Answers
How much deposit do I need to buy a home in Dubai?
A short answer, with the article it comes from.
The answer
At least 20 percent of the price for an expatriate's first home below AED 5 million, and 15 percent for a UAE national's first home at AED 5 million or less. Above AED 5 million it rises to 30 and 25 percent, a second home needs 40 or 35 percent, and off plan needs 50 percent.
CBUAE Circular 31/2013 Articles 1 and 3.2, the Dubai Land Department fee schedule and Dubai Executive Council Resolution No. 30 of 2013 Article 3, checked 7 October 2026.
Those figures are the other side of the Central Bank's loan to value caps in Article 3.2, and they apply to every lender in the UAE. They are minimums: the circular allows a bank to ask for more.
The deposit is not all the cash you need. In Dubai the Land Department fee is 4 percent of the sale value, shared equally between buyer and seller unless they agree otherwise, registering the mortgage costs 0.25 percent of the loan, and the registration trustee charges AED 4,000 plus VAT on a sale of AED 500,000 or more. These sit on top of the deposit.
The loan is also measured against the bank's valuation, because the circular defines loan to value against "the appraised value of the residential property". If the valuation comes in below the price, the difference is yours to fund.
A specialist can put the deposit, the fees and the valuation risk into one figure for the property you are looking at, which is the number that decides whether the purchase works.
Rules are the easy part. Your file is the question.
Want the full cash figure for a property you have in mind? Talk to a Specialist.