CRESCO RESEARCH
You do not need to live in the UAE to own a home in Dubai. You do need to buy inside a designated freehold area. In August 2026 that constraint ruled out 1.8 per cent of the registered market and left 98.2 per cent of it open.
In August 2026 the Dubai Land Department registered 9,956 screened home sales. 9,772 of them, or 98.2 per cent, were in freehold areas. Those are the areas a non-resident foreign buyer is allowed to buy in. Only 184 sales, 1.8 per cent, were in non-freehold areas.
That is the number worth knowing before anything else. The restriction that worries most overseas buyers turns out to bind almost nothing. The freehold market is not a carve-out. It is the market.
The UAE Government portal states that foreigners who do not live in the UAE, and expatriate residents, "may acquire freehold ownership rights over property without restriction" in the areas designated for it. The designation comes from Article 3 of Regulation No. 3 of 2006. There is no residency test, no minimum purchase price attached to ownership itself, and the portal notes there is no age limit to own property in Dubai.
Ownership and residency are separate things. Buying a home does not by itself grant you a visa, and you do not need a visa to buy. People conflate the two constantly.
All 184 non-freehold sales sat in five area labels. Here they are in full.
| Area label | Sales | Median price | Median per sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silicon Oasis | 98 | AED 794,000 | AED 996 |
| Dubai Investment Park First | 72 | AED 556,678 | AED 958 |
| Dubai Investment Park Second | 10 | AED 596,256 | AED 718 |
| Rega Al Buteen | 3 | AED 1,175,000 | AED 702 |
| Mirdif | 1 | AED 845,000 | AED 870 |
Non-freehold residential unit sales, Dubai Land Department register, August 2026, screened at or above AED 500 per square foot.
Two industrial and residential districts account for 170 of the 184. If you are an overseas buyer, the practical effect of the freehold rule is that Silicon Oasis and Dubai Investment Park are harder for you to reach. The rest of the city is not.
Freehold homes carry a premium. The median freehold sale was AED 1,124,446, about USD 306,180. The median non-freehold sale was AED 667,500, about USD 181,756.
Per square foot the gap is wider and cleaner, because it strips out size. Freehold ran at a median AED 1,714 per square foot against AED 965 for non-freehold. That is 77.6 per cent more per square foot for the right to own it outright.
| Measure | Freehold | Non-freehold |
|---|---|---|
| Sales registered | 9,772 | 184 |
| Share of screened market | 98.2 per cent | 1.8 per cent |
| Median price | AED 1,124,446 | AED 667,500 |
| Median price in USD | USD 306,180 | USD 181,756 |
| Median per square foot | AED 1,714 | AED 965 |
| Distinct area labels | 112 | 5 |
Dubai Land Department register, August 2026. Sales, residential usage, unit property type, screened at or above AED 500 per square foot. Converted at the pegged rate of 3.6725 dirhams to the dollar.
The median freehold Dubai home in August 2026 registered at about USD 306,180. The National Association of Realtors put the United States median existing-home price for the same month at USD 429,100, released on 10 September 2026.
Both are sold prices, not asking prices. That matters, because listing medians and sold medians are different animals and get mixed up in most comparisons you will read. One caution on the Dubai side: 74.5 per cent of freehold sales were off-plan, so a large part of that median is a contract on a home that does not exist yet. The American figure is entirely completed resale housing. They are comparable in currency, not in what you receive on the day you pay.
On the Dubai side, no. The freehold rule is about where the property sits, not where the buyer is from. A British buyer and a German buyer face the same register, the same designated areas and the same four per cent transfer fee.
What differs is what happens at home. Your own tax authority decides how it treats foreign property, rental income and gains, and that is the part worth real professional advice.
| Country of residence | May buy freehold in Dubai | UAE residency required | Confirm home treatment with |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | HM Revenue and Customs |
| Germany | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Bundeszentralamt fuer Steuern |
| France | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Direction generale des Finances publiques |
| Italy | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Agenzia delle Entrate |
| Spain | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Agencia Tributaria |
| Netherlands | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Belastingdienst |
| Denmark | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Skattestyrelsen |
| Sweden | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Skatteverket |
| Norway | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Skatteetaten |
| Finland | Yes, in designated freehold areas | No | Verohallinto |
Dubai-side position per the UAE Government portal. The final column names each country's national tax authority. It is a pointer, not tax advice, and Cresco does not give tax advice.
We publish this as one page on purpose. Ten near-identical pages, one per country, would rank for a while and tell you nothing that this table does not. The Dubai-side answer is the same in every row.
Source: the Dubai Land Department transaction register for August 2026, 15,955 rows, downloaded 2 September 2026. This is the latest full month published at the time of writing.
Basis: GROUP_EN of Sales, USAGE_EN of Residential and PROP_TYPE_EN of Unit gives 10,123 rows. We then remove rows below AED 500 per square foot as non-market, which takes out 167 rows and leaves the 9,956 used throughout. Those removed rows are mostly fractional share registrations at a few thousand dirhams. Areas are converted from registered square metres at 10.7639 square feet per square metre. Dollar figures use the pegged rate of 3.6725.
Limits we would rather state than bury. Freehold status here is the register's own IS_FREE_HOLD_EN flag for the transaction, not a legal opinion on any specific plot, and you should confirm the status of a named property with the Dubai Land Department before you commit. Area labels are the register's, and their spelling and casing are inconsistent, so counts are grouped on a normalised label. Registered value is the declared transaction value and does not include the four per cent transfer fee, agency fees or mortgage costs. Medians are single-month and will move. This page carries no rental yield or service charge figure because neither is in this dataset, and we do not publish numbers we have not computed ourselves.
Nothing here is tax, legal or investment advice.
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