Gifting property in Dubai

Dubai lets a home pass between the closest members of a family for a fraction of what the same transfer would cost as a sale. A father putting an apartment into his daughter's name, a wife added to the deed of the villa, a mother handing the flat to the son who has moved back: each is a transfer of ownership like any other, done at the same trustee office as a sale, on the same title deed, and the Dubai Land Department files every one of them in the same register as the sales, under a heading of its own. The difference is the fee. A sale pays 4% of the price; a gift between first-degree relatives pays 0.125% of the property's value, a thirty-second of it. This page has the rule and its edges as they stood on 15 September 2026, the morning the transfer takes, what happens when there is a loan on the home, and the thing no other page prints: how many Dubai families do this, where, and what they hand over, from the register that records each one.

What a gift transfer is, and who can make one

The department's word for it is a grant, from the Arabic hiba, and the register files it under Gifts: the transfer of a property from one owner to another for no price. What earns the reduced fee is not the absence of money but the relationship. The rule, as the department applies it, is first-degree relatives: between spouses, and between a parent and a child, in either direction. A gift to anyone outside that circle, a brother or sister, a grandchild, a son- or daughter-in-law, a friend, a business partner, is a transfer the department registers as a sale, at the sale's 4%, whatever the family calls it.

The department has also, for some years, treated a transfer into a company as a gift where the company is wholly owned by the giver or by first-degree relatives of theirs, which is how some families hold a home they mean to pass down. Which companies qualify, and from which jurisdictions, has been changed more than once, so that route is a question for the department or a lawyer on the day rather than for a page written in advance.

Two edges are worth knowing before anyone books the appointment. A gift has to land on someone who can own the home: a foreign national can only receive one in an area where a foreign national can own, which is the freehold areas, and buying property in Dubai as a foreigner has who can hold a deed where. And a gift is made between living people. A home that passes on its owner's death is an inheritance, a different procedure that runs through the courts, and for a non-Muslim what applies depends on whether there is a registered will; a good part of why families gift is to settle the question while the giver can still sign.

What it costs

The department's fees are regulation and the same at every office. These are its figures as this site understands them on 15 September 2026, written from knowledge of the procedure rather than copied from a fee schedule on the day; the department can change any of them, the minimum and the trustee's charge most easily, so confirm the day's figures at the office before a cheque is drawn.

The arithmetic is why the procedure exists. The register carries a value against every gift it records, which this site reads as the department's valuation for the fee, and the median value of a residential apartment gifted in 2025 was AED 1,390,000. As a sale that home pays AED 55,600 at the counter. As a gift it pays 0.125%, which is AED 1,738, and if the minimum is where this site reads it, that falls under it: the department's fee on the median gifted apartment of 2025 was the minimum. The median gifted villa was valued at AED 3,750,219, on which 4% is AED 150,009 and 0.125% is AED 4,688. Where the department issues a formal valuation certificate there is a charge for that too, which the office will quote. Nothing on the list is borrowable: like a sale's fees, a gift's are paid in cash at the counter, by whichever side the family decides. The cost of buying has the sale's side of the same table, fee by fee.

How it is done

The same door as a sale: a registration trustee office, one of the private, department-licensed offices where every Dubai transfer is completed, with both sides present or represented by a notarised power of attorney. A gift with its papers in order is a morning. What takes weeks is the paper that proves the relationship, so that is where the work starts.

• The original title deed, and the passports and Emirates IDs of the giver and the receiver, or passports alone for a receiver who is not resident
• Proof of the relationship: a birth certificate for a parent and a child, a marriage certificate for spouses. A certificate issued outside the UAE is attested for use here, which commonly runs the issuing country's foreign ministry, the UAE embassy in that country and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the UAE, and then translated into Arabic by a legal translator
• The developer's no-objection certificate, which confirms the service charges are settled and the developer has no claim on the home; the trustee will not transfer without it, on a gift as on a sale
• The bank's letter, where there is a mortgage, in the form the next section describes
• A power of attorney, notarised and attested, for a giver or a receiver who is abroad

The department values the home, the fee is paid on the valuation, and the old deed is cancelled and the new one issued in the receiver's name in the same act, on the Dubai REST app the same afternoon. What follows is what follows any transfer: the DEWA account moves to the new owner, the service charge account with it, and a tenant in the home stays, because a tenancy is registered on Ejari against the property rather than against the owner, and the new owner takes the tenancy contract with its cheques and its renewal date.

