Dubai off-plan payment plan calculator
Put a price and a schedule in, get the cash out: what lands at booking, what each construction installment costs, what is waiting on handover day, and the total paid before anyone hands over a key. The presets are built from 3,315 published Dubai payment plans, so the starting point is what the market actually asks rather than what one brochure claims.
Nothing is sent anywhere. Every figure below is computed in your browser from the numbers you type.
| Stage | Timing | Share | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking | On reservation | 20% | AED 300,000 |
| Construction installment 1 of 9 | Month 3 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Construction installment 2 of 9 | Month 6 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Construction installment 3 of 9 | Month 9 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Construction installment 4 of 9 | Month 12 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Construction installment 5 of 9 | Month 15 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Construction installment 6 of 9 | Month 18 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Construction installment 7 of 9 | Month 21 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Construction installment 8 of 9 | Month 24 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Construction installment 9 of 9 | Month 27 | 4.4% | AED 66,667 |
| Handover | Month 30 | 40% | AED 600,000 |
| Total | Over 30 months | 100% | AED 1,500,000 |
Construction money is spread evenly across the installments rather than tied to real milestones, which no developer publishes in advance. Nothing here includes service charges, mortgage costs, agency fees, or the developer admin fees that usually land with the first invoice. The DLD transfer fee is 4 percent of the price and sits outside the 100, so the total above exceeds the price whenever the toggle is on.
Two or three units, one cash calendar
The calculator above models one unit. A buyer holding two or three off-plan units does not have one schedule, they have two or three running at once, and the month that hurts is the month where a handover payment on one lands on top of a construction installment on another. No brochure shows that, because a brochure is about one building. Pick your real projects below and the tool lays their published plans on a single timeline, names the heaviest month, and counts the months where more than one of them wants money.
Pick two or three real projects and the tool lays their published schedules on one timeline. Start typing a project name. 1,659 projects are pickable: every tracked project with a stated future handover date, a payment plan that sums, and a published price.
Nothing is sent anywhere. The project list is a public file and every figure below is computed in your browser. Booking money is placed on this month because the corpus holds no launch date, so tick booking already paid if you bought these units before today. No fee is modelled: the 4 percent DLD transfer fee, service charges, agency commission and mortgage costs all sit outside the payment plan.
Loading the project list.
The same arithmetic run across the whole tracked book is the market payment calendar: when the money on 1,660 tracked off-plan projects falls due, quarter by quarter, as against when the buildings finish. Its heaviest quarter is Q4 2026 and 50.3 percent of the projects still owing money in Q1 2029 have already handed over.
- This is a schedule projection, not a forecast. It models every unit record we hold as bought on the valuation date at its listed price on the plan the developer publishes. Real off-plan absorption is partial and staggered, so no quarter here will be collected in full.
- It counts only units in this corpus, and it weights a project by how many priced unit records were published for it. Those records are a sample of each building inventory, and the sampling rate is not uniform: one tower with three thousand listed units outweighs eighty small projects. Every AED figure is therefore a floor on the market and a distorted share of it, which is why every group row names the single project driving its heaviest quarter and repeats the same concentration on a one-median-unit-per-project basis where a scrape cannot skew it.
- Booking money is placed on the valuation date by construction of the model. Most of this book launched months or years ago and collected its reservation money then, at a date this corpus does not hold. Read the booking band as money due on reservation, never as bookings expected this quarter.
- Construction instalments are spread evenly across the remaining months to handover, and because the model buys on the valuation date, a project completing in six months has its whole construction schedule compressed into those six months. In reality most of that money was collected across the build, at dates this corpus does not hold. The first year of the calendar is therefore overstated against the far end, and the near bars read as what a buyer entering today would owe, not as what the market will pay. Real schedules are also tied to build milestones that are never published in advance and that slip, so an even spread is a model rather than a schedule.
- Handover dates are the developer own targets scraped from portals. They move, and they move later far more often than earlier. Every quarter on this calendar inherits that.
