Villas in Dubai

The price of a room

What a villa costs by bedroom count, with the flat beside it

Both registers cut by layout for every house size from two bedrooms to six, city-wide, the same twelve months — and the apartment at the same bedroom count where the flat pages price one.

The four-bedroom is the middle of the villa market, and the three-bed its volume: 24,322 three-bed tenancies and 16,477 four-beds, against 5,819 five-beds and 3,435 two-beds. The fourth bedroom adds about AED 60,000 a year to the three-bed’s rent and AED 900,000 to its price; the fifth adds AED 79,800 a year again. Two things worth reading twice. The two-bedroom house resold for more than the three-bedroom — AED 3,300,000 against AED 3,250,000 — because 209 of the year’s 383 two-bed house resales were in the Springs, and most three-bed ones were in Town Square, the Valley and Villanova. And at every size both registers price both kinds, the house is dearer to rent and cheaper to buy than the flat: a three-bed house let for 25% more than a three-bed flat and resold for 8% less; a four-bed house for 14% more and 45% less. A tenant pays for the garden; a buyer pays for the tower’s address.

Villa-typed rows only, because the plot rows carry no bedroom count. Rent is the median of every Ejari villa contract for the layout registered in the twelve months to 14 Sept 2026; price is the median completed resale registered in the twelve months to 10 Sept 2026, off-plan left out. The six-bedroom price is nine sales and is printed for completeness, not for use. The flat column is the apartment pages’ own reading — the three-bedroom page prices the house beside the flat in more detail, and at four bedrooms the register holds only 335 completed apartment resales in a year, so the four-bed flat is the rarity and the four-bed house is the market. City medians hide a great deal — a townhouse in Rukan and a villa on the Palm are in the same row — so the tables that follow do the same sum area by area.

To rent

What a villa rents for, area by area

Median annual rent for a villa or townhouse across every Ejari contract registered in the twelve months to 14 Sept 2026, for each Land Department area with 100 or more of them — with the three- and four-bedroom medians where the area let 20 or more. Cheapest first. Each community name opens its area guide.

The cheapest rows with a community we write a guide for are Saih Shuaib 2 — Dubai Industrial City — at AED 75,000, and then Madinat Hind 4, which is Damac Hills 2, at AED 95,000 on 4,873 contracts — the busiest house district in the city, and the one a family on a budget most often ends up in. The dearest were on Palm Jumeirah, at AED 950,000, which is 10 times as much as Damac Hills 2 for the same kind of home. The old villa districts people search for by name are here under the register’s own spelling: Jumeirah is Jumeirah First, Second and Third, Umm Suqeim is Um Suqaim First to Third, the Springs is Al Thanayah Fourth, Arabian Ranches is Wadi Al Safa 6, the Meadows and the Lakes are Al Thanyah Third, Dubai Hills is Hadaeq Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid, and District One is Al Merkadh. The middle-half column is worth as much as the median: an area whose middle half spans AED 200,000 holds two different markets under one name — Wadi Al Safa 7 is Rukan’s townhouses and Arabian Ranches 2’s villas in one row.

AED a year, the median of every Ejari villa and townhouse contract registered in the twelve months to 14 Sept 2026 — new leases and renewals together, so a new let signed today usually costs more than the median beside it. The row is the Land Department area, because that is the unit the register files a tenancy 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 one figure per name. 39 of the 64 areas here hold a community we publish; the rest are the old villa districts along the creek, the Jumeirah coast and the Al Khawaneej and Al Warqa belt, which the register prices and we do not write guides for. The top two rows are Dubai Industrial City’s staff villas and the Al Awir farm belt, priced by the register and not a market most searchers mean. A company letting a house for its staff is a registered tenancy like any other and is counted. “The middle half” is the 25th to the 75th percentile; a bedroom cell is blank where the area let fewer than 20 of that layout. Sizes are the register’s built areas, medianed over the contracts carrying a plausible one — in the old districts the register often carries the plot instead, which is why Al Barsha Third reads as fifteen thousand square feet.

Sold with the plot

The houses the register files as land

Completed transfers of a house sold with its plot — filed as land under the developer's project name, with no bedroom count — in the twelve months to 10 Sept 2026, for every community with 10 or more. Cheapest first.

This is where the two busiest house markets in Dubai are, and they appear nowhere else on the page: Damac Lagoons (1,122 sales at a median AED 2,900,000) and Damac Hills 2 (1,066 sales at a median AED 1,750,000), every one of them filed this way. Read the size column with more care here than anywhere: a row at 1,500 to 2,000 square feet is a row of built townhouses changing hands, and a row at 6,000 to 8,000 is a villa plot in a project that may or may not have handed over — Nad Al Sheba Gardens’ phases 10 and 11 registered 194 transfers in the year in a project that, as far as we can tell, was still handing over, so many of those are the register’s prices for houses that were not yet standing, and the rate per foot is a plot rate. The register does not say which; the project names do, and they are printed.

Land Department rows typed as land and carrying a project name, transferred as completed property in the twelve months to 10 Sept 2026; a bare plot with no project is not here. The register files a house this way when the title is to the plot rather than to a unit, which is how most of the newer villa estates were sold — Damac’s, Emaar’s golf-course villas, Meraas’s Nad Al Sheba Gardens, Sobha’s and Aldar’s — so a community can sit in both tables, with its townhouses in one and its plot-titled villas in the other: Dubai Hills, Damac Hills, Mudon, the Valley, Al Barari and Jumeirah Golf Estates do. The rate per foot is price over the register’s recorded area, which for these rows is usually the plot, not the house, and so reads lower than a villa-typed row for the same home. City-wide the 4,214 rows went for a median AED 3,480,000 on 2,364 square feet.

Where this leads

The villas and townhouses we are letting and selling

To see what is on the market rather than what the register recorded, our villas to rent, townhouses to rent, villas for sale and townhouses for sale carry a real asking price on each — and, unlike the register, tell a villa from a townhouse.

Every community on this page has an area guide carrying its whole register, layout by layout. If the house is a budget decision rather than a preference, the cheapest areas in Dubai ranks every community, to rent and to buy; the best areas to live shortlists the villa communities by what a family needs around the house — the school run, the gate, the drive; and 3 bedroom apartments in Dubai is the other side of this page’s comparison, the flat at the size where the house becomes the other choice. Choosing between renting one and buying one? The rent vs buy calculator costs out both paths over the years you will stay, the mortgage calculator turns a price here into a monthly repayment, the cost of buying adds the 4% transfer fee and the rest of the bill, and service charges explains the yearly fee a villa community levies on top. Buying one to let? The rental yield calculator turns a price and a rent into a return, and the golden visa explains what a purchase at these prices can carry with it. Renting one? Your contract has to be registered — Ejari explains how, and the DEWA move-in covers the deposit, which is higher for a villa than a flat, and the bill that follows it.