September 2026
The number I have been repeating
For as long as I have been doing this job, when a buyer asks what it costs on top of the price, I have said some version of "budget seven to ten per cent".
I did not make it up. Every cost guide in this market says it. Agents say it to each other. It sounds careful, it sounds conservative, and it gets you to the next question.
This week I sat down with the line items those same guides publish and added them up. On a two million dirham resale with a mortgage, they come to six point six to six point eight per cent. Not seven. Nowhere near ten.
To reach ten you would need about sixty-four thousand dirhams of charges that nobody, in any of the guides I read, actually names.
So the admission is simple. I have been quoting a band I never checked, because everyone around me quotes it and it has never cost anyone a deal. That is exactly the habit I keep writing about in other people.
What the lines actually are
Six of them, on a two million dirham ready apartment at eighty per cent.
Four per cent to the land department, eighty thousand. Two per cent commission plus VAT, forty-two thousand. The trustee office, four thousand two hundred. Title deed and admin, about five hundred and eighty. The developer's NOC, somewhere between five hundred and five thousand. Mortgage registration, a quarter of a per cent of the loan plus a fixed fee, four thousand two hundred and ninety.
A hundred and thirty-one to a hundred and thirty-six thousand. Plus the bank's own valuation and processing fees, which none of my sources prices and which you should get in writing.
Since February 2025 none of it can go into the mortgage. So the buyer needs the deposit and all of that in cash, at transfer. About twenty-seven per cent of the price.
On a cheaper unit the fixed charges weigh more, and at eight hundred thousand the same lines do reach seven point something. So the band is not invented. It is just stretched well past anything the arithmetic supports, and applied to every price as if the maths did not change.
The line I would rather not point at
The second-largest line in that list is mine.
Agency commission is how I am paid. It is two per cent plus VAT on a resale, it is forty-two thousand dirhams on that example, and it is more than half the size of the land department fee.
I could have written this piece and let that line sit quietly in the table. I think the reason the "seven to ten" survives is partly that nobody in the chain has much incentive to make the fee layer look precise. A vague number is comfortable for everyone who takes a slice of it.
So I will say it plainly. If you are buying a resale, you are paying commission, it is cash, and you should know the number before you meet anyone, including me.
Where the four per cent came from
I had also never looked this up properly.
The land department dates from 1960, and for most of that time the transfer fee was two per cent. In 2013, with the market rebounding hard after the crash and people flipping units for quick profit, the Dubai Executive Council doubled it. The point was to make fast trades more expensive and slow things down.
It has been four per cent for thirteen years. It is a brake, not a revenue line. I find that clarifying. A fee designed to discourage short holding periods is telling you something about how the city wants you to own.
The concessions everybody quotes
There are two, and both get overstated.
Gifts to close family register at an eighth of a per cent. The sources describe it as parents, spouse and children only. Your brother is reported to pay the full four. People are surprised by that more often than by anything else in this topic.
And moving a property into your own company: I found sources saying you can do it at the gift rate if the owners are identical, and a source in the same research saying you pay the full fee again. On two million dirhams that is eighty-two and a half thousand against a hundred and sixty. I cannot tell you which is right from what I have. I can tell you to settle it before you buy, not after.
I am a broker, not a lawyer or a tax adviser. That is a description of what the sources say, not a structure I am recommending to anyone.
What I take from it
Two things.
A band is not a calculation. "Seven to ten per cent" is the kind of number that feels like diligence and is actually a way of not doing the sum. It survives because being too high is safe, and nobody audits the safe answer. If you have the lines, add them. It takes four minutes.
And the numbers closest to your own income are the ones to check hardest. Not because anyone is lying, but because nobody has much reason to look closely. I had not, for years.
I will be using the lines from now on.
Idris Dad writes about off-plan strategy across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah.
More on how I work with buyers at offplancrypto.com.
Nothing here is legal, tax or financial advice. I am a licensed real estate broker, and agency commission is my income.
