What an AED 2,000,000 apartment (USD 545,000) really costs you

The price on the listing is not the price you pay. In Dubai the gap between the two is usually somewhere between six and ten per cent, and almost all of it falls due on a single day, in cash, on top of your deposit. Buyers who plan only for the deposit are the ones borrowing from family in the last week before transfer.

Here is the arithmetic on an apartment listed at AED 2,000,000, which is about USD 545,000, bought ready rather than off plan and paid for in cash. The dirham is pegged to the US dollar at 3.6725, so the dollar figures here do not move even though the fee rates can. The rates below are those in force in August 2026. Treat the method as the lasting part and check the rates when your turn comes.

The fees that are fixed

• Transfer fee. Two per cent from the seller and two per cent from the buyer. By convention in the market the buyer pays the whole four per cent, which is AED 80,000 here, about USD 21,800.
• Title deed certificate: AED 250.
• Map fee for a villa or apartment: AED 250.
• Knowledge fee and innovation fee: AED 10 each.
• Trustee centre fee, because the transfer is processed by a licensed trustee rather than by the Land Department itself: AED 4,000 plus value added tax, so AED 4,200 where the price is AED 500,000 or more.

That comes to AED 84,720, about USD 23,100, before anybody has been paid for their work. Every figure there is published by the Land Department on its property sale registration page, and you can check the lot in about a minute.

The fees that are negotiable

The agency commission on a resale is conventionally two per cent of the price plus value added tax, which is AED 42,000 on this example, about USD 11,400. Note the word conventionally. It is a market habit, not a published rate, and on larger transactions I have seen it move. If you buy off plan directly from a developer, the buyer usually pays no commission at all, because the developer pays the agent instead.

Add the developer no objection certificate, which runs from a few hundred dirhams to several thousand depending on the developer, and a conveyancer if you choose to use one.

Where that leaves you

On a cash purchase at AED 2,000,000 the total is AED 126,720 plus the no objection certificate. Call it AED 127,000 to AED 132,000, which is roughly USD 34,600 to USD 35,900, or about six and a half per cent on top of the price.

Take a mortgage and the number moves again. The Land Department charges a quarter of one per cent of the loan to register it, which is AED 4,000, about USD 1,100, on a loan of AED 1,600,000 or roughly USD 436,000, plus the title deed, knowledge and innovation fees on the mortgage side, another AED 270. Your bank will then want its own valuation and will usually take an arrangement fee, and those are bank charges rather than government ones, so they vary by lender and are worth asking about before you apply. Financed buyers should work on eight to ten per cent rather than six and a half.

What I would do before signing anything

Ask the agent for the full cost sheet in writing before you sign the memorandum of understanding, not after. Everything above is either published or set by convention, so nobody has a reason to be vague about it. If the sheet you are given does not land close to these numbers, ask what the difference is.

This is one of the sections every Ledgard report calculates for the specific property in front of you, from the registered price rather than the asking price.

Government fees taken from the Dubai Land Department property sale registration and mortgaged property registration service pages, as published in August 2026.