Payment plans in Dubai

A payment plan is the developer's way of selling you a home before it exists, or a finished one it has not sold, without a bank in the room. The price is cut into a schedule: a deposit on the day, instalments as the building rises, a sum at handover, and, on the plans that carry the word, a share paid across the years after you have the keys. Three in four homes sold in Dubai in the last year were bought this way, and the vocabulary that comes with them, 60/40, 80/20, one per cent a month, post-handover, is shorthand for where the money falls. This page is the mechanism: what the numbers mean, how a post-handover plan works, where a ready home on a plan can be found, the escrow law every off-plan instalment passes through, what the plan does to the price, what happens if you miss a payment, and what the Dubai Land Department's register says about all of it, because the register records every sale and marks the ones whose payment was deferred.

What a payment plan is, and the shapes it comes in

Every plan has the same four parts, in different proportions. A booking deposit, paid when the unit is reserved and the sale and purchase agreement is signed, commonly a tenth or a fifth of the price, with the department's 4% paid beside it when the sale goes on Oqood. Construction instalments, either on dates or on milestones, the foundation, a floor count, the structure topped out, each a few per cent of the price. A handover payment, when the completion certificate is issued and the keys are ready. And, on a post-handover plan, a tail: a share of the price paid in the years after you have moved in or let the home. The shorthand names the split at the day of handover:

The one-per-cent plan repays a minute with a calculator. On a home at AED 1,000,000 with a 10% deposit, one per cent is AED 10,000 a month; seventy months of it is AED 700,000, and a 20% payment at the keys makes the hundred. The instalment is a per cent of the price, not of what is left, so it never shrinks the way a mortgage's interest does, and a plan that runs seventy or a hundred months has put handover somewhere in the middle of it. Add up every percentage on the schedule, check that they reach a hundred, and find the handover date on it: that is the day the home stops being a plan and starts costing service charges and a DEWA bill, whatever is left to pay.

Post-handover payment plans

A post-handover plan is a developer's loan that is never called one. You take the keys with a share of the price unpaid, commonly a fifth to a half, and pay it off across two to five years, sometimes longer, in instalments the sale and purchase agreement fixes. The developer keeps its security in the register: on an off-plan sale the Oqood stays an Oqood until the last instalment, or the deed is issued with the developer's balance registered against it, and on a completed home the department records the sale as a deferred one, the developer staying the registered owner with your contract and schedule recorded against the title until you have paid. Which of those your developer does is a question for the counter, and the answer belongs in the agreement.

Three things follow from living in a home you have not finished paying for. Service charges are yours from handover, on the whole home, not the share you have paid. Some agreements restrict letting or resale until the balance is cleared, or make either subject to the developer's consent, so an investor buying for the rent should read that clause before the plan's length. And a bank will not easily lend against a home whose title the developer still holds, so the tail is paid from income, or refinanced at the end when the deed exists; the mortgage calculator will tell you what the balance costs at the bank's rate, which is the number the plan is competing with. The escrow account, below, is a rule about construction money: an instalment paid after the completion certificate is paid on a building that stands, and the protection at that stage is the register, which names you.

Ready homes with a payment plan

The plan is the off-plan instrument, and most ready homes are bought with a bank: of the 27,191 residential mortgages the department registered in the twelve months to 31 August 2026, every one was on a completed home, and the mortgage brokers page has what buyers in each district actually borrowed. But a ready home on a plan is a real thing, and the register counts it. The Land Department files a sale whose transfer waits on the balance under its own procedure, Delayed Sell, and since September 2018 under a second one named outright, Sale On Payment Plan; the seller stays the registered owner, the buyer's schedule is recorded against the title, the 4% is paid at the start, and the deed moves on the last payment. The trustee offices that file them describe schedules of up to ten years. In the twelve months to 31 August 2026, 5,024 completed apartments and villas were sold that way, against 34,388 sold outright: one completed home in eight.

Almost all of it is the developer. Two in three of those deferred sales were registered within a year of the building's first completed sale, and three in four within two, which is a developer selling the last of a tower, or a tower it kept, on terms; the register does not name the seller, but a private owner does not sell that way at that moment. Sobha Hartland's towers carried 319 of them in the year, Dubai Studio City's 317, Jumeirah Village Circle's 368 across fifty-one projects, and in the Land Department's Al Merkadh, the Meydan and Mohammed Bin Rashid City area, twenty-seven of every hundred completed homes sold were sold with the payment deferred. The 461 filed under Sale On Payment Plan were even more concentrated: 105 in Discovery Gardens, 80 in Liwan, 81 in Motor City, 41 in Silicon Oasis, 20 in Remraam, a developer clearing completed stock one project at a time, which is what a ready-home plan looks like from the register's side. Which developers are doing it this season is a question for this season; the count is history.

