Buying property in Dubai as a foreigner

Yes, a foreigner can buy property in Dubai, outright, in their own name, with no visa, no residency and no local partner, and has been able to since 2002. The title deed a British, Indian or American buyer receives is the same deed a UAE national receives, issued by the same department on the same afternoon. What the law does restrict is where: foreign ownership is freehold in the areas the government designated for it, which is where most of the city that has been built this century stands, and something less than freehold everywhere else. What follows is who can buy and where, what you need, the purchase itself in the order it happens, what it costs, what a home actually sells for from the register of every sale in the city, and the questions a buyer abroad asks about paying, borrowing, visas and tax.

Who can buy, and where

Dubai's property law lets a person of any nationality own real estate in the areas the Ruler designates for foreign ownership, as freehold or on a long lease of up to ninety-nine years. The designated areas are the freehold areas, and they are the point: Dubai Marina, Downtown, the Palm, Business Bay, Jumeirah Village Circle, Dubai Hills, Arabian Ranches, Dubai South, nearly every master-planned community a visitor has heard of. Outside them, in the older city along the creek, Deira, Bur Dubai and Karama, and in the residential districts of Jumeirah and Al Barsha proper, ownership is reserved to UAE and GCC nationals, and a foreigner rents. There is no residency test and no visa test. A tourist on a thirty-day stamp can complete a purchase, and buyers do.

The freehold areas page reads the designation from the Land Department's own mark on every registered tenancy and lists each area with the share of its homes that are freehold, because a district can be partly freehold, and the page can tell you which. On that reading six in ten homes let in Dubai in a year are in freehold. Ownership can be of an apartment, a villa or a plot of land, and the deed is the same document for each. Two people can own jointly, in the shares they choose, and a home bought by a married couple is commonly registered in both names.

A company can own too, on narrower terms. A company incorporated in the UAE, onshore or in a free zone the department recognises, can hold Dubai freehold in its own name; a foreign company generally cannot hold it directly, and the usual route for a buyer who wants a corporate holding from abroad is an offshore company in Jebel Ali, which the department registers. Which vehicles the department will register, and on what paperwork, is a rule it revises, so a buyer structuring through a company confirms it with the department before the company is formed rather than after.

What you need

For a cash purchase in your own name, a valid passport is the identity document, and it is enough. A resident adds an Emirates ID. Nothing else is required of you personally, and there is no permission to apply for; the freehold designation is the permission.

If you will not be in Dubai to sign, the purchase is done through a power of attorney: a document naming someone here, a lawyer, a relative or the broker's conveyancer, to sign the contract and attend the transfer for you. A power of attorney signed abroad has to be notarised there, attested by the UAE embassy in that country and then by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here, and translated into Arabic; one signed in Dubai is drawn up and notarised at a Dubai notary in an afternoon. The trustee office will check it on the day, so it is drafted to say exactly what the transaction is.

Money moves by manager's cheque on the day of transfer, drawn on a UAE bank, one to the seller for the price and one each for the fees. A buyer with no UAE account either opens a non-resident account, which several banks offer against a passport and proof of address, or routes the funds through the registration trustee's or the brokerage's client account, which then draws the cheques. Agree the route at the outset, because the bank, the trustee and the broker will each ask where the money came from, and a purchase funded by a wire from a named account in your own name, with the paperwork behind it, is the purchase that completes on time.

Buying a completed home, step by step

Most foreign buyers buy a resale: a built home, from its owner, through a broker. The sequence is standard, and every step but the first is written on a Land Department form.

• Find the home and check two things before anything is offered: the advert's Trakheesi permit, which ties it to a real owner and a licensed broker, and the seller's title deed, which the Dubai REST app verifies in a minute
• Agree the price and sign Form F, still called the MOU by most of the market, with a deposit of 10% by cheque held by the broker or the trustee; the form records the price, the completion date, the conditions the sale depends on and what each side forfeits if it fails to complete
• If a mortgage is part of it, the bank's pre-approval comes before Form F is signed and its valuation after; the mortgage brokers page has the Central Bank's deposit rules and what non-residents can borrow
• The seller obtains the developer's no-objection certificate, the NOC, confirming the service charges are paid on Mollak and the developer has no claim on the unit; the developer sets the fee, commonly AED 500 to AED 5,000, and takes anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks
• On the day, at a registration trustee office, the price is paid by manager's cheque, the Land Department's 4% transfer fee and the trustee's fee are paid, the seller's deed is cancelled and yours is issued, electronically, the same afternoon; if the seller had a mortgage, the buyer's funds clear it at the same counter
• Afterwards, the DEWA account is opened in your name, the service charge begins to run to you from the day of transfer, and if the home is to be let the tenancy goes on Ejari

The RERA forms page has each form in full. A cash purchase runs, by convention, from Form F to keys in two to four weeks, most of it waiting on the NOC; a mortgaged one takes six to eight, most of it waiting on the bank. Neither is a rule, and a seller with a mortgage to clear or a developer slow with the NOC lengthens both.

