How Much Cash Do I Need to Buy This Property?

Method & assumptions

Pick your scenario — Ready or Off-plan, No Mortgage or Mortgage — and only the costs that apply are shown. Total buying costs = Registration / DLD (4% of price) + (Ready: combined Title Deed / Related DLD Charges + purchase brokerage 2% + trustee / service-partner fee) or (Off-plan: developer / admin fee) + snagging + other purchase cost, plus for a mortgage: mortgage registration (0.25% of the loan) + bank arrangement / processing fee + VAT on that processing fee (5%) + bank valuation + other mortgage cost. Total property purchase cost = price + total buying costs. On a cash purchase, your cash required is the total purchase cost; with a mortgage, it is your investor-funded share of the price plus the buying costs, and the mortgage funds the rest. EOI is credited toward the price, and the mortgage principal is financing — neither is added again as a cost. Official fees depend on the applicable transaction and service channel; variable service, developer, bank and professional costs remain editable.

• Registration / DLD fee is 4% of price (editable). A separate combined "Title Deed / Related DLD Charges" line (default AED 520, editable) covers the standard title-deed and related issuance for a ready apartment/villa; the individual sub-fees are not shown as separate fields, and there is no standalone "map fee".
• Ready: purchase brokerage 2% + Trustee Office / Service Partner Fee AED 4,200 inclusive of VAT (editable; the sub-500k service-partner band is lower). Off-plan: developer / admin fee AED 2,500 — an editable commercial assumption, not a government fee, applied only to off-plan. Snagging defaults to AED 0 (editable).
• Mortgage registration is 0.25% of the loan, distinct from the bank arrangement / processing fee; VAT (5%) applies only to the processing fee, when charged. Ready investment mortgage defaults to 60% LTV and off-plan to 50% (CBUAE expatriate maximums; first owner-occupied homes can be higher). Individual lender and non-resident criteria may be stricter than the regulatory maximum — this tool does not promise mortgage eligibility.
• Off-plan: the estimate covers the costs payable at purchase / booking. Title-deed and related DLD registration charges for an off-plan unit typically become payable later, around handover, and depend on the transaction and service channel; they are not added to the initial off-plan acquisition total shown here, so they are not double-counted. Use the Ready scenario to estimate those handover-stage charges when the time comes.

Official regulatory basis

Official government & regulatory sources

• Central Bank of the UAEMortgage lending framework — applicable LTV, debt-burden ratio and maximum-tenor regulatory limits where relevant to the model.View CBUAE source
• Dubai Land DepartmentOfficial Dubai property registration, mortgage registration, trustee / service-partner charges, title deed and unified map government fees.View DLD source
• Federal Tax Authority (UAE)Value Added Tax basis: the 5% standard rate applied to commercial property and to taxable fees (e.g. bank processing), and input-tax recovery — recoverable in full where it relates to a taxable supply. Residential leases and second-hand residential sales are treated per FTA rules.View FTA VAT source

Formulas & methodology

• Decision Lab methodologyStandard reducing-balance mortgage amortisation, renter opportunity-cost logic, equity modelling and the year-by-year comparison — implemented transparently in this tool.
• Commercial costs are your editable assumptionsBrokerage, bank arrangement, valuation, conveyancing and insurance are not government-set. Enter your actual quote or use the clearly-labelled editable planning assumption — these are not official government charges.