What Off Plan Actually Costs, Matched Like for Like

Almost three quarters of Dubai apartment sales are off plan. In August 2026 it was 73.7 percent of every registered apartment sale. So the premium you pay for buying before completion is not a niche question. For most buyers it is the whole question.

The number usually quoted is around 20 percent. We get it too if we compare the two medians straight: off plan registered at $475 per square foot against $391 for ready stock, which is a 21.7 percent premium.

That comparison is wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that flatters off plan.

Why the raw comparison understates it

Ready stock and off plan stock are not the same product in the same places. Completed inventory is concentrated in older, established, often more expensive communities. New launches cluster in areas that are cheaper per square foot to begin with.

So when you compare all off plan against all ready, you are partly measuring geography, not timing. The mix works against off plan in the raw numbers, which makes the premium look smaller than it is.

The fix is to compare like with like. We matched every sale into cells defined by the same community and the same bedroom count, kept only cells with at least five off plan and five ready sales, and took the median of each side.

The matched result

Method	Off plan	Ready	Premium
Raw medians, whole market	$475	$391	21.7%
Matched on community and bedroom count	63 cells, 3,363 sales		33.1%

Matched properly, the median off plan unit sold at a 33.1 percent premium per square foot over an identical ready unit in the same community. That is half again as large as the number in general circulation.

The result is not fragile. Raising the threshold to eight sales a side gives 31.6 percent across 44 cells. Raising it to ten gives 35.5 percent across 31 cells. The answer sits in the low thirties however you cut it.

The spread matters more than the average

A single premium figure hides how wildly it varies. Across the 63 matched cells the lower quartile was 18 percent and the upper quartile was 58 percent.

Community	Type	Off plan	Ready	Premium
Business Bay	3 bed	$1,348	$486	+178%
Dubai Land Residence Complex	1 bed	$388	$199	+95%
International City Phase 1	1 bed	$305	$160	+90%
Palm Jumeirah	2 bed	$1,383	$731	+89%
Jumeirah Village Circle	3 bed	$504	$269	+87%
Majan	1 bed	$384	$375	+2%
Arjan	2 bed	$391	$392	0%
Dubai Production City	2 bed	$333	$343	-3%
International City Phase 2 and 3	Studio	$341	$354	-4%

In 4 of the 63 matched cells off plan actually registered below ready stock. So the premium is not a law of nature. It is a price, it is negotiated, and in a handful of places it disappears entirely.

What you are actually buying for that 33 percent

Paying more for off plan is not automatically a mistake. You are buying a payment plan instead of a lump sum, a new building instead of a used one, and first ownership rather than someone else's exit.

What you should not do is buy it believing the premium is 20 percent when the matched evidence says a third. On a $500,000 purchase that difference is roughly $55,000 of assumption.

And the premium is paid on day one while the value arrives on handover. Between those two dates you carry the risk. If prices are flat over your construction period, a 33 percent entry premium is not recovered by the market. It has to be recovered by the building being genuinely better than the alternative you did not buy.

The three questions this should make you ask

What is the premium in my specific community and unit type? Not the market average. The table above ranges from minus 4 percent to plus 178 percent. The average is nearly useless at the level of an actual decision.

What is ready stock trading at right now in the same building or the one next door? That is your alternative, and it is the only fair comparison. Registered comparables, not asking prices.

Can I exit before handover if I need to? Most developers require a minimum percentage paid before they will issue a no objection certificate, so a resale may not be available when you want it. We cover the mechanics in our market report series.

Method

Source is the Dubai Land Department open data portal, registered transactions for 1 to 31 August 2026. We kept sales only, apartments and residential units only, and excluded mortgage registrations and gift transfers because they are not arms length sales.

We removed records with a value under AED 100,000, a size under 150 square feet, or an implied price per square foot outside AED 200 to AED 20,000. That left 9,971 sales, of which 9,559 carry a usable bedroom label.

For the matched comparison we grouped sales into cells of the same Dubai Land Department community and the same bedroom count, kept cells with at least five sales on each side, and compared medians. That gives 63 cells covering 3,363 registered sales, or 34 percent of the cleaned file. Cells with no bedroom label were excluded, because a blank label is not a like for like match.

Dirhams convert at the fixed peg of 3.6725. Sizes convert at 10.7639 square feet per square metre.