Buying off-plan, from a developer

The other route is to buy a home before it is built, from the developer, and in the register it is now the larger one: of the 166,446 sales the Land Department registered in the twelve months to 11 September 2026, 121,409 were off-plan, seventy-three in every hundred. The sequence is different. There is no broker's Form F; the developer's own sale and purchase agreement, the SPA, is the contract, and its terms, on payment, delay, area tolerance and what happens if either side defaults, are the developer's, so it is the document to read before the reservation fee is paid. The purchase is registered on Oqood, the department's interim register, for the same 4% fee, and the developer must bank every instalment into an escrow account the department oversees and can draw on only as construction is certified, which is the protection Dubai put in place in 2007 and the reason a foreign buyer can pay a developer here in instalments over three years with less anxiety than the arrangement sounds. The instalments follow the developer's payment plan, banks do not lend on an unbuilt home in any number, and the deed is issued at handover after snagging. Off-plan or resale sets the two purchases side by side.

What it costs, on top of the price

For a cash buyer, a little over 6% of the price, paid in full on the day: the department's 4% transfer fee, the agency's 2% plus VAT, the trustee office's AED 4,000 plus VAT, or AED 2,000 under AED 500,000, and AED 580 for the deed. A mortgaged buyer adds the department's quarter of one per cent to register the loan, the bank's arrangement fee and its valuation. None of it can be borrowed and none of it is negotiable with the department, and a buyer who has budgeted the price alone is short at the counter by the difference. What it costs to buy has every item, who pays it, and a worked example on a one-million-dirham home.

What a home sells for

The Land Department publishes every sale it registers, and this site reads that register nightly, so what a home in Dubai costs is a figure, not an estimate. In the twelve months to 11 September 2026 the register recorded 34,791 completed apartments changing hands and 5,255 completed villas. The median price by layout, with the off-plan figure beside it for the same layout bought unbuilt:

Two things in it are worth a foreign buyer's attention. Of the completed apartments, 14,860, four in ten, sold for under AED 1,000,000, and 8,759, one in four, for AED 2,000,000 or more, which is the Golden Visa line. And an off-plan apartment sells for more than a completed one of the same layout, not less, because what is being launched is newer and dearer than what is being resold; the off-plan villa sells for less because the new villa communities stand further out. The reports page has the same reading for every community, and the cheapest areas page ranks them.

The same register, for the one-bedroom apartment, the layout foreigners buy most, in the areas where the most of them were bought. The register files a sale under a Land Department area rather than a community name, so each row names the communities the area holds; every one is a freehold area.

The spread is four and a half to one on the same layout, from AED 450,000 in International City to AED 2,050,000 in Downtown, which is the whole answer to what a one-bedroom in Dubai costs: it depends where, and the area guides say what each place is and what it sells and lets for.

Paying for it from abroad

The dirham is pegged to the US dollar at 3.6725, and has been since 1997, so a buyer funding a purchase in dollars carries no exchange risk between offer and completion, and a buyer in sterling, euros or rupees carries exactly the dollar's. Funds come in by wire, and the cleaner the trail from a named account in your own name to the cheques on the day, the fewer the questions.

A non-resident can borrow here. A shorter list of UAE banks lends to buyers with no UAE visa, on a larger deposit, commonly around half the price, against the same kind of file a resident supplies: passport, proof of address, six months of statements, proof of income and a credit report from home. The Central Bank's caps for residents, 20% down on a first home under AED 5,000,000, run in the mortgage brokers page beside what buyers in each district actually borrowed, from the register of every mortgage the department recorded in a year; the mortgage calculator turns a price, a deposit and a rate into the monthly figure. A buyer who cannot raise that deposit today has rent to own, a developer's scheme or an Islamic bank's Ijarah, registered against the title on the same footing as a purchase.

Your own country's rules travel with you. A buyer resident in India moves money out under the Reserve Bank's liberalised remittance scheme, which caps what an individual may send abroad in a financial year, USD 250,000 as this is written, so a couple buying a two-million-dirham home commonly funds it across two names or two years. A buyer resident in the United Kingdom pays no tax in Dubai on the rent or on a gain, and pays both at home, since the UK taxes its residents on worldwide income and gains and Dubai levies nothing to set against it. Neither of those is a Dubai rule, and both change; the point is to ask an adviser at home before the deposit, not after the deed.

Visas, tax, and what comes after the deed

Buying does not, by itself, give you residency, and does not need to. What it can give you is a visa on the strength of the deed: a two-year investor visa on any property a sole owner holds, since April 2026 (AED 400,000 a share where it is owned jointly), and the ten-year Golden Visa at AED 2,000,000, with the family on either. Each is applied for through the Land Department after the purchase, on the deed, and each rests on the property while it is held.

Dubai levies no annual tax on the value of a home, no tax on the gain when it is sold, and, for an individual, no tax on the rent it earns. What an owner pays is the service charge the building levies every year, and, only if the owner lives in the home, the municipality's housing fee on the DEWA bill; a tenant pays the housing fee on a home that is let. An owner abroad conventionally puts the home with a property manager, who registers the tenancy, collects the cheques and serves the notices the law requires.

One thing a foreign owner should do that nobody at the transfer will mention: make a will that covers the property. Dubai is a Sharia jurisdiction, and without a will the estate of a deceased non-Muslim owner can be distributed under its rules rather than under those of the owner's home country. Dubai maintains a wills registry for non-Muslims, and a will registered there, naming who inherits the home, is the document that settles it. It costs several thousand dirhams and an hour or two, and it is the last step of the purchase.

Where to start

The property for sale index is what is on the market with McCone today, in every freehold community, with the register's figures for the building on each listing's page. Tell us the budget, the country your money is in and whether you can be here to sign, and we will tell you what that buys, what the day costs, and how to complete it from where you are.