioners to women supporting families and people with disabilities who have no stable income. These groups need direct assistance with the new rent, he says, adding that he sees no move to amend the 15% annual increase.
He proposes a government circular exempting the poorest groups from payment, supported by parliamentary action. He warns that continued increases will further harm tenants unable to pay and invokes the state’s constitutional responsibility to provide housing.
This remains his proposal for assistance. Law 164 of 2025 contains no automatic, general rent exemption for these groups. An administrative circular does not, by itself, override a statutory obligation. Any subsidy or exemption requires an appropriate legal basis and a clear means of implementation.
The 2017 population census recorded 1,642,870 households living in old-rent homes. That is a historical statistical baseline, not an estimate of how many households remain in those properties in 2026.
A New Woman Foundation reading of a study published in the National Criminal Journal in November 2023 reported that women made up 26% of the tenant sample. Retired people, people not working and homemakers accounted for 33.8%, while service and craft workers accounted for 37.2%. In the data discussed, 92.1% earned less than EGP 4,000 a month. These percentages relate to the study’s sample and period. They cannot be treated as current income levels for every tenant or compared without qualification with a minimum wage that subsequently changed.
Calculating the increase and challenging the law
Ayman Essam, a lawyer who helped represent tenants during parliament’s old-rent discussions, considers the increases unconstitutional. He argues that the initial calculation fails to account for different tenant circumstances, particularly pensioners whose contracts date from the 1990s. Rents in those contracts were relatively high at the time, exceeding EGP 100 or EGP 200 in some cases and reaching EGP 500. He says he has seen cases in which the new multiplier pushed monthly rent to approximately EGP 10,000.
Essam tells Zawia3 that failing to distinguish between homes within the same area provides another basis, in his view, for a constitutional challenge. He points to tenants in middle-tier neighbourhoods, where the minimum is EGP 400, and demands he says reach EGP 2,000 or EGP 3,000. He contrasts rooms beneath staircases with apartments of 100 or 200 square metres. But increasing EGP 400 by 15% produces EGP 460, not two or three thousand pounds. EGP 400 is a minimum, not the rent of every property. A larger demand requires examination of the applicable base rent, multiplier or arrears in each individual case.
Essam believes these cases expose problems in calculating rent and classifying areas. He says local committees did not rely on sufficiently comprehensive and accurate information about tenants and properties, resulting in assessments that, in his view, fail to reflect the actual differences between homes.
Article 3 does set out criteria: location and street characteristics, building standards, average property sizes, utilities, roads, services and the rental value used for property taxation. Essam’s objection therefore concerns the adequacy, application and effects of those criteria, rather than an absence of criteria in the law.
The lawyer says some tenants now face the loss of their contracts because they cannot afford the tenfold or twentyfold increases. Others continue paying the temporary EGP 250 amount established before neighbourhood classification and final rent assessments. To him, this contradicts the intended purpose of reorganising the relationship between landlord and tenant. He argues that legislation intended to provide rules for that relationship has instead placed some groups under burdens they cannot carry.
Essam bases his position on the Supreme Constitutional Court’s November 2024 ruling against fixed annual rents under Law 136 of 1981. The ruling gave the legislature time to determine new parameters. He interprets its purpose as establishing rent that neither undermines landlords’ rights by remaining excessively low nor becomes so high that tenants cannot pay or their need for shelter can be exploited.
In his assessment, although Law 164 of 2025 began with a temporary EGP 250 payment, it ultimately imposed increases beyond the means of pensioners and other vulnerable groups. He says this has led to arrears, inability to meet obligations and additional disputes between tenants and landlords. He questions whether the new framework has achieved the balance that reform was intended to produce.
Among the cases he describes is an elderly woman whose rent rose to EGP 800 a month. Unable to pay for two months, she came under pressure from her landlord and signed trust receipts for EGP 800 for each month of delayed payment. Essam says she was caught between the risk of losing her home and the prospect of criminal proceedings associated with those receipts if she failed to pay.
