Sell property in Dubai

What selling costs

What a seller pays, and what the buyer pays that you will be asked about

A Dubai sale carries a handful of fees, most of them the buyer’s. What the Land Department and the Central Bank fix is stated as regulation; what the market has settled by habit is stated as convention.

Agency commissionConvention · Seller

2% of the price to the agent who sells it, plus 5% VAT on the commission — 2.1% of the price all in — paid on completion by manager’s cheque like everything else that day. The buyer conventionally pays the same 2% to the agent who found them the home; where one agent has both sides, the arrangement is whatever the two forms say. It is a conversation, not a tariff, and it is written on the Form A before a single advert runs.

The developer’s NOCConvention · Seller

The no-objection certificate confirms the service charges are settled on Mollak and the developer has no claim on the unit; without it the trustee office will not transfer. The developer sets the fee — commonly AED 500 to AED 5,000 — and the seller conventionally pays it, along with any service charge arrears it turns up. It takes a few working days to a few weeks, depending on the developer, and it is the step that most often decides the completion date.

Releasing a mortgageRegulation · Seller, if mortgaged

The seller’s bank issues a liability letter with the payoff figure, the buyer’s funds — or the buyer’s bank’s — clear it at completion, and the Land Department charges a fixed fee to release the charge from the title. The Central Bank caps the bank’s early-settlement fee at 1% of the outstanding balance or AED 10,000, whichever is lower. The mortgage brokers page carries the sequence the two banks and the trustee have to agree on the same morning.

The transfer feeRegulation · Buyer

4% of the price, to the Land Department. The department’s schedule nominally splits it between the two sides; no sale in the market is done that way, and every contract says the buyer pays it. A seller is not paying it — but a seller who priced the home should know the buyer is budgeting 4% on top of the figure, because it is part of what the buyer is weighing. A home passing to a spouse or a child is not a sale at all: the department registers it as a gift at 0.125% of its valuation, and gifting property has that transfer, its documents and the register’s count of it.

The trustee office and the deedRegulation · Buyer

AED 4,000 plus VAT to the registration trustee office (AED 2,000 under a price of AED 500,000) and AED 580 for the new title deed, both conventionally the buyer’s. The trustee office is the private, department-licensed office where the transfer is actually done and the seller’s deed is cancelled — nineteen of them on the department’s list, by area, on that page.

Service charges and utilitiesConvention · Seller

Service charges are settled to the day of transfer — paid in advance for the period, apportioned between the two sides on the day — and the DEWA account is closed with its final bill settled, the deposit returned to the seller. A home with arrears does not get its NOC, so this is paid before the sale, not out of it.

TaxRegulation · Seller

The UAE levies no personal income tax and no capital gains tax on an individual’s sale of a home, as at 14 Sept 2026. A property held through a company can fall inside the corporate tax regime, and a seller who is tax-resident elsewhere may owe tax at home on the gain — neither is the Land Department’s business, and both are a question for an adviser before the Form A, not after the transfer.

Checked 14 Sept 2026. The department’s fees and the Central Bank’s cap are what a regulator can change; commission and the NOC are what the market and the developer set. The cost of buying explainer carries the buyer’s side of the same day, worked on a price, and the DLD fee calculator itemises the seller’s side for yours.

The seller’s year

How many homes sold, month by month, and at what price

Every completed apartment and villa the Land Department transferred in the last twenty-four months, by the month it was registered.

The busiest month of the two years was October 2024, with 4,677 resales; the quietest May 2026, with 2,067. From March 2026 the register recorded fewer transfers in every month than in the same month a year earlier — 15,654 resales in March to August against 24,949 a year before, 37% fewer — while the median price a square foot rose from AED 1,360 to AED 1,407, 3% up. Fewer sales at higher prices is the register’s reading; it does not say why. For a seller it means a buyer is weighing fewer homes and taking longer over each, and a price set from the record sells while a price set from hope sits.

Completed homes only — the developer’s off-plan sales fell over the same months, so the shape is the market’s, not a shift between the two registers. August 2026 is the last complete month on the day of the reading; the whole register was loaded in one snapshot, so no month is short for having been read early. The month a sale is registered is the month it transferred, which is commonly two to six weeks after the offer was agreed.

Where the year’s buyers spent

66% of the year’s resales — 26,707 of 40,458 — were under AED 2,000,000, and 7% were over five million. A seller of a two-bedroom flat at a million and a half is selling into the deepest part of the market; a seller at eight million is selling to one buyer in twenty, and prices against a shorter list of comparables in a smaller pool.

Completed apartments and villas, city-wide, the twelve months to 31 Aug 2026, with the implausible rows every report on this site excludes. Shares are rounded and may not sum to a hundred.

Three sales that run differently

A home with a tenant in it, a home not yet built, a seller not in the country

The sequence above is the plain case. These three are common enough to have their own rules, and each changes the price, the paperwork or the timing.

With a tenant in it

The tenancy passes to the buyer with the home — the contract, the post-dated cheques and the deposit — and the tenant’s rights under it are unchanged by the change of landlord. A buyer who wants to live in it has to wait: the law lets a landlord recover a home in order to sell it only on twelve months’ notice served through the notary public or by registered post, and a notice given to sell and then not followed by a sale is the kind of case the Rental Dispute Centre hears. Many buyers prefer a tenanted home; it is priced on the rent, and the yield calculator is how they price it. A seller who does not want the building’s year of cheques to run through their hands until then hands the tenancy to the property management desk.

Off-plan, before handover

Sold by assignment, with the developer’s no-objection certificate, and the department records the new buyer on Oqood in place of you. Most developers require a minimum share of the price to have been paid first — commonly 30% to 40% — and charge their own fee for consenting. What you are selling is the equity paid in and the payment plan the buyer takes over; the price is that equity plus whatever premium the project has earned, and it is set against other assignments in the same project, not against completed homes. The off-plan or resale explainer sets the two beside each other.

From abroad

A power of attorney, notarised and attested for use in the UAE, lets an attorney — your agent, a lawyer, a relative — sign the Form A, the Form F and the transfer on your behalf. The trustee office verifies the attorney document against the notary’s record on the day. The proceeds go by manager’s cheque or bank transfer to an account you name, and a seller with a UAE mortgage settles it through the same sequence. Sellers abroad routinely complete without flying in; what they cannot delegate is the decision on the price.

The tenancy rules are Dubai’s tenancy law as the Rental Dispute Centre applies it, checked 14 Sept 2026; a developer’s assignment terms are its own. How a financed buyer completes — and why a cash buyer completes sooner — is on the mortgage brokers page: the register filed about 67 mortgages for every hundred completed-home sales in the year, so most sellers meet a bank on the other side of the table.

Where this leads

The rest of a seller’s reading

What every building in Dubai sold for is on the Dubai property prices page, and each community’s area guide carries its towers ranked. The forms the sale runs on are in the RERA forms explainer, the deed in the title deed one, and the buyer’s side of transfer day in the cost of buying; the steps from the Form F to the deed with who does each, and a seller abroad’s power of attorney, are on conveyancing in Dubai. What is for sale beside your home today is on Buy; the people who would sell it are on the team.