First month cost of renting in Dubai

Before the first rent cheque clears, a tenant in Dubai pays a set of one-off items that nobody advertises. Worked through on a real contract rent, a studio in Business Bay at AED 5,000 a month, they come to AED 8,910. That is the median of 733 registered new contracts, so the rent in this calculation is a number somebody actually signed, not an asking price.

Two of those items are percentages of the annual rent, which is why the same list costs AED 6,010 on the cheapest studio in the register and AED 13,910 on a one bedroom in Downtown Dubai. The fixed fees are the same for everyone; the percentage items are not.

The one-off items, one by one

Without the Ejari registration the electricity and water account cannot be moved into your name and family visas cannot be filed, so the AED 220 is not optional. The medical test price depends on the centre and how fast the result is issued; the calculations below use the cheaper end at AED 320, and a faster centre at AED 750 adds to every total on this page.

Worked through on three real contract rents

The line worth memorising is the second to last one. Ejari at AED 220, the Emirates ID at AED 370 and the medical test at AED 320 add up to AED 910 no matter which flat you take. Everything above that line scales with the rent: the commission and the deposit are 5 percent of the annual rent each, so together they are a tenth of a year's rent, paid in the same week.

And then the rent itself

None of the totals above include a single day of rent. Dubai leases are agreed for a year and paid in a number of cheques, and the fewer the cheques, the lower the rent that is usually agreed. On the Business Bay studio the annual rent is AED 60,000. In one cheque that means AED 68,910 leaves the account in the first week, fees included. In four cheques the first instalment is AED 15,000, which brings the opening bill to AED 23,910. In two cheques the first payment is AED 30,000.

What the first month costs in every studio area

Because two of the items are percentages, the opening bill is a direct function of the area you choose. The table below applies the same list to the median studio contract of every area the register holds a studio group for.

The spread runs from AED 6,010 in Al Warsan First to AED 10,138 in Downtown Dubai. In other words, choosing the cheapest studio area over the most expensive saves roughly as much on day one as it saves in the first month of rent, and it keeps saving every month afterwards. The ranking behind these medians is on cheapest studio rent in Dubai by area, and the larger sizes are in the Dubai rent index by area.

How long each step takes

The money has to be ready before the paperwork finishes, not after. The medical test result comes back in 24 hours, the Emirates ID in five to ten working days after the biometrics, and the full visa run takes two to three weeks. With a bank account added it is four to six weeks. Rent and deposit are usually paid well inside that window, which is the part newcomers underestimate.

What this calculation leaves out

Three things, and we would rather name them than pad the total with guesses. Cooling is billed separately in many buildings and we hold no figure for it. Furniture is not in here either, and a furnished unit carries a higher deposit than the 5 percent used above. Finally, the commission is gone for good, while the landlord deposit and the DEWA deposit come back, so the amount you lose is smaller than the amount you have to produce.

Frequently asked questions

Source of the rents: Dubai Land Department, Ejari tenancy contract register, as of September 2026, new contracts only. The figures are quoted with attribution and are not a DXB Radar survey. Fees and processing times: DXB Radar cost record, September 2026.

When a fee changes we post it with the date on our Telegram channel t.me/dxbradar.