A mortgaged home

The bank's charge sits on the record beside the deed, and the department will not move the title while the bank objects. There are two ways through, and the bank decides which it will allow. The first is to repay the loan before the gift: the bank issues a liability letter with the payoff figure, the loan is settled, the department releases the charge from the title for its fixed fee, and the gift is then registered on a clean deed. The second is for the bank to consent to the transfer and take a new charge against the receiver, which in practice means the receiver qualifying for a mortgage in their own name, under the same Central Bank rules as any borrower, and the department's registration fee on the new loan. A bank rarely lets a loan pass to a person it has not lent to, so a family with a mortgaged home is usually choosing between paying it off and the receiving relative borrowing afresh. Mortgage brokers in Dubai has what a new loan costs to set up and what buyers in each district actually borrowed.

What the register shows

The department files every gift in the same stream as the sales, under Gifts, and this site read that stream in full on 15 September 2026, from the register's rows to 31 August. The series since 2015, beside the sales the same register recorded, with the register thin before then:

Homes are residential apartments and villas; the rest of a year's gifts are offices and shops, hotel apartments, plots of land and whole buildings. In 2025 the department registered 9,556 gifts, twenty-six a day, against 214,604 sales: for every hundred sales, four and a half transfers went through at the family rate. Since the start of 2024 it has registered 24,824 of them, 18,152 of them homes, and 2026 is running at the same pace, 5,896 to the end of August. The count has grown with the market, from under two thousand a year a decade ago, but the rate has not: gifts have run at between four and six per hundred sales in every year since 2022. The exception in the series is 2018, when sales fell to their lowest year in this series and gifts of land jumped from 212 to 1,049, so that the department registered one gift for every eight sales; the register records what was filed, not why.

The 9,556 of 2025 were 7,062 apartments and other units, of which 5,488 were homes, 1,062 offices and shops and 505 hotel apartments; 1,335 villas; 868 plots of land; and 291 whole buildings. Of the 6,823 homes, the 1,335 villas are one in five. That share was between a quarter and a third in every year to 2021, and it has fallen since not because fewer villas are gifted, there were 351 in 2015, but because the apartment stock built since then has begun to be handed down. The department also names the procedure on every row. Of the 9,556, 7,796 were a plain grant of a completed, owned property; 1,021 were a grant at pre-registration, a home still on Oqood and not yet built, so one gift in nine was of a property not yet built; 552 were a grant on a delayed sale, a completed home whose purchase was still being paid off to the developer; and 187 were filed under grant development.

Where the gifts are

The count follows the stock, so the busiest districts are the biggest ones. The rate is the more telling figure: gifts per hundred home sales says where the homes are old enough, and held long enough, to be passed on. The twenty districts where the most homes were gifted in 2025, with their community names, the homes the same register recorded sold in the district that year, and the rate:

Read the last column and the map of Dubai's ages appears. The Palm, the Greens and the Views, the Springs, Downtown and the Marina, the districts built and first bought fifteen to twenty years ago, gift a home for every four to nine they sell; the Palm gifted 347 homes in a year in which it sold 1,469. Dubai South, the Ranches 3 side of Wadi Al Safa 5, Al Barari's district, where much of the stock is new, gift one for every fifty to ninety sold, because a home has to be owned for a while before anyone thinks to pass it on. International City, the oldest of the low-cost districts, sits with the prime districts at nine. The area guides carry each district's sales and rents from the same register.

When it is not a gift

The rate is for the relationship, and the department checks the relationship on the certificates. A transfer that cannot show one is registered as a sale at 4%, and calling it a gift on the form does not change what it is. The cases that reach the counter expecting the family rate and do not get it:

• A brother to a sister, a grandparent to a grandchild, an uncle to a nephew, a parent-in-law to a son- or daughter-in-law: not first-degree, so a sale
• A transfer between friends or business partners for no money, or for a price the parties would rather not write down: a sale, at 4% of the department's valuation
• A transfer into a company that is not wholly owned within the first degree, or from a jurisdiction the department does not accept for the purpose: a sale
• A home passing on its owner's death: not a gift at all but an inheritance, through the courts and then the department, on its own documents

And a gift is a transfer, not a loan of the title. Once registered, the receiver owns the home outright, can sell it, let it or mortgage it, and the giver has no claim on the deed; a home given back is another gift, at another fee. The receiver also takes the home as it stands, with its tenant, its service charge account and, until the bank is dealt with, its mortgage, which is why the paperwork for a gift is the paperwork for a sale with a birth or marriage certificate on top. Sell property in Dubai has what the home is worth from its building's recorded sales, for a family weighing a gift against a sale to a stranger, and what a sale to a stranger costs the seller.