What an annual contract is actually for
Two different things, and it is worth being clear which one you need.
For a home, it is prevention: four visits a year keeps ant, cockroach and rodent pressure from ever becoming an infestation, which costs less than treating two serious outbreaks. Worth it for villas with gardens, less so for a small apartment with no history of problems — and we will say so rather than sell you a contract you do not need.
For a business, it is compliance. Restaurants, cafes, staff accommodation, warehouses and food storage are expected to demonstrate ongoing, documented pest management. What is inspected is not whether you have pests, it is whether you have a maintained programme and the records to prove it. A folder of one-off invoices does not meet that.
What you get
Four scheduled visits a year, each producing a dated service report naming the technician, the areas covered, anything found, the products applied and the recommendations. Between scheduled visits you get priority response, and most call-outs are included rather than charged.
We keep copies of every report, so if an inspector asks for twelve months of records and you cannot find them, we can send them.
What is covered, and what is not
Most complaints about pest control contracts anywhere come from this being left vague, so here it is plainly.
Included in a standard contract:
- Cockroaches — both the German cockroach breeding indoors and the large outdoor species coming in from drains.
- Ants, including the small pale kitchen ants that have to be baited rather than sprayed.
- Rats and mice: treatment, monitoring points and the proofing recommendations.
- Mosquitoes — breeding water found and removed, then resting sites treated.
- Wasp nests located and removed.
- Monitoring points installed and checked at every visit, numbered against a site plan on commercial sites.
- A dated service report every visit, and copies kept by us.
- Priority response between scheduled visits, with most call-outs included rather than charged.
- Free re-treatment if activity returns within 90 days of a completed treatment.
Quoted separately, and why:
- Bed bugs. They are brought into a property rather than pressing in from outside, so they are not a pressure a scheduled programme prevents. They need a two-visit programme or heat treatment: bed bug treatment. Anyone including bed bugs in a cheap annual contract is either pricing for a treatment you will probably not need or intending to argue about it later.
- Termites. Soil injection and bait station systems are a different job from general pest treatment: termite control. What a villa contract does include is a termite inspection of the timber and the soil line at each visit, which is how you get the early warning that makes a treatment cheap.
- Structural proofing work. Minor sealing is done on the visit. Fitting new door sweeps, replacing a broken drain cover, meshing a run of vents or rebuilding a bin store is separate work, quoted, and yours to decide on.
- Heat treatment and fogging programmes beyond the routine visit.
The corrective actions in your report are also yours: a gap under a delivery door, cardboard stored in the dry goods room, irrigation watering the base of a wall. We will keep listing them until they are closed, because an inspection checks whether they were acted on and because a programme cannot outrun a source nobody fixed.
How many visits you actually need
Four a year is the standard because it matches the UAE’s pest calendar, not because it is a round number.
- Homes — four visits. Ideally spring (March or April, before the humidity climb rather than during it), mid-summer at peak ant and cockroach activity, early autumn, and one in the cooler months when rodent pressure moves indoors.
- Apartments with no history — two visits, or none. We will say so.
- Food premises — fortnightly or monthly. Warmth, food and water are permanent and cardboard arrives with every delivery, so the pressure never drops. Quarterly on a restaurant kitchen is a programme that exists on paper.
- Warehouses and storage — monthly, with external bait stations checked each visit and trend data built by point.
- Offices and non-food retail — quarterly, focused on the pantry, waste room and service risers.
- Staff accommodation — monthly, with treatment on room handover between residents rather than only when someone complains.
Residential packages
Apartment plan. Kitchen and bathroom harbourage treated at each visit, floor drains and the gaps around waste pipes checked, monitors left behind appliances, and the shared riser and chute route assessed — because if the source is the building we would rather tell you than bill you quarterly for someone else’s problem.
Villa plan. Everything above, plus the part that matters more: a perimeter treatment to the soil line and the base of external walls, the entry points around air-conditioning pipework and conduit, a termite inspection of door frames, skirting and wardrobe backs, a standing-water check for mosquito breeding, and the bin store, side alley and boundary wall for rodents. Irrigation against the building line gets flagged every time until it is changed.
Residential contracts start at AED 900 a year excluding VAT. See residential pest control for what an individual visit involves.
Commercial packages
Quoted after a site survey, because sector, size, layout and frequency change the programme too much for a list price to be honest. All of them include a numbered site plan, a logbook kept on site, dated reports, corrective-action tracking carried forward until closed, and visits scheduled around your trading hours.
- Food premises — restaurants, cafes, central kitchens, canteens. Fortnightly or monthly, before opening or after closing, with drain and gully treatment, insect light trap servicing, and products approved for food premises.
- Warehouse and logistics — monthly, with a numbered external bait station perimeter and non-toxic monitoring inside food and packaging storage, plus a prioritised proofing schedule.
- Office and retail — quarterly, out of hours, with nothing visible in client-facing areas.
- Facilities management and multi-site — scheduled and reported building by building, one point of contact, and the licensing differences between Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah handled inside one programme. Detail on commercial pest control.
Whether it is worth it
For a home the arithmetic is simple. A residential contract starts at AED 900 a year. Two separate treatments during a bad summer, booked as emergencies, will cost you more than that and you will have lived with the problem twice in between. If your villa has a garden, mature planting and irrigation against the wall, you are not deciding whether to have pest pressure — only whether to manage it on a schedule or react to it.
For a business the comparison is not with the cost of treatment at all. It is with a failed inspection, a closure notice, a landlord dispute, or an FM contract lost because twelve months of records could not be produced. That is what the contract is actually insuring against, and it is why inspectors look at the programme and the paperwork rather than at whether anything was crawling on the day.
The part that does not show up on an invoice: the same technician gets to know the property. By the third visit they know which floor gully breeds flies in August, which corner of the warehouse takes activity first, and what the neighbouring plot does when it is cleared. That is the difference between a programme and four unrelated visits, and it is why activity trends downwards over a year rather than flat.
Cost
From AED 900 a year for a residential property, excluding VAT. Commercial premises are quoted on size, sector and visit frequency — a restaurant kitchen needs a different programme from a warehouse.
How it works
- Free survey. The property is walked and a programme proposed with the frequency, the scope and the price in writing. Homes can often be quoted without a survey; commercial sites never are.
- The first visit is a full treatment, not a token inspection to start the clock. If there is an active problem, it is dealt with — including the follow-up visit where the pest needs one.
- Monitors and stations placed and numbered, mapped on commercial sites.
- Scheduled visits, with a reminder before each one. If a date is bad for you it is moved rather than skipped.
- A report every visit, plus the Safety Data Sheets, with copies kept by us.
- An annual review of what the trend data shows, and whether the frequency should go up, down, or stay as it is. Down is a real answer — a warehouse that has been quiet for a year after its proofing was finished does not need the same programme it started on.
Pricing sets out the bands for individual treatments, so you can compare them against a contract yourself.