So where to look, in order. The developer's own sales office, for a completed project or the last floors of one handing over; the portals, for the words "post-handover" and "payment plan" on a home whose completion status is ready, and for the phrase "developer unit"; an off-plan resale close to handover, where the seller assigns the contract and the rest of the plan with it, which off-plan or resale and Oqood explain; and rent to own, the completed-home instrument the plan has all but replaced, 758 contracts in a year. On McCone's own books on 15 September 2026, of 491 completed homes for sale, one was offered on a payment plan; of 79 developer units, 38 were. The honest sentence is that a ready home on a plan is a developer's home, and the place to price it is the building's own page, where the community reports print what its neighbours paid.

The escrow account rule

Law No. 8 of 2007 is the reason a stranger can pay a developer for three years for a home that is not there. Before a developer may sell a unit off-plan it must open an escrow account for that project, with a bank the department approves, and every dirham a buyer pays, and every dirham a lender advances, goes into it. The account belongs to the project: the developer's own creditors cannot touch it, and the developer draws on it only for that project's construction, against progress certified by a consultant and approved by RERA, which audits the account. When the completion certificate is issued, the escrow agent keeps back five per cent of what the account took, for a year from the day the units are registered in the buyers' names, as security for defects. A developer who misuses the account faces a fine of at least AED 100,000 and, the law says, prison. The department has since added a condition of its own, as it describes its practice: a developer must own the land outright and have either built or banked a fifth of the project before the first unit is sold. Treat the exact threshold as the department's to state; the requirement is real.

What the rule buys you is that your instalments are spent on your building, and that a project which stops is a project whose account can be returned to the people who paid into it: a cancelled project goes to a judicial committee that has liquidated projects and refunded buyers from their escrow since 2013, and the interim register is how it knows who they are. What the rule does not buy you is a date. Escrow protects the money, not the calendar; the handover date and its grace period are in the sale and purchase agreement, and Dubai's history holds projects that came in early, on time, late and never. The practical checks are three. Every cheque and transfer goes to an account named for the project's escrow, never to the developer's general account or a broker's, and the receipt should say so. The project is registered with RERA, its escrow account is open and its completion percentage is moving, all of which the department's Dubai REST app shows without a login. And the advertisement that brought you carries a permit number, because a developer cannot advertise an off-plan project until the project and its escrow exist.

What the plan does to the price

A plan is finance, and finance is never free. Where the bank's cost sits in the rate, the developer's sits in the price: the "waived" 4%, the interest-free years, the one per cent a month are all paid for somewhere in the figure on the brochure, and the way to see it is to ask what the home costs paid in full, which developers commonly quote lower and rarely advertise. Then put the balance through the mortgage calculator at a bank's rate, and the deposit through the rent or buy calculator against what it would earn or save: the plan is worth taking when its cost, the gap between the plan price and the cash price, is less than what the same money would cost to borrow or earn to hold.

The register cannot see the plan, only the price, and what it says about the price is this. In the twenty-six towers where ten or more off-plan sales and ten or more completed resales were registered in the same twelve months, a home sold on the developer's plan and a home resold complete fetched the same price a square foot: the median ratio is 0.99, and off-plan was the dearer in eight of the twenty-six. In the sixty-five towers where ten or more deferred sales and ten or more outright sales were registered in the year, the deferred sale's price a square foot was 99% of the outright one's, and in half the towers within five per cent either way. So there is no discount for paying now and no premium for paying later that the register can find; the cost of a plan is in the developer's price against the cash price, and in what the money would otherwise do. One warning about the comparison people actually make. A launch registers well above the completed resales in the same district, 1,659 a square foot against 1,093 in Dubai South, 2,723 against 1,822 in Business Bay, 4,072 against 1,940 in the Marina's area, and that gap is a new building priced for its handover year set against an older one next door, not the plan; the community reports keep the two prices side by side for every community, and never blend them.

