Dubai real estate statistics — 2026

Dubai property market, Jan–Aug 2026: the key statistics

Each statistic above stands on its own — cite freely with a link to this page (see «Methodology & citation» below). Source for all figures: DLD registered sales, Jan–Aug 2026, our aggregation.

Bedroom mix of all 86,946 registered apartment sales (DLD records the room count for ~100% of deals). The investor profile is unmistakable — compact stock dominates:

Off-plan units registered at a median AED 1,774/sqft against AED 1,403 for ready stock — a 26% premium for payment plans and new product. That gap is the number to watch in the correction: it compresses if off-plan demand cools:

A square metre in Dubai cost AED 18,514 between January and July 2026 — about $5,041 — measured across all 77,666 apartment sales registered with the Dubai Land Department. Listing portals quote higher, and on averages they quote much higher: three to four times the registry. Both numbers are arithmetically true. They describe different things, and only one of them is what buyers paid.

Advertised figures as published by the portals themselves: the villa average and the apartment range are Bayut's own stated numbers; the "from" price is Emirates.Estate's stated entry point ($50,002); the per-m² median is our own count across 13 listing cards on the first page of a large Russian-language Dubai catalogue on 15 August 2026 — a small sample, quoted as indicative only. Registry figures: DLD Sales-group residential transactions, deduplicated by transaction number, apartments Unit/Flat ≥AED 100k, villas Building/Villa ≥AED 300k. The AED 599,000 is the 10th percentile of registered apartment sales.

Why the averages diverge and the medians agree

The pattern in that table is the whole story. On averages the gap is multiples; on the median it is three percent. Two mechanisms produce that.

First, a portal shows inventory, and inventory is not the market. A villa listed at AED 80M that nobody buys stays on the site for years and keeps lifting the advertised average every day it sits there. The registry only records closings, so an unsold trophy asset never enters it at all. Second, the average is dragged by that tail while the median is not: move the top 1% of listings and the mean jumps, the median barely twitches. Which is why the medians of the two sources end up almost on top of each other — they are both describing the ordinary middle of the same market, where things actually transact.

The practical rule follows directly. Ignore any "average price" quoted from listings — it is arithmetically correct and practically useless. Use medians, and prefer medians of registered deals, because that is the only number that means "someone paid this".

What Google currently answers

Ask Google in Russian how much an apartment in Dubai costs and its AI Overview replies that a square metre averages $5,400–5,800. That figure sits above both numbers we measured: above our registry median of $5,041 and above the ~$5,200 asking median from the catalogue sample. We are not going to guess how the answer was assembled — but a reader who takes it as the market price is budgeting from the advertised side of the market, and from the upper part of it.

If you cite one number for the price of a square metre in Dubai, the defensible one is AED 18,514 / $5,041, and it should be cited with its period (January–July 2026), its source (Dubai Land Department) and its type (median of registered sales, not asking prices). Every figure on this page can be recomputed from the open DLD file — that is the point of publishing the method alongside the number.

Common questions