What a Dubai off-plan payment plan actually looks like

Ask five people in Dubai what an off-plan payment plan looks like and you will get five confident answers. 60/40. 80/20. One percent a month. The numbers are quoted constantly and sourced almost never, which is a strange situation for the single term that decides how much cash a buyer actually needs.

So we went and counted. Doment holds the published payment plans for 101 off-plan projects, 109 plans in total. This is what they say.

The most common plan is 20/30/50

Of the 50 plans where all three stages are recorded and add up to a whole, the single most common structure is 20 percent to book, 30 percent across construction, and 50 percent at handover. It appears 15 times. The next most common inverts the middle and the end: 20 percent to book, 50 percent across construction, 30 percent at handover, 13 times. Third is 10/40/50, nine times.

Booking	During construction	At handover	Plans
20%	30%	50%	15
20%	50%	30%	13
10%	40%	50%	9
20%	40%	40%	3
35%	5%	60%	2
10%	50%	40%	2

Three structures account for 37 of the 50. The market is more standardised than the range of quoted numbers suggests.

The deposit is smaller than its reputation

Across the 106 plans that record a booking percentage, 20 percent is far and away the most common deposit, appearing 39 times. Ten percent appears 12 times. The heavier front-loaded plans exist, and 60 percent up front appears 17 times, but they are a distinct minority of what is on the market rather than the norm a buyer should budget for.

That matters for anyone doing the arithmetic on whether they can enter this market at all. On a AED 1.5 million apartment, the difference between assuming 40 percent up front and finding the plan is 20 percent is AED 300,000 of cash that does not need to be raised this year.

Half the price often is not due until you have keys

In the most common structure, half of the purchase price falls at handover. Combined with the deposit figures above, the practical reading is that a buyer on a typical plan pays 20 percent to secure the unit, a further 30 percent spread over the build, and the remaining 50 percent when the building is finished and inspectable.

That is a genuinely different risk profile from a completed purchase, and it is the reason off-plan keeps attracting buyers who could afford ready stock outright.

Construction instalments are few, not monthly

Where the plans record how many construction instalments there are, the average is 2.9, across 47 plans. Not twelve, not twenty four. Under the most common terms, the construction phase of a Dubai off-plan purchase is a small number of milestone payments, not a monthly bill.

This is worth saying plainly because "one percent monthly" is quoted so often that it has become the assumed default. It is a real product and some developers offer it, but it is not what the majority of the plans we hold describe. If you want to model a specific plan properly rather than an assumed one, our off-plan payment plan calculator takes the actual milestones and tells you what falls due when, including whether a plan is genuinely monthly or only marketed that way.

What we cannot tell you yet, and why we are saying so

The Doment register holds 1,727 off-plan projects. We hold a published payment plan for 101 of them. That is the honest limit of this report, and stating it is more useful than burying it.

The gap is not an accident of our data collection. Payment terms are the least consistently published detail in Dubai off-plan marketing. A project will list its handover quarter, its unit mix, its amenities and its price per square foot, and then describe its payment plan as "attractive" or "flexible" and leave it there. That is precisely why the terms that do get published are worth counting.

So read the figures above as a description of the plans that are on the record, not as a census of the market. Where a project is missing from that set, it is because nobody published the terms, not because the terms were unusual.

Use these numbers

Every figure here is free to reproduce with attribution and a link back to this page. If you are writing about the Dubai off-plan market and want the breakdown behind any of these numbers, or the same cut for a particular developer, ask us and we will send it.

This is the first in a monthly series. Each one takes a question the market answers by repetition and answers it by counting instead.