DLD fees and Oqood on a Dubai off-plan purchase

The Dubai Land Department charges a registration fee of 4% of the sale value when a property changes hands. Its service page for registering the sale of a property states the rate plainly as 4% of the sales value. On the off-plan side, the equivalent service page splits the same rate into two lines: the seller 2% of the sale value, the purchaser 2% of the sale value.

That split is how DLD bills it. It is not how the market pays it. In practice a Dubai buyer, off-plan or resale, carries the whole 4%, and a developer’s reservation form will usually say so in a single line. Read the contract rather than the fee schedule to find out which of you is paying, because the fee schedule will tell you the wrong answer.

Oqood is a register, not a charge. Law No. 13 of 2008 created the interim real estate register for the Emirate of Dubai, the record on which a sale is entered while the building does not yet exist and no title deed can be issued. DLD’s service for putting a sale on it is called Request to Register the Initial Sale, and it is the service buyers and agents refer to as Oqood.

So the sequence is: you sign the Sale and Purchase Agreement, the developer submits the sale to the interim register, and the 4% falls due there. Nothing further is charged as a percentage for the Oqood step, because the Oqood step is where the 4% is charged. If a quotation shows a 4% DLD fee and a separate percentage described as an Oqood fee, the quotation is charging you twice for one registration.

The one genuinely separate line DLD publishes on that page is an AED 1,000 self registration fee for developers using the Oqood portal. That is a charge on the developer for the submission, not a buyer tariff, and what a developer then bills a buyer for handling the paperwork is a commercial decision the Land Department does not set or publish.

Beside the 4%, DLD publishes a registrar fee scaled to the property value: AED 2,100 where the price is below AED 500,000, and AED 4,200 where it is AED 500,000 or above. Every purchase in the range this site covers sits in the AED 4,200 band. Two small fixed charges, an AED 10 knowledge fee and an AED 10 innovation fee, appear on every DLD service page we read.

Where the registration runs through a service partner rather than direct, DLD’s mortgage registration page publishes a service partner fee of AED 4,000 plus VAT, and AED 5,000 plus VAT for a provisional, meaning Oqood, case. A title deed issuance line of AED 250 appears wherever a deed is produced, which on an off-plan purchase is at completion rather than at signature.

Agency commission is a separate question and usually not yours on a new launch: on most off-plan sales the developer pays the broker, and the buyer pays no commission. Our cost of buying calculator exposes it as an adjustable input for that reason.

Cash purchase, no mortgage, buyer carrying the full 4% as Dubai custom has it. DLD registration fee at 4% of AED 2,000,000 is AED 80,000. The registrar fee is AED 4,200. The knowledge and innovation fees are AED 20 together. That is AED 84,220 payable to the Land Department and its registrar, 4.21% of the purchase price.

Add whatever the developer charges for processing the Oqood submission, which is set by the developer and not by DLD, and which we have seen quoted anywhere from a few hundred dirhams to several thousand. Ask for it as a figure in the reservation form rather than as a description, because it is the one line on this list nobody publishes.

The same structure, and the reason the percentage falls as the price rises: only the 4% is proportional. DLD registration fee at 4% of AED 5,000,000 is AED 200,000. The registrar fee is still AED 4,200, because AED 4,200 is the whole band above AED 500,000, not a scale. Knowledge and innovation fees, AED 20. Total AED 204,220, or 4.08% of the price.

The gap between 4.21% at AED 2M and 4.08% at AED 5M is the entire effect of the fixed charges. Anyone quoting you a flat all-in percentage across price bands is rounding, and on a AED 5M purchase a rounded percentage point is AED 50,000.

Registering a mortgage with DLD costs 0.25% of the mortgage value, plus AED 250 for the title deed issuance and the AED 10 knowledge and AED 10 innovation fees, with the service partner fee of AED 4,000 plus VAT, or AED 5,000 plus VAT in a provisional Oqood case, where the registration is handled that way.

On a AED 1M loan against the AED 2M apartment above, that is AED 2,500 in registration fees, AED 270 in fixed DLD charges, and AED 5,250 as the provisional service partner fee including VAT: about AED 8,020 on top of the AED 84,220. On a AED 2.5M loan against the AED 5M villa, the registration line becomes AED 6,250 and the total addition about AED 11,770. Bank arrangement and valuation fees sit outside the DLD schedule and vary by lender, so model them in the mortgage calculator rather than assuming a number here.

The 4% is not negotiable, but who pays it is. A developer absorbing the DLD registration fee is one of the two standard Dubai incentives, alongside a waived service charge period, and on a quiet launch it is usually available for the asking. On an AED 2M unit it is worth AED 80,000, which is a larger concession than most buyers extract on price.

Two cautions. The Land Department publishes nothing that defines or requires this incentive: it is a commercial arrangement between you and the developer, and the only related DLD publication we found is a 2021 notice calling on developers to remit registration fees within 60 days, which is about compliance, not marketing. And the offer is normally conditional, most often on the payment plan being kept, so a missed instalment can put the 4% back on you. Get the condition written into the SPA rather than the brochure.

The registrar fee, the knowledge and innovation fees and any mortgage registration charge are set by DLD and are not negotiable with anyone.

Three figures that circulate in almost every Dubai fee article are absent above because no Dubai Land Department page we read on 4 September 2026 carries them: an AED 40 off-plan administrative fee, an AED 580 administrative fee on a ready property, and a stated range for the developer’s own Oqood processing charge. Our own cost of buying calculator still uses the first two, taken from secondary 2026 fee breakdowns, and they are flagged as such in its source notes.

The claim that the 4% is split equally between buyer and seller by law is also absent. DLD does publish 2% and 2% as separate lines on the initial sale service, which is a billing structure, and we could not find a statutory provision making the split binding on the parties. The contract decides it.