Land and plots for sale in Dubai

By district

What a plot sold for, district by district

Median price, plot size and rate per square metre for every Land Department area with 10 or more bare-plot sales registered in the twenty-four months to 11 Sept 2026, with the Land Department's freehold mark on the district's houses and on its flats beside each. Cheapest by the metre first. Each community name opens its area guide.

The cheapest ground by the metre is in Al Warqa Third and Al Warsan Third, at about AED 2,800 a square metre — AED 260 a square foot — and neither is freehold. The cheapest freehold ground is Madinat Hind 4 (Damac Hills 2) at AED 4,003 a square metre — and the cheapest freehold plot outright too, at a median AED 723,000 on 175 square metres, the footprint of a townhouse rather than the ground for a villa. The dearest is Al Wasl at AED 28,161, 10 times Al Warsan Third, and then Hadaeq Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid — Dubai Hills Estate — at AED 19,364. The busiest districts were Al Warsan Third (251), Madinat Hind 4 (219), Wadi Al Safa 5 (126) and Wadi Al Safa 3 (111). Read the size column with the rate: Wadi Al Safa 3’s AED 24,600,000 median is a 1,400-square-metre plot in the Al Barari and Majan belt; Wadi Al Safa 5’s AED 6,000,000 is a 384-square-metre one at nearly the same rate. And read the freehold marks before the price: Al Warqa Third, Nad Al Hamar, Al Mizhar First, Al Goze First, Al Barsha Second, Al Mamzer, Um Suqaim Second, Al Satwa and Al Wasl are districts whose houses are not freehold — where a UAE or GCC national builds a family house — and the register prices them as it prices everything else.

Bare plots — Land Department rows typed as land with no project name — sold and registered in the twenty-four months to 11 Sept 2026, for every area clearing 10; a year alone would seat half as many districts, which is why the window is two. The row is the Land Department area, because a plot has no project and no building for the register to file it under; where we publish a guide for a community the area serves, it is named beneath, and an area serving several communities is one reading shared between them rather than a figure per name. 15 of the 26 districts here hold a community we publish; the rest are the old villa districts east of the creek, the Umm Suqeim and Al Barsha belts, and Al Warsan, which the register prices and we do not write guides for. The master project is the register’s own label where its rows carry one. Freehold is the Land Department’s mark on every Ejari contract, the one the freehold areas page grades a whole district by — read here over the twelve months to 10 Sept 2026 and cut by kind, the houses let and the flats let, because the two can disagree and a plot buyer needs the right one: Nad Al Hamar reads 98% freehold on every home, and every one of its freehold homes is a flat — all 56 of its houses are not, and a plot there is villa land. Freehold is 95 in 100 and above, not freehold under 5, part between; a kind prints no mark under 20 houses or 50 flats let, which leaves Wadi Al Safa 4 unmarked. The houses’ mark is the one for a villa plot; the flats’ is the one where a district’s plots are building sites, as Arjan’s and Jumeirah Garden City’s in Al Satwa are. Nad Al Hamar, Jabal Ali First, Al Satwa and Al Wasl carry two different marks, which is a district holding both titles side by side; the deed decides. Wadi Al Safa 4's 33 sales fell on 8 registration days — a developer’s parcels moving between developers in batches, at a median 4,208 square metres, so the count is not a count of buyers and the price is a parcel’s. AED a square foot is the metre figure divided by 10.764. “The middle half” is the 25th to the 75th percentile of the district’s rates; a wide one — Al Merkadh, Nad Al Shiba First — is a district holding a villa plot and a tower site under one name. The change column is the district’s median rate against its own over the twenty-four months before, printed only where the district cleared 10 sales in both; a district’s own rate moves with its own mix too, and a figure on 10 or twenty sales is a reading, not a trend.

The dearest

The dearest plots sold in Dubai

The ten dearest bare plots registered in the twenty-four months to 11 Sept 2026, by price paid — the date, the district, the master project the register names, the size and the rate.

