Dubai rent index by area, September 2026

This page is the overview the other rent pages point back to. It lists all 26 Dubai areas for which the tenancy register holds enough apartment contracts to publish a median, and it shows what tenants actually signed, not what landlords asked. The cheapest one bedroom in the table is Al Warsan First at AED 3,666 a month, the most expensive is Downtown Dubai at AED 9,166. That is a spread of AED 5,500 a month, or a factor of 2.5, inside one city.

Every figure below comes from registered new tenancy contracts filed with the Ejari register of the Dubai Land Department, as of September 2026. The four size classes in the table rest on 28,904 registered new contracts in total. Renewals are excluded on purpose: they are held down by the rent cap and describe sitting tenants, not the market someone moving in walks into. Bulk contracts covering several units are excluded as well.

Median contract rent by area and size

Read one cell like this: Dubai Marina shows AED 7,083 for one bedroom with 755 in brackets. That means 755 registered new contracts for one bedroom flats in that area, and the middle one of them was signed at AED 7,083 a month. A cell marked as having no entry means the register held no separate group for that size in that area, and we would rather leave it empty than estimate it.

Two areas carry no studio line at all, Zabeel and Dubai Creek Harbour, because studios are filed as their own unit type in the register and neither area produced a group. Dubai Creek Harbour instead has the largest single group in the whole table: 1,339 registered one bedroom contracts at a median of AED 7,500.

What the extremes say

The cheapest studio in the register is in Al Warsan First at AED 2,583 a month from 596 contracts, the most expensive in Downtown Dubai at AED 6,023 from only 90. The gap widens with size: the largest two bedroom group is Downtown Dubai with 962 contracts at AED 15,000, while three bedrooms in Zabeel sit at AED 51,666 on 19 contracts only.

One row deserves a warning rather than a headline. Al Nahda Second shows AED 5,000 for three bedrooms, which is below its own two bedroom median of AED 5,416. It rests on 34 contracts, and a group that small moves with a handful of cheap deals. Treat any cell with a bracket below fifty as an order of magnitude, not as a negotiating anchor. The rows that carry weight are the ones with hundreds of contracts behind them, such as 963 one bedroom contracts in Jumeirah Village Circle at AED 5,833.

Asked against signed

Asking rents from listing portals and contract rents from the register measure two different things, so they never share a column here. One is a demand, the other is a deal. Where our own reading of propertyfinder.ae listings covers the same area and size, the two can be put side by side.

The most useful line in that table is Downtown Dubai, where asking and signed sit AED 1 apart. In a market that tight the listed price is the price. In Dubai Marina the gap is 11.8 percent, which is roughly one month of rent across a year, and that is the room a tenant is negotiating for.

The register names behind the area names

The cadastre does not use the names people search for. Dubai Marina is filed as Marsa Dubai, Jumeirah Village Circle as Al Barsha South Fourth. Without this mapping the register numbers cannot be matched to an area anyone recognises, so we publish it.

One entry needs care: Al Hebiah Fourth covers Dubai Sports City, but the Elan and Harmony projects inside it belong to Tilal Al Ghaf. The area figure therefore describes both, and calling it a pure Sports City number would be wrong.

Where the bedroom count comes from

The tenancy register leaves the bedroom field empty for apartments, so the class is derived from floor area: studio up to 57 square metres, one bedroom 58 to 95, two bedrooms 96 to 146, three bedrooms 147 to 260, four bedrooms from 261. Those cut-offs were calibrated on 2,177 of our own portal listings that state bedrooms and area together, then checked against the sale register, where the bedroom count is recorded: studio 37 against 42 square metres at the median, one bedroom 75 against 74, two bedrooms 120 against 117, three bedrooms 172 against 177. Two independent sources, less than five square metres apart. Studios are the exception; they are filed as their own unit type and are not derived.

The honest part: the classes overlap in reality. Between 10 and 90 percent of two bedroom flats measure 92 to 149 square metres, so a generous one bedroom layout can land in the two bedroom class and the other way round.

What the rent number leaves out

None of the figures above is what leaves the account in the first month. Ejari registration costs AED 220 per contract, the DEWA deposit is AED 2,000 for an apartment and AED 4,000 for a villa, agency commission is 5 percent of the annual rent and the deposit on an unfurnished flat another 5 percent. Worked through on a real contract rent, that is a four figure sum before the first rent cheque. We calculate it line by line on first month cost of renting in Dubai, and the studio market is ranked area by area on cheapest studio rent in Dubai by area.

Frequently asked questions

Source: Dubai Land Department, Ejari tenancy contract register, as of September 2026. The figures are quoted with attribution and are not a DXB Radar survey. Asking rents: our own reading of propertyfinder.ae listings, September 2026.

New readings from the Dubai Land Department registers go out on our Telegram channel t.me/dxbradar as we publish them.