Dubai off-plan under AED 1M: what the entry end actually buys

One project in three publishes a start under AED 1M. One in five starts under AED 750K.

Of the 2,100 Dubai off-plan projects carrying a published starting price, 649 of them, 31%, open under AED 1 million. 378 open under AED 750K and 33, 2% of the set, open under AED 500K. The median published start across the whole tracked pipeline is AED 1.50M; within the sub-1M book alone the median start is AED 710,000. So the entry end is a real third of the market rather than a rounding error, and its centre of gravity sits well below the line rather than crowding it.

The unit-level picture is tighter. Across 42,490 priced Dubai records the lower quartile asking price is AED 1.25M, which is above AED 1 million on its own, so fewer than one priced unit in four is a sub-1M unit. A third of projects can offer an entry ticket under the line while most of the stock inside those same projects sits above it.

Bands are cumulative, so each row contains the ones above it. The base is the 2,100 Dubai projects that publish a starting price, not all 2,337 tracked Dubai projects: 237 publish no "from" figure we can read, and are absent from every count on this page.

The ranked version of this cut, community by community, is off-plan under AED 1M. For the smallest layouts specifically, the studio median asking price is AED 828K across 7,540 records: studio price per sqft.

A "from" price sits a median 30% below the median asking price of its own community.

This is the single most important thing to understand about every number on this page. Comparing each project's published start against the median asking price of the community it stands in, across 2,061 projects, the middle ratio is 0.70. The quartiles run 0.54 to 1.02, and 73% of starting prices come in below their community median.

Read plainly: a project advertising "from AED 750,000" in a district whose median unit asks AED 1.1 million is behaving exactly as the typical project does. The advertised figure is the floor of one building, not the price of a home in that district, and a quarter of published starts are actually at or above their community median, which happens when a project is small, premium, or the only thing priced there.

The first two rows sit on different bases and are not two views of one number: the first counts each project once, the second counts each priced unit record once, so a large tower weighs more in the second row than in the first. The ratio row is computed only where the project has a community with a published median asking price.

Nothing here forecasts a price. It describes what is published today, observed to 2026-07-30. How the two fields are collected and cleaned is in the methodology.

51 Dubai communities hold a sub-1M entry point, and Jumeirah Village Circle holds 18% of them.

The 649 projects starting under AED 1 million are spread across 51 of the 135 Dubai communities we track, which sounds broad until the counts are read. Jumeirah Village Circle alone carries 115 of them, 18% of the national entry book, with a lowest published start of AED 407,000 and a median sub-1M start of AED 702,777. The top three communities together carry 39%.

The pattern in the table is consistent: entry stock clusters in mid-density apartment districts away from the coast, and the communities that appear are the ones with the deepest project pipelines rather than the cheapest per sqft. Note the third column: in 1 of these twelve rows, fewer than half of the sub-1M projects are still recorded as selling.

The twelve Dubai communities with the most projects publishing a start under AED 1 million. The last two columns describe all priced stock in that community, not the entry projects, so they are the benchmark the entry ticket should be read against rather than a description of it.

Every row has its own benchmark page with the full distribution behind these medians: start with Jumeirah Village Circle, or the full index at communities.

At the market median of AED 2,021 per sqft, AED 1M is 495 sqft. Entry projects buy more than that.

The arithmetic is simple and worth doing before any viewing. AED 1,000,000 divided by the Dubai median asking price of AED 2,021 per sqft is 495 sqft. But the projects that publish a sub-1M start are not median projects: their own median asking price per sqft is AED 1,449, against AED 2,137 for projects starting at 1M or above. At AED 1,449 the same budget covers 690 sqft.

That direction holds inside communities too, not just across the market. Of the 24 communities where at least 5 sub-1M projects carry priced units, 18 have a sub-1M project median per sqft below the community median. The cheap ticket is not usually a shoebox in an expensive building, it is a smaller unit in a cheaper building. What the budget will not do is bend the arithmetic: in Al Satwa, the dearest per sqft of the communities in this cut at AED 2,331, AED 1 million is 429 sqft whatever the brochure says.

The twelve cheapest per sqft of the 24 communities that hold at least 5 sub-1M projects with priced unit records. Both sqft columns are pure arithmetic on a published median, not an offer: they ignore service charges, registration and transfer fees, floor, view and finish, and any specific unit will differ from its own community median in both directions.

Size and price per sqft by layout is a separate cut, published per community in the 1 bedroom and studio rankings.

The cheapest tickets still recorded as selling start at AED 320,000.

Filtered to the 372 sub-1M projects whose recorded sale status reads as selling, on sale, available, booking started, pre-sale or launching, the lowest published start is AED 320,000 at Sunlight Homes in International City. The twelve cheapest are below. Read the last two columns before the first: several of these projects have no priced unit record behind them at all, which means we can report the developer's published floor and nothing else about what is inside the building.