The dearest ground in Dubai by price is a tower’s footprint, not a home’s: a 5,602-square-metre site in Downtown Dubai, registered on 14 Nov 2025 for AED 690,416,104 — AED 123,245 a square metre. The parcels beneath it in City of Arabia are a different thing again, 100,000 to 165,000 square metres of estate land moving between developers at AED 2,421 to 3,967 a square metre, beside the AED 4,306 the district table prints for Wadi Al Safa 4. By the metre the dearest is Jumeira Bay: a 2,499-square-metre plot on 4 Mar 2025 for AED 330,000,000, AED 132,053 a square metre, and a 1,379-square-metre one the October before at AED 126,904 — a villa plot on the island priced above a Downtown tower site. Then Al Wasl District (930 square metres, AED 104,301 a square metre) and Palm Jumeirah (1,177 square metres, AED 99,405 a square metre).

Price paid as registered, the plot area as the register records it, and the master project as the register names it — no address is added to any row, because the register carries none for a plot and we will not invent one. Every row is development land: a site a tower will stand on, or a parcel a developer will cut into plots. The plot a family builds a house on is among the 300-to-3,000-square-metre plots on the district table, not here — the one exception on this list is Jumeirah Bay’s, a villa plot on an island that has very few of them. Rates are price over area, rounded to the dirham.

Buying the ground

How buying a plot differs from buying a home

The transfer is the same morning at the same office; the questions before and after it are not.

Where you may hold it. A foreign national holds property outright only in Dubai’s designated freehold areas, and that applies to ground as it applies to a flat. The freehold marks on the district table are the Land Department’s own, the same mark the freehold areas in Dubai page grades every district by, read here on the district’s houses and on its flats separately. The districts whose houses read not freehold — mostly the old villa belts — are where a UAE or GCC national builds; a villa plot there is not for a foreign buyer however it is advertised. Where the houses read part, or the houses and the flats disagree, both titles exist side by side and the plot’s own deed decides. What that deed is, and what it says, is in the title deed; the whole process for a foreign buyer is in buying property in Dubai as a foreigner.

What it costs on top. The Land Department’s transfer fee is 4% of the price, the same on a plot as on a home, and the transfer is done at a registration trustee office, where the seller and buyer — or their attorneys — sit across a desk and the deed is reissued in the buyer’s name the same day. The fee, the trustee’s charge and the rest of the bill are in the cost of buying, and the morning itself in the trustee office. One difference worth knowing before the deposit, from our desk’s experience rather than any rulebook: a mortgage on bare land is a bank’s own product rather than the regulated home loan, and the banks that offer one lend a smaller share of the price for a shorter term than they would on a built house — most plots at the prices on this page are bought for cash, and a buyer who needs to borrow should ask before committing. Our mortgage desk will say what is available on the day.

Building on it. A plot in a master-planned community comes with rules that were set before it was sold — what may be built (a villa, a townhouse row, a tower), how much of the plot it may cover, how many floors, how far from each boundary — written into the master developer’s plot regulations, and as a rule a design has to clear the master developer before Dubai Municipality issues the building permit, through a licensed consultant. In the old districts the municipality’s own rules apply directly. The permitted floor area is what a plot is really priced on: two plots of the same size with different buildable areas are two different values, and the register does not record that figure, which is one reason a district’s middle half is as wide as it is. How long any of that takes depends on the community, the consultant and the drawings, and no figure is printed here for it because none we could source would be honest.

Where this leads

The house, the district, and what is on the market

The house that goes on the plot is the other half of this page: villas in Dubai prices the completed house by bedroom and by community from both registers, and carries the houses sold with their plots that this page leaves out. Every community named on the district table has an area guide with its whole register; the cheapest areas in Dubai ranks the same communities by what a home there costs, and property investment in Dubai is what a dirham put into a built home here has returned, which is the comparison a plot has to beat.

We list plots when we have them, under property for sale, and there are never many: the register above is the better guide to what ground costs, and it does not depend on what is listed this week. Tell us the district and the size and we will say what the last plot there transferred for, and whether a foreign buyer can hold it.