Dubai Property Prices in 2026

Across the 77,666 apartment sales the Dubai Land Department registered between 1 January and 31 July 2026, the median price was AED 1,720 per square foot — the same as AED 18,514 per square metre, about $468 per sq ft or £347. The median apartment itself was 777 sq ft and closed at AED 1,250,000. Villas and townhouses came in marginally higher per foot, at AED 1,771.

"Average" and "median" are not the same number

The arithmetic average across the same file was AED 1,922 per sq ft — 12% above the median — because a luxury tail running past AED 5,000 per foot on Palm Jumeirah and in Marsa Dubai drags the mean upward. Eight in ten registered sales fell between AED 1,104 (10th percentile) and AED 3,050 (90th percentile). So when a source quotes one "average price per square foot in Dubai" without saying which average it means, assume the mean — and assume it overstates what a typical buyer paid.

In euros the median works out to about €406 per sq ft (€4,371 per m²), and in rupees roughly ₹44,700 per sq ft. The dirham is pegged to the US dollar at 3.6725, so dollar figures barely move; pound, euro and rupee equivalents drift with the market. FX as of 14 August 2026.

Off-plan costs more per foot than finished

This surprises most first-time buyers: off-plan stock registered at AED 1,779 per sq ft against AED 1,404 for ready apartments — a 27% premium for buying a building that does not exist yet. What you are paying for is the payment plan and the newness, not the floor area. Reverse the logic and it becomes the most dependable saving in the market: taking a completed apartment today costs about a fifth less per foot than the equivalent launch.

Six times the price, one city

The gap between Dubai's most and least expensive districts is 6.3× per square foot. Both ends are real markets with hundreds of registered deals behind them:

A note on the names: these are DLD zone names, not marketing names. Marsa Dubai is the registry's name for the Dubai Marina waterfront and tops the table at AED 4,460; Business Park and Madinat Dubai Almelaheyah cover parts of Business Bay and the maritime district. At the other end, International City Phase 1 at AED 707 per foot is the cheapest place in Dubai to own a registered freehold apartment.

Small apartments cost more per foot

Price per square foot is not flat across unit sizes, and it does not simply rise with them. Studios cost more per foot than one-bedrooms — AED 1,742 against 1,640 — because kitchens and bathrooms do not shrink in proportion to the floor plan. From two bedrooms upward the curve turns and climbs steeply into the prime segment:

Method: Sales-group residential transactions registered by the Dubai Land Department, 1 January – 31 July 2026, deduplicated by transaction number. Apartments = Unit/Flat at AED 100k and above (77,666 deals, AED 146.0bn); villas = Building/Villa at AED 300k and above (8,025 deals, AED 31.8bn). Sizes converted from m² at 10.7639; per-sq-ft values are capped to a sanity band of AED 100–30,000 to keep data-entry errors out of the medians. These are registered contract prices, not portal asking prices — and the gap between the two is measured in our asking-versus-registered breakdown. Full dataset: Dubai real-estate statistics · price index by area, both refreshed monthly.