Dubai off-plan property, answered with the numbers

Off-plan means buying from the developer before the building is finished, and often before construction starts, paying the price in instalments against a published schedule rather than in one go at completion. The buyer signs a sale agreement with the developer, the project is registered with the Dubai Land Department, payments run into a project escrow account, and the title deed is issued at handover. OffplanIndex tracks 2,337 Dubai off-plan projects and 42,490 priced unit records, of which 1,988 projects are recorded as under construction and 816 as completed.

A published plan splits the price into stages: an amount on booking, instalments tied to construction milestones, a payment on handover, and in a minority of plans a tail after handover. Across 3,315 published Dubai plans the median plan asks 20% on booking, 40% across construction and 30% on the day the keys change hands. The number that decides how much cash a buyer needs is booking plus construction, the share due before receiving anything, and its median is 60% with the middle half of plans between 50% and 80%. Cadence is not the same as size: a plan advertised as 1% a month is a way of slicing that construction share, not a smaller total.

Two different figures both get called the down payment, and they do not agree. Of the 1,855 Dubai projects that publish a headline down payment percentage the median is 10%, with quartiles of 10% to 20% and a maximum of 70%. The booking stage inside the published plans themselves is larger, a median 20% and a mean 25%, because it sums every step falling at reservation and contract signing rather than one marketing number. Before budgeting, ask which of the two the reservation form actually charges.

The median asking price across 42,490 priced Dubai off-plan unit records is AED 2,021 per sqft, with the middle half between AED 1,608 and AED 2,649 per sqft. The median asking price for a whole unit is AED 1.91M, quartiles AED 1.25M to AED 3.08M. These are asking prices published by developers and listing sites, collected to 2026-07-30 and built 2026-09-02, not recorded transaction prices.

Median asking prices by layout: AED 828,000 for a studio across 7,540 priced records, AED 1,500,000 for one bedroom across 15,866, and AED 2,529,000 for two bedrooms across 11,413. Median sizes run 375, 754 and 1,237 sqft. Small layouts carry the higher rate per sqft, AED 2,280 for studios against AED 1,916 for one bedroom, so a cheaper ticket is not a cheaper square foot.

928 of the 2,827 Dubai projects that publish a starting price open below AED 1M, 33% of them, at a median start of AED 699,715, spread across 60 of the 135 Dubai communities we track. At the market median of AED 2,021 per sqft, AED 1M buys roughly 495 sqft. The sub-1M projects sit at a lower median of AED 1,449 per sqft, which is how the ticket works: a smaller unit in a cheaper community, not a discount on the same product.

We cannot answer that from our data, so we will not guess at it. OffplanIndex holds published asking prices for off-plan stock only, which lets us state a median of AED 2,021 per sqft across 42,490 Dubai off-plan unit records and AED 1.91M for a median whole unit, but we hold no ready or secondary market prices to compare those against. A precise off-plan versus ready discount requires transaction records we do not collect, and anyone quoting one should be able to name that source.

A post-handover plan leaves part of the price due in instalments after the keys are handed over. It is developer financing rather than a discount: the price does not change, only the timing does. 561 of 3,315 published Dubai plans carry one, 17% of them. Where the tail exists it is substantial, a median 40% of the price with quartiles of 30% to 50%, so it describes a genuinely different deal in about one plan in six and nothing at all in the other five.

By tracked project count the order is Dubai Islands with 183, Jumeirah Village Circle with 170, Dubai South with 136, Dubailand with 108, Dubai Land Residence Complex with 95. By priced unit records the order changes: Dubai South leads with 4,518, then Nad Al Sheba with 2,987. Supply is concentrated, with those five communities holding 30% of every project we can place in a named Dubai community, out of 135 communities in total.

Counted by tracked Dubai projects: Emaar with 331, DAMAC with 247, Azizi with 134, Meraas with 97, Nakheel with 97. That counts projects, not units delivered or value sold, so a developer running many small towers outranks one running fewer large masterplans. The tail is most of the market by name: 582 distinct developers have at least one Dubai project in our data.

1,433 tracked Dubai projects are recorded as selling, and 1,404 of them state a delivery year. The median is 2,027, the single largest year is 2,027 with 457 projects or 33% of the book, and 73% land between 2026 and 2028. Across the whole tracked pipeline, past and future, the busiest completion year is 2,027 with 750 projects. Delivery dates are the developer's own stated dates, they slip in practice, and we record them exactly as published.

Of the 2,858 tracked Dubai projects that publish a sale status, 1,351 or 47% are recorded as sold out, out of stock or possibly sold out, while 50% are still recorded as selling. Selling out does not wait for completion: 703 of the gone projects are still under construction, so roughly half the sold-out book went while the building was going up. A status is the developer's or portal's own label observed on 2026-07-30, per project rather than per unit, so a project marked as selling may hold one unit or hundreds.

Yes, but the book is thinning: of the 496 tracked Dubai projects due in 2026 that publish a sale status, 279 or 56% are already gone and 217 are still recorded as selling. Sell-through falls steadily with distance to handover, so each later delivery year holds more open stock than the one before it, and most of the projects still selling today hand over in 2027 or later. A near-term handover also compresses the payment plan: the pre-handover share is due over months rather than years.

Usually not. A "from" price is the cheapest layout in the cheapest tier of a single project, so it sits well below what the stock around it asks. Across 2,777 Dubai projects that publish a start and sit in a community we price, the median start is 67% of that community median asking price, about 33% below it, and 74% of starts fall below their community median. Read a from price as the floor of one project range, then read the community median next to it to see what the units are actually asking.

Every figure on this site is the property asking price alone. The Dubai Land Department charges a transfer fee of 4% of the purchase price, a fixed regulatory rate, which on the median Dubai off-plan asking price of AED 1.91M works out at roughly AED 76K; it is paid to the government rather than the developer, so it appears in no published payment plan. An off-plan sale is also recorded on the interim property register, the Oqood registration, which carries its own fee, and a brokered purchase carries an agent commission where an agent is involved. We do not track fee schedules and no number here includes any of them, so confirm the current amounts with the Dubai Land Department or your conveyancer rather than with us.

Registration is a matter of public record: a genuine Dubai off-plan project is registered with the Dubai Land Department and RERA, is required to hold a project escrow account into which buyer payments are made, and is sold through a registered broker. Check the project, the escrow account and the broker with the land department directly, not through a listing, a brochure or an aggregator. OffplanIndex is not a registry: we record what developers and listing sites publish, so the presence of a project in our data is evidence that it was advertised, never evidence that it is registered or that its terms are as stated.

Everything on this site is computed at build time from published Dubai off-plan listings: 2,337 projects, 42,490 priced unit records, 3,315 published payment plans from 2,539 projects, and 2,827 published starting prices. The data was observed to 2026-07-30 and this page was built 2026-09-02, so it is a snapshot of July 2026 asking prices rather than a live feed. Prices are what sellers ask, not what buyers paid, and every table on the site carries the base count it was computed from.

No. They are aggregates of published asking prices for off-plan stock, computed at a point in time and republished with the base count they came from. They are not a forecast of prices, rents or yields, not a valuation of any project or unit, and not a recommendation to buy, hold or sell anything. A median describes the middle of a set of listings: it cannot tell you what a specific unit is worth, what a developer will offer you, or what the market will do next.