This incident is attributed to the lawyer’s account. The legal character of a particular receipt, or criminal liability arising from it, cannot be inferred automatically from unpaid rent. Those questions depend on the documents, facts and judicial assessment.
Alternative homes, unanswered questions
Essam’s objections extend beyond rent. He considers aspects of the relocation mechanism unconstitutional and says tenants have complained about being moved to distant areas without the services available near their existing homes in Haram, central Cairo or Nasr City. He says he has challenged the relevant provision.
In discussing possible delivery delays, he also refers to complaints about homes that he says have not been handed over since 2018. He did not identify the project or provide documentation for those cases in the interview. They therefore cannot be attributed to an alternative-housing programme arising from a law passed in 2025. His comparison expresses concern about the capacity to deliver new allocations.
He identifies a further problem in the lack of detailed information about the homes offered to tenants. He says applicants using the electronic platform have complained that monthly rents, floor areas and locations are unclear when they are considering relinquishing an old-rent tenancy in exchange for another home.
In his account, applicants fear committing themselves to surrender a lease before knowing all the details of their replacement home. Legally, however, there is a distinction between submitting an undertaking to vacate with an application and the point at which that undertaking must be carried out. Article 8 links the handover of the existing property to both an allocation decision and receipt of the replacement unit, not simply registration of an application on the platform.
Essam argues that tenants need to know the details before giving up their existing homes. Some occupy three-bedroom apartments accommodating five or six people. Location, he says, is fundamental to a family’s ability to continue working, attending school and accessing services. Yet applicants may not know where their replacement home will be when asked to commit to moving in the future.
He says he has filed cases for tenants seeking to retain the EGP 250 payment and avoid liability for differences accumulated over previous months until the disputes over the new rent are resolved by the competent courts, including constitutional challenges.
These are requests the lawyer says he has submitted, not verified final judgments overturning the law or exempting applicants from the difference. Filing a challenge does not in itself suspend obligations or eviction procedures.
Who can apply for replacement housing?
The uncertainty extends beyond the location, specifications and monthly cost of a replacement home to a more fundamental question: who is entitled to apply?
During an appearance on Sada El-Balad, sustainable-development specialist Hussein Hassan said that access to replacement housing was limited to the original tenant named in the contract, excluding children unless their names also appeared in it. That media interpretation, which adds to some families’ confusion, needs to be distinguished from the legislation itself.
Hassan did not resolve the position of spouses or children whose tenancy had legally continued after the original tenant’s death. He referred to eligibility as dependent on meeting conditions.
Limiting the right to apply to the person initially named in a contract does not match Article 8. It covers tenants and people to whom a tenancy has legally extended. Separately, the article establishes an obligation to allocate housing to the original tenant and a spouse whose tenancy extended before the law took effect, no later than one year before the transitional period ends. That specific guarantee does not remove the right of other lawful continuing tenants to apply under the relevant conditions and priorities.
Hassan also described eligibility as depending on the actual use of the existing home and the applicant’s housing position. He said it must be occupied rather than closed, that the tenant must not have another home available, and that they must not previously have received state housing. These are the conditions as presented by the speaker. Acceptance of an individual application depends on the official rules and examination of documents, not a media description alone.
Ayman Farid’s situation illustrates the uncertainty. The 47-year-old, who has polio and kidney failure, lives with three daughters and a son in an old-rent apartment registered in his father’s name in Saft El-Laban, Giza. He has lived there since marrying approximately twenty years ago.
He applied for alternative housing in 2025, but the application remained unresolved when he was interviewed in September 2026. Each time he checked the platform, it was still pending. He does not know whether he will receive a home, particularly because the lease is in his father’s name alone. That fact by itself neither establishes nor rules out his eligibility: lawful continuation of the tenancy and the allocation conditions must be examined.