- Nothing here is discounted for the time value of money. A dirham due in 2031 is counted as a dirham. The discounted reading of the same schedules is the effective price.
Counted over 1,660 of 2,924 tracked off-plan projects, 56.8 percent. The rest are excluded for a stated reason: 661 publish no payment plan that sums, 222 carry a handover date that has already passed or is missing, and 381 carry no priced unit record to value. The calendar runs 2026 Q3 to 2032 Q2 and 99.6 percent of the modelled obligation lands inside it; the AED 826.1M that does not is post-handover tail money running past the horizon. Method and rollback are in the methodology. Not investment advice.
What a Dubai off-plan payment plan is
Buying off-plan means paying for a building that does not exist yet, in stages written into the sales agreement. A plan has four parts: a booking amount due on reservation, a run of installments across construction, a payment on handover, and sometimes a tail of installments that continues after the keys move. The four are quoted as percentages of the price and, in a plan that is written honestly, add to 100.
Two projects at the same price per sqft can demand very different amounts of cash. The number that decides which is which is the pre-handover share, booking plus construction, the money paid before the buyer receives anything at all. On top of it sits the Dubai Land Department transfer fee at 4 percent of the price, which is not part of the plan and is usually due within days of signing.
What the corpus medians say
The middle plan asks 20% on booking, 40% across construction and 30% on handover, which puts 60% of the price on the table before the buyer receives anything. The quartiles matter more than the median: the softest quarter of plans stop at 50% before handover, the hardest quarter want 80% or more, and 57% of all plans sit at 60 percent or above. Where a down payment is quoted separately the median is 10% across 1,855 projects.
Only 17% of plans run past the keys, 561 of 3,315, and when they do the median tail carries 40% of the price. A tail is the cheapest thing in a plan to advertise and the most expensive to ignore, because it is interest free credit from the developer and it moves the cash requirement by tens of percent.
The three presets in the calculator come from these medians, adjusted so the four stages sum to exactly 100. Stage medians are computed independently across 3,315 plans, so they do not add to 100 on their own: the typical preset holds booking and construction at their medians and lets the handover stage absorb the remainder, the tail preset reserves 10 percent for handover day and gives the rest of the post-handover median to the tail, and the aggressive preset takes the 80% upper quartile of pre-handover demand entirely out of construction. None of the three is a real developer schedule. They are honest starting shapes.
The full analysis of these splits is in Dubai off-plan payment plans 2026, the tails get their own piece in post-handover payment plans, and the rankings put communities and developers in order by the cash they ask for before handover.
To start from a real structure rather than a preset, every published shape is counted one page at a time in off-plan payment plans: how many projects offer a 60/40, who offers a post-handover tail, what each costs per sqft, and what the deferral is worth once the schedule is discounted.
What the calculator assumes
Construction money is spread evenly across the chosen frequency, monthly or quarterly, from the first payment month to the month before handover. Real schedules are tied to construction milestones that are never published in advance and that slip, so an even spread is the only defensible model. Change the months to handover and the installment count changes with it.
No fees are included by default. The 4 percent DLD transfer fee is a toggle and, when it is on, appears as a separate line at booking rather than inside the 100, so the total exceeds the price. Service charges, developer admin fees, agency commission, mortgage costs and oqood registration are not modelled at all. Nothing here is discounted for the time value of money: a dirham due in month 48 is counted as a dirham.
The four stage percentages are yours to set and the calculator will not silently correct them. If they do not sum to 100 it says so and still computes with the numbers as entered, because a plan that sums to 104 is worth seeing exactly as written.
Data edition July 2026, built 2026-09-02, from 2,539 Dubai projects with a published plan out of 2,337 tracked. Definitions and exclusion rules are in the methodology. This is a research tool, not financial advice.
The full report: every community, every developer, ranked.
Payment plan structures in context: price per sqft by community and developer, payment plan structures ranked by cash due before handover, the 2026 to 2029 delivery pipeline, and the CSV behind every table. PDF plus data, delivered instantly.