---
title: "Licensing a restaurant or café in Egypt: the order that saves you months | GoSufra"
description: "A public-shop licence is not one paper, it is a sequence — and most of the delay comes from doing it out of order. What to check before you sign a lease, what the file contains, and what the digital route changed."
url: "https://gosufra.com/en/blog/restaurant-licences-in-egypt/"
language: "en"
source: "https://gosufra.com"
---
# Licensing a restaurant or café in Egypt: the order that saves you months

A public-shop licence is not one paper, it is a sequence — and most of the delay comes from doing it out of order. What to check before you sign a lease, what the file contains, and what the digital route changed.

2026-09-24 · 9 min read

![Illustration of a stamped licence document beside a shop front](https://gosufra.com/blog/restaurant-licences-in-egypt.svg)

## Key points

- Check the building's legal status before you sign the lease — an unresolved building violation is the most common reason a licence file stops moving.
- The commercial register and the tax card come before the licence application, not after it.
- The application now runs through the Digital Egypt platform, with a temporary permit that lets you trade while the remaining approvals finish.
- The inspector reads a written list of conditions — cold chain, water, ventilation, surfaces. Fit out against that list, not against a photo you liked.

Almost everyone who opens a restaurant in Egypt loses time in the same place. Not in the kitchen, not on the menu — in the file. And usually not because a document was impossible to obtain, but because it was collected in the wrong order.

A licence is not a single paper you go and buy. It is a chain, and every link assumes the one before it already exists.

## What you are actually applying for

A restaurant, café or juice bar is a **public shop** (محل عام), licensed under Egypt’s public shops law, No. 154 of 2019. The licence is issued by the local unit responsible for your address — the district or the markaz — not by a central ministry. That is why two people opening identical cafés in two governorates can have noticeably different experiences.

Hotels, and food outlets operating inside a licensed touristic establishment, sit outside this law and follow the tourism licensing route instead. If your site is inside a hotel or a touristic facility, you are on a different track from the first day.

## Check the property before you sign anything

This is the step that decides whether the rest takes six weeks or a year.

Before you sign a lease, you want to know:

- **Does the building have a valid permit, and are there unresolved violations recorded against it?** A shop inside a property with outstanding building violations is the most common reason a file sits still.

- **Is the unit legally designated for commercial use?** A ground-floor flat that has always “been a shop” is not the same thing as a unit registered for commercial activity.

- **Does the lease permit your specific activity** — including extraction, outdoor seating, and shisha if that is part of the plan?

- **Is there a lawful route for the smoke and the grease?** An extraction duct that has to climb a residential façade is a dispute waiting to happen, and neighbours object at exactly the wrong moment.

Ask the landlord for the building’s paperwork and have someone who reads these files read them. A rent-free fit-out period is worth far less than a property whose status is clean.

One piece of relief is worth knowing about: temporary licences have been made available for shops inside properties carrying building violations, running **until the end of 2027** or until the property’s status is settled, so that trading businesses can come onto the record rather than stay invisible. It does not make the violation disappear and it does not shield the property from enforcement. Treat it as breathing room, not as a solution.

## The file, in the order it assembles

1. **Identity and premises.** National ID, the lease or ownership deed, and — for men — the military service certificate. The lease should be properly registered; an unregistered scrap of paper is where files stop.
2. **Commercial register and tax card.** These come *before* the licence application, because the licence file asks for them.
3. **Drawings and a site sketch.** A layout of the unit and a sketch locating it. What you draw is what you will be inspected against, so draw what you actually intend to build.
4. **The application itself**, submitted to the competent centre with the documents and drawings attached.
5. **Civil protection requirements** — extinguishers, exits, the gas installation, alarms where required. Handle this during fit-out, not after it.
6. **Health certificates for everyone who touches food.** Every food handler needs one and they are checked. Start them early: they take longer than people expect, because staff are usually hired last.
7. **Inspection, then the licence.**

## The clocks the law gives you

The law puts time limits on the authority, not only on you:

- The competent centre must notify you that the application is **accepted or rejected within 60 days**, and that notification has to list the general and specific conditions you must meet.