Lowest published starting price first, among sub-1M projects carrying a sale status in the selling group. "Priced units" is the count of unit records we hold with a usable price for that project, and a zero there means the AED/sqft column cannot be computed. A handover year in the past on a project still marked as selling is the developer's own published pair of fields, reported unchanged.

Developer terms differ far more than these tickets do: see payment plans 2026 and developers by price per sqft.

33% of the sub-1M book is already recorded as sold out or out of stock.

The entry end is the fastest-clearing part of the pipeline, and the status field shows it. Of 649 projects publishing a start under AED 1 million, 217 carry a status of sold out, out of stock or possibly sold out, and only 372, 57%, read as currently selling. 49 state no status at all.

This is why a list of cheap projects goes stale faster than any other list on this site. A published start of AED 400,000 tells you a developer once opened at that number in that district. It does not tell you that a unit at that price is unsold today, and for more than two projects in five here it is on the record that none is.

The same status field, applied to the whole pipeline rather than the entry end, is what drives the handover pipeline note, and the full accounting of it, by year, community and developer, is the sell-through note.

Waiting for a later handover does not buy a cheaper ticket: 34% of 2026 stock starts under 1M, 9% of 2030.

The intuition that the far end of the pipeline is where the cheap launches are does not survive the count. Among Dubai projects with a published start and a delivery year of 2026 or later, the share opening under AED 1 million falls from 34% for 2026 handovers to 9% for 2030. The median published start moves the other way, from AED 1.45M to AED 2.70M.

Read this as a cross-section of what is on sale now, not as a forecast and not as a claim about price movement. The composition of what developers are launching for the later years is different: more villa and townhouse product, more of it in newer masterplans, and less of the small-apartment stock that produces a sub-1M ticket in the first place.

Which communities carry each completion book: 2026, 2027 and 2028.

Cheapest by ticket and cheapest by square foot are different lists: the two top eights share 1 of 8 names.

A buyer looking for the lowest number and a buyer looking for the most space per dirham end up in different districts. Ranking the 77 Dubai communities with 30 or more priced units by their lowest published start gives one top eight; ranking the same set by median asking price per sqft gives another, and the two lists share 1 of eight names.

Dubailand shows one direction: a lowest published start of AED 396,216 sitting on a median AED 2,189 per sqft, the dearest rate on the left-hand list, which is what a very small unit in an otherwise expensive district looks like. Damac Suncity shows the other: AED 1,295 per sqft, among the cheapest square feet in Dubai, and yet the lowest start anyone publishes there is AED 2,995,000, because the product is a townhouse or a villa and there is no small layout to open on.

Two independent rankings printed side by side, both over the same 77 Dubai communities with 30 or more priced unit records and a published page. Rows are not pairs: position 3 on the left has no relationship to position 3 on the right.

The full ladders are cheapest communities per sqft and off-plan under AED 1M.

Entry projects ask 50% before handover, the top band 60%.

The cheapest tickets come with the lightest published schedules. Across 1,727 Dubai projects carrying both a published start and a validated payment plan, projects starting under AED 750K have a median 50% of the price due before handover and 55% of them ask 50% or less. Projects starting at AED 5 million or more sit at a median 60%, with only 27% at 50% or less. The market median across all validated Dubai plans is 60%.

A lighter schedule is a financing term, not a discount: the price does not change, only the timing does. It does change the cash a buyer needs before a building exists, which at this end of the market is usually the binding constraint rather than the headline price.

Project level, one row per project, banded on the published starting price. Pre-handover means booking plus construction, the share of the price paid before the buyer receives anything. Plans whose stated stages do not total between 90 and 110% are excluded before any statistic is computed. Bands do not overlap and this is a description of five buckets, not a fitted relationship.

The full treatment of booking shares, construction milestones and post-handover tails is payment plans 2026, ranked at lowest pre-handover payment plans.

What we cannot see: whether a unit at that price is still there.

Every ticket on this page is a published starting price, recorded once per project. It is the cheapest unit in a building at the moment the developer published it, which is generally the smallest layout, on a low floor, with the least favourable aspect, and it is frequently a single unit. We cannot confirm that any particular unit at that price remains unsold, we cannot see the unit's floor, view or completion specification, and we do not receive availability updates between scrapes. The data behind this piece was observed to 2026-07-30.

Three narrower limits. 237 tracked Dubai projects publish no starting price at all, so a genuinely cheaper launch could exist outside this count entirely. 164 of the 649 sub-1M projects carry no priced unit record, which is why some rows in finding 5 show no price per sqft. And none of these figures include the 4% Dubai Land Department transfer fee, agency commission, service charges or mortgage costs, which are paid outside the developer's price and change the real entry cost materially at this end of the market.

Where the data does not support a claim we say so rather than filling the gap. Nothing on this page is a forecast, a valuation or a claim about future prices, and nothing here is investment advice.

The same discipline applied to the wider market is the Q3 2026 market note. What we do and do not republish is set out in the data policy.