His fear of being left without housing has grown after his landlord demanded EGP 12,000 in rent differences said to have accumulated since September 2025. Ayman says the landlord threatened legal action and an eviction case if he did not pay.
His only source of funds, he says, is his father’s EGP 6,000 pension. It is divided between rotating savings commitments to prepare his three daughters for marriage, medication for kidney failure and the family’s daily needs. Monthly rent after the 15% annual increase is EGP 1,380, leaving him unable to settle the accumulated demand.
“I am now paying like tenants on new-rent contracts who pay EGP 1,300 near me,” he says bitterly. This is his comparison with neighbouring cases he knows, not a documented average for the local rental market.
“If the state provides an alternative home, I will move. If it does not provide housing, my children and I will be on the street,” Ayman tells Zawia3.
A pension stretched across a family’s needs
For Samia Abdel Aziz, a pseudonym, the anxiety begins before rent is paid. The 60-year-old worries that changes in her children’s circumstances will reduce the total pension income reaching her household.
Since her husband died six years ago, she has lived on a pension of EGP 3,400. At the time of her September 2026 interview, one daughter expected to be registered for social insurance through her employer within three months, while another planned to marry within four. Samia also feared that her youngest son would lose his entitlement when he finished studying, leaving her with less income and no other source of support. These are her concerns, not a final calculation of entitlement. Suspension or termination of one beneficiary’s share is subject to rules and may involve redistribution among remaining beneficiaries. What Samia will receive cannot be established without reviewing the insurance file and each beneficiary’s income and family circumstances.
She tells Zawia3 that she has been trying to pay her landlady EGP 250 for the apartment in Bulaq El-Dakrour because she considers its location an economic area. The landlady has refused that sum in recent months and demanded EGP 700. With the 15% annual increase, the demand became EGP 805 a month. “How will I pay that amount after my children leave?” she asks.
Samia believes the new rent does not reflect the conditions of her neighbourhood. She describes a narrow, dead-end alley no more than five metres wide, while saying that nearby tenants in substantially better areas pay the same amount.
She submitted a complaint to the Cabinet objecting to the increase, but says she has received no response that changed her situation. She hopes constitutional challenges will lead to reconsideration of rents in economic areas.
As the dispute with her landlady intensified, she also applied for replacement housing. Her application was still pending at the time of the interview. She is waiting anxiously for acceptance, afraid of being left without shelter.
The cost of moving goes beyond rent
Hassan El-Safi, a member of the Tenants’ Union legal defence team, says the new rent has placed the most vulnerable groups at the centre of the crisis, especially pensioners and people with disabilities. Many, he says, can no longer pay. “Even one humanitarian case harmed by implementing the law should prompt it to be reconsidered.”
He agrees with Essam’s interpretation that the Supreme Constitutional Court’s November 2024 judgment sought to end frozen rents without imposing increases tenants could not afford. He says the court emphasised balance between landlords’ rights and protection against exploiting tenants’ need for shelter. In his view, the government changed the entire framework and disregarded earlier constitutional judgments on the extension of tenancies to the first generation.
El-Safi warns that the issue concerns the future of thousands of families without alternative homes, not simply the amount of rent. The vulnerable households he encounters cannot readily move elsewhere and have established their lives in particular neighbourhoods.
He believes pensioners will be especially affected by relocation, not only because of distance but because they would lose familiar networks of hospitals, schools and everyday services.
Like Essam, he criticises the absence of advance information about the monthly cost of replacement homes. That information is decisive for tenants receiving pensions of EGP 2,000 or EGP 3,000, a group he says makes up a substantial share of old-rent residents.
As statutory increases continue and alternative housing is announced, some tenants interviewed for this report have not applied. Nihal cannot see how she could relocate her elderly mother and siblings with disabilities. Others, including Samia and Ayman, wait for decisions. For them, an alternative home offers hope of retaining shelter despite unanswered questions, landlords’ threats of eviction proceedings and growing difficulty paying the rent each month.
