Getting a mortgage on a Dubai off-plan property

The instrument is the Regulations Regarding Mortgage Loans, Circular No. 31/2013, issued to all banks and finance companies on 28 November 2013 and amended twice, most recently by Board Resolution No. 31/2/2020. The consolidated version of 8 April 2020 is the operative text, and we found no later rulebook instrument on loan to value.

Article (3) is headed Important Ratios, and its item 2 sets the loan to value ceilings. Paragraph C reads: “Given the long term nature of the development process and the higher level of risk to completion, the maximum LTV for mortgages on property being purchased off plans is 50% regardless of purpose, value, or category of purchaser.”

Read the last clause carefully, because it overrides the two paragraphs above it. A UAE national buying a first home is entitled to 85% on a completed property below AED 5 million, and to 50% if that same home is bought off plan. An expatriate first-time buyer moves from 80% to 50% the same way. It is Article (3), item 2, paragraph C, not the standalone Article 4 it is often miscited as.

Loan to value is the limit everyone quotes and rarely the one that decides the answer. Article (3) item 4 sets a maximum financing amount of seven years of annual income for expatriates and eight for UAE nationals. Article (3) item 1 imports the debt burden ratio from the Regulations Regarding Bank Loans and Other Services Offered to Individual Customers, at 50% of gross salary and regular income, and warns lenders not to apply the maximum automatically.

The same item adds a requirement most affordability calculators ignore: lenders are “required to stress test the loan at (2 to 4) percentage points above the current rate of interest on the loan”, and where an introductory rate applies the test runs against the rate that follows it. That is why the amount a bank offers sits below a naive calculation, and why an introductory rate is not the number to plan against. The same article caps the tenor at 25 years and sets no maximum age at final repayment, leaving that to each lender.

The claim that banks release nothing until a project reaches 40% construction is repeated everywhere. It is not in the regulation. We searched the full consolidated text on 4 September 2026 and the figure does not appear in it in either language column, and we found no Central Bank or Land Department publication setting a construction threshold.

What the regulation imposes is different. Article (2) item 1 requires that where stage payments form part of the financing, the lender “must first use owner’s equity portion of the construction price to pay the developer/contractor before the mortgage loan provider provides any of the loan monies”. It then requires payments to the developer to “be based upon prescribed completion milestones that must be physically confirmed either by the mortgage loan provider or by a suitably qualified professional agent who is independent from both the borrower and the developer/contractor”. Article (4) requires the loan documentation to spell out those milestones with a clear pre-payment policy.

So the gate is real, but it is a verification gate rather than a percentage. Any specific completion figure is a credit policy set by the bank.

The regulation says nothing about non-residents. The words do not appear in it. Article (3) item 2 recognises two categories, UAE Nationals and Expatriates, applies no residency test, and defines neither term by residence. On the face of the rulebook a non-resident expatriate buying off plan is capped at 50% like everyone else.

The lower figures quoted for non-residents are bank credit policy, and the regulation makes room for them in terms: nothing in it prevents lenders adopting more conservative limits. So a bank offering a non-resident less than 50% is expressing an appetite rather than applying a rule, which is a reason to ask a second lender. Registration is not the obstacle: the DLD document list asks for a “copy of passport for non-resident foreigners” where there is no UAE ID.

The Land Department charges 0.25% of the mortgage value to register it, plus AED 250 for the issuance of each title deed and the AED 10 knowledge and AED 10 innovation fees. A service partner charges AED 4,000 plus VAT, or AED 5,000 plus VAT for a provisional, meaning Oqood, case, and a developer no objection e-certificate obtained through the Dubai REST app is a listed requirement for a provisional sale property.

The bank side is less transparent. The Central Bank fee schedule for retail services caps no mortgage arrangement, processing or valuation fee. The only constraint is the Consumer Protection Regulation, which says licensed financial institutions “must not charge unreasonable fees”. That is a standard, not a number, so the arrangement fee is a price to negotiate.

Purchase price AED 2,000,000, bought off plan by an expatriate. The most a bank may lend is 50%, so AED 1,000,000, and AED 1,000,000 is equity. The Land Department registration fee at 4% of the price is AED 80,000, payable at the initial Oqood registration rather than at handover. Registering the mortgage costs 0.25% of AED 1,000,000, so AED 2,500, plus AED 250 for the title deed and AED 20 in knowledge and innovation fees.

Then the income test, which is where a deal usually fails. Borrowing AED 1,000,000 needs annual income of about AED 143,000 to stay inside the seven year multiple, which sounds undemanding until the debt burden ratio applies: instalments across all your borrowing must sit within 50% of gross monthly income, and the instalment used in that test is calculated two to four percentage points above the rate you are quoted. Run your numbers through our mortgage calculator at a rate above the offer.

Cash required before handover is therefore AED 1,080,000 at minimum, equity plus the DLD fee, and more if the plan front-loads. That is the number to test a purchase against.

Off-plan units are sold on instalments, and a mortgage does not slot neatly into them. Article (2) item 1 puts your equity in first: the lender must use it to pay the developer before releasing any loan money. Since the loan can never exceed half the price, a plan calling for more than 50% before handover is one you fund yourself up to that point.

So plot the developer instalment dates against the milestones the bank will pay on, which Article (4) requires the loan documentation to state. Our payment plan calculator lays out the developer side, and the off-plan catalogue carries the published plan for each project.

No interest rate appears above. Rates move weekly and the ones quoted in market articles are bank offers, not anything a regulator publishes. The same applies to the arrangement and valuation fees commonly quoted, which the Central Bank does not cap, and to the maximum age at final repayment, which Article (3) expressly delegates to each lender.

One figure is missing because the regulator contradicts itself. For an expatriate first home valued at exactly AED 5,000,000, the consolidated Article (3) says one thing and the amending Board Resolution No. 31/2/2020 that created the text says another. We give the bands as below and above AED 5 million and stay off the boundary rather than pick a side. It does not affect the off-plan cap, which is 50% at every value.