Missing an instalment

On an off-plan home the answer is written in law, and since 2017 it does not need a court. Article 11 of Law No. 13 of 2008, as rewritten by Law No. 19 of 2017, sets the procedure: the developer notifies the Land Department of the missed payment; the department serves you a written thirty-day notice, in person, by registered post or by email, to pay or to reach a settlement, which it will try to broker; and only when the thirty days have passed with nothing paid and nothing agreed may the developer act, and what it may do depends on how far the building has got. Our reading of the tiers, checked in September 2026, with the department's procedure the authority:

The percentages are ceilings, not entitlements; the law is public policy, so an agreement that gives the developer more is unenforceable to that extent, and one that promises you less than the refund is not worth the clause. On a completed home bought on a deferred sale the picture is different: the developer holds the title, your contract is recorded against it, and, as the law firms read it, unwinding the registration takes a Dubai court order rather than the department's thirty-day letter, with the agreement's own default clause argued inside that. In either case the useful step comes before the date: a developer with a half-built tower would rather reschedule than terminate, the department will mediate, and an assignment to another buyer, with the developer's no-objection certificate after the minimum paid share, is the exit that keeps what you have paid.

What the register shows

The department registers every sale in Dubai and marks two things on each: whether the property was off-plan or completed, and, for a completed home, whether the payment was deferred. Both are the plan's footprint. Apartments and villas, from 2009, the interim register's first full year; the last row runs to 31 August 2026:

Two stories are in that table. The first is the plan's rise: one home in ten was bought off-plan in 2011, the year after the crash cleared the launches, and three in four are now, on a register that recorded nine times as many sales in 2025 as it did then. The second is the ready-home plan's peak and retreat: in 2021, with the developers holding the unsold stock of a slow decade and the market turning, one completed home in four was sold with its payment deferred; as those towers cleared and the launches returned, it fell back to one in eight. The twelve months to 31 August 2026, by the Land Department's areas where 2,500 or more homes were sold, with the community each area holds:

Read the second column as the answer to whether a community is being bought on a plan at all. Dubai South, Dubai Islands, Bukadra and the Dubailand areas are launches: nine in ten homes, or every one, sold before they were built, and a buyer there is choosing a developer and a schedule. The Marina, Meydan and Downtown are the other Dubai, where the greater part of what sells is a completed home and the plan, where it exists, is the developer's on a handover tower. The last column is where those towers were in the year to August 2026: Meydan and Mohammed Bin Rashid City, Al Jaddaf, Jumeirah Village Triangle and Arjan; Ghaf Woods' figure is sixteen sales in a community that has barely begun to hand over. Every community's own page in the area guides prints its off-plan launches beside its completed resales, at the price each fetched.

What to check before you sign

• The account: every receipt names the project's escrow account, and the project, its account and its completion percentage are on the department's Dubai REST app
• The register: the Oqood arrives within weeks of signing, in your name, with a registration number, and until it does the law says there is no sale
• The schedule: the percentages add up to a hundred, the handover date is marked on it, and you know what falls due that day, the final construction instalment, the first year's service charge, the department's issuance fees for the deed
• The date: the handover date in the agreement, its grace period, and what happens to the post-handover instalments if handover is late, since a plan dated from the keys and a plan dated from signing are different plans
• The tail: on a post-handover plan, who holds the title until the last payment, whether you may let or sell the home in the meantime, and whether the balance can be cleared early without a charge
• The exit: the paid share after which the developer will consent to an assignment, commonly 30% to 40%, and its fee for the certificate
• The price: what the home costs paid in full, the 4% and who is paying it, and the building's own registered prices on this site, so that the plan's cost is a number rather than a feeling
• The bank at the end: a lender lends at most 50% against an off-plan home and values it at handover, not at launch, so a buyer planning to refinance the tail should ask a mortgage broker what the deed will be worth to a bank on that day

Whether to take one

A plan is the right instrument for a buyer with time, an income that can carry a schedule for three or five years, and no wish to borrow twenty-five years from a bank, and it is the only instrument for most of what Dubai now sells, since three in four homes are sold on one. It is the wrong instrument for a buyer who needs to move this year or a landlord who needs the rent from the first month, for whom a completed home and, if wanted, a mortgage at 80% is the honest route; off-plan or resale sets the two purchases side by side, and buying property in Dubai as a foreigner runs both from abroad, with what each layout sold for on the two routes in the year. Whichever you take, the plan's cost is measurable, in the gap between the plan price and the cash price and in what the register says the building's neighbours paid, and a plan that is priced fairly against those is a plan worth signing.