- Once you have met them and this has been verified, the **licence is issued within one month**.

- The inspection fee is capped. The licence fee itself falls inside a statutory band set by category, which is why a small café and a large restaurant are not charged alike.

- A licence is generally **open-ended** unless your category says otherwise — but any change to the premises, the activity, the licensed area or the location needs approval or a new licence. Knocking a wall through after the drawing was approved is not a small matter.

Write these dates down the day you submit. The single most useful thing an owner can do is know, on any given day, which clock is running and whose it is.

## What the digital route changed

The process has been moved onto the **Digital Egypt platform**, and several things came with it that are worth using deliberately:

- **One online submission.** Data and documents are entered by activity type and the request is tracked online, instead of visiting each authority in turn.

- **A temporary permit.** You can be granted a permit to begin operating while the remaining approvals are completed — which is what turns a fit-out loan from a bleeding wound into a manageable cost.

- **Implicit approval.** If the competent authority does not respond within the set period, that silence counts as approval under the rules. This only helps someone with a dated, documented submission, which is another reason to use the online route.

- **A three-month ceiling** on completing approvals and procedures.

- **A 50% reduction in licensing fees**, aimed at bringing informal businesses onto the record.

These facilitations have been announced and amended more than once. Confirm the current position on Digital Egypt or with your local unit before you plan around any single one of them, and get the answer in writing.

## The conditions an inspector actually reads

Food premises have a written list of requirements, and it is far more specific than most owners expect. The ones that most often fail an inspection:

| Area | What is expected |
| --- | --- |
| Cold chain | Chilled holding at or below 5°C, frozen at or below −18°C, with a thermometer somebody can read |
| Perishables | No perishable stock held on site at all without proper refrigeration |
| Water | Potable water from an approved source, hot and cold, at adequate pressure, plus a reserve for interruptions |
| Handwashing | Dedicated basins, separate from equipment washing, with WCs for staff |
| Lighting | Adequate light, with shatterproof covers over bulbs in food areas |
| Ventilation | Designed so it does not carry contamination onto food, and does not let grease and condensation accumulate |
| Surfaces | Food-contact surfaces smooth and cleanable, no sharp internal angles, removable with simple tools |
| Chemicals | Stored sealed and separate from food |
| Waste | A defined external waste area |
| Outdoor service | Canopies protecting any food served outside |

Notice how many of these are **fit-out decisions**. A steel table ordered because it looked right, with a welded internal angle you cannot get a cloth into, is a failed inspection you paid for yourself. Take the conditions list to your contractor on day one, not to the inspector on the last day.

## Run the tax side in parallel, not afterwards

The tax card is already in your licence file, so use the moment. While the licence is moving:

- Register for VAT if you meet the threshold, and get clear with your accountant on where the **service charge** sits relative to tax. Our guide to Egypt’s 14% VAT on restaurant bills sets out the order a bill has to add them in.

- Understand what the **e-receipt system** will ask of your till *before* you buy the till. That is the expensive one to get wrong.

- Choose a POS that records your real payment methods — cash, card, and the wallets your customers actually carry.

Opening with a licence and a till that cannot produce clean, sequential, exportable sales data is opening with a problem scheduled for later.

## The short version

- Check the property’s legal status **before** signing.

- Commercial register and tax card **before** the licence application.

- Fit out against the written conditions, not against a mood board.

- Start health certificates early.

- Log every submission date and know which clock is running.

- Use the temporary permit and the implicit-approval rule — but get them documented.

Nothing here replaces your lawyer or your accountant, and the licensing rules have moved more than once in recent years. What does not move is the sequence: property, then registration, then licence, then inspection. Get the order right and the paperwork becomes a schedule instead of a wall.

When the doors do open, the next question is whether the first thirty days were planned. Our thirty-day opening checklist picks up exactly where this leaves off.

- restaurant licence
- Egypt
- opening a restaurant
- compliance

## In the product

### [Tax & Compliance](https://gosufra.com/en/features/tax-and-compliance/)

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