Ready apartments have risen 81 percent since 2020. Off-plan has risen 33 percent

Dubai's price story is usually told as one line going up. Split the register the way the register itself splits it, into off-plan and ready, and it is two lines going up at very different speeds, and the interesting one is not the one that gets talked about.

The ready market did the moving

Median price per square foot for a Dubai apartment, by year of sale:

Year	Off-plan AED/sqft	Ready AED/sqft	Off-plan premium
2019	1,420	839	+69%
2020	1,349	782	+73%
2021	1,492	948	+57%
2022	1,788	1,062	+68%
2023	1,801	1,142	+58%
2024	1,775	1,236	+44%
2025	1,849	1,353	+37%
2026 (to 15 July)	1,793	1,418	+26%

From the 2020 low to the first half of 2026, the median ready apartment went from 782 to 1,418 AED per square foot. That is plus 81 percent. Over the same six years the median off-plan apartment went from 1,349 to 1,793, which is plus 33 percent.

The off-plan line has been close to flat since 2022. It printed 1,788 in 2022 and 1,793 in the first half of 2026, four years apart. Everything that looks like a Dubai price boom, in the register, happened in finished buildings.

The premium has compressed every year since 2022

68 percent, 58 percent, 44 percent, 37 percent, 26 percent. That is the off-plan premium in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and the first half of 2026, and it is the cleanest trend in this dataset.

There is a mechanical reason for part of it. An off-plan launch is priced by a developer against a handover two or three years out, so a launch price is partly a forecast. A ready sale is priced by two people in the present. When the present catches up with what the forecasts assumed, the gap closes from the bottom, which is exactly the shape here: the ready line rises into a stationary off-plan line.

The reading that follows is uncomfortable for anyone who bought at a 2022 launch expecting the market to grow into the price. For the median unit, the market has now largely done that, and the launch premium that was supposed to be the profit has been absorbed rather than compounded.

The last three months are worth watching, not announcing

By month, the off-plan median held between 1,836 and 1,920 from November 2025 through April 2026, then printed 1,683 in May, 1,727 in June and 1,744 in the first half of July. The ready median did not follow it down: it sat between 1,343 and 1,450 through the same months.

We are not calling that a downturn, and neither should anyone else on three data points. A citywide off-plan median is sensitive to where the launches were: one large low-price release in an outer district moves it several percent without a single existing price changing. The volumes shifted at the same time, from around 9,000 off-plan apartment sales a month in April to 6,728 in May, which is consistent with a quieter launch calendar rather than a repricing.

What can be said is that the compression in the table above is not a story about the past. It is still happening in the most recent months we hold.

What to do with this if you are buying

The premium in your area is a specific number, not the citywide 26 percent. We published the full area-by-area breakdown in the previous report: it runs from 3 percent in Meydan and Sobha Hartland to 124 percent in Nad Al Shiba First. The citywide figure is useful for understanding the market. It is close to useless for pricing a unit.

The second thing worth doing is separating the two reasons to buy off-plan. If the reason is the payment plan, the arithmetic still works and it has nothing to do with the premium. If the reason is that the launch price is below market, the register says that has been getting harder to find for four years running.

Use these numbers

Every figure here is free to reproduce with attribution and a link back to this page. If you want this cut for a single area, a single developer, or by unit size rather than area, ask and we will send it.