Dubai Rental Market 2025: Average Rent by Area, Bedroom & Trend

How much does it cost to rent an apartment in Dubai in 2025? We answered that the only way that matters — with data. This report aggregates millions of registered residential lease contracts across Dubai’s major communities to show median rents by area and bedroom, how rents moved year-over-year, and where the fastest growth is happening.

Every figure below is computed from lease contracts registered with the Dubai Land Department (DLD). You can pull DLD rental and sale transactions yourself through the UAEPropertyAPI transactions endpoint to reproduce, extend, or build on any of it. For the full interactive breakdown of any community, see our UAE market data hub.

Updated October 2026 with lease contracts registered up to 24 October 2026. This report covers calendar-year trends to 2025; new-lease rents have softened during 2026, so see our monthly Dubai Rent Report for the latest month.

Headline findings

• The mainstream Dubai apartment market runs roughly AED 52,000–145,000 a year, depending on community — from value areas like Dubai South and Dubai Silicon Oasis to prime addresses like Downtown.
• Rents are still rising in most communities. The strongest year-over-year growth is in mid-market and emerging areas, not the prime core.
• Affordable communities saw the biggest jumps: Dubai South (+15.6%), Motor City (+13.8%), Dubai Silicon Oasis (+10.4%) and JVC (+10.3%) led apartment-rent growth, as demand pushed outward from the city centre.
• Established waterfront areas slowed. Dubai Marina (+4.5%) and JLT (+3.7%) grew far more modestly, Mirdif was flat (+0.7%), and Mohammed Bin Rashid City actually cooled (−8.6%) as new supply was handed over.

Average apartment rent in Dubai by area (2025)

Median annual rent for apartments, with year-over-year change. Click any area for the full breakdown — rent by bedroom, price per square foot, recent contracts, and live asking prices.

Area	Median annual rent	YoY change
Downtown Dubai	AED 145,000	+9.9%
Dubai Creek Harbour	AED 130,000	+8.5%
Jumeirah	AED 120,000	+9.1%
Dubai Hills Estate	AED 112,500	+9.5%
Dubai Marina	AED 110,000	+4.5%
Business Bay	AED 95,000	+5.4%
Mohammed Bin Rashid City	AED 94,900	−8.6%
Jumeirah Lake Towers (JLT)	AED 85,000	+3.7%
Al Barsha	AED 75,000	+7.1%
Motor City	AED 75,000	+13.8%
Jumeirah Village Circle (JVC)	AED 65,000	+10.3%
Mirdif	AED 62,920	+0.7%
Dubai Silicon Oasis	AED 52,000	+10.4%
Dubai South	AED 52,000	+15.6%

Figures are medians of annualised residential lease contracts (last 24 months). Villa-led communities such as Arabian Ranches (median villa rent ~AED 245,000) are reported separately.

Rent by bedroom

The single most-asked question — “what does a one-bed cost here?” — answered for the most active apartment communities:

Area	Studio	1 Bed	2 Bed	3 Bed
Downtown Dubai	AED 75,000	AED 115,000	AED 179,000	AED 280,000
Dubai Marina	AED 64,000	AED 90,000	AED 136,000	AED 200,000
Business Bay	AED 65,000	AED 85,000	AED 125,000	AED 170,000
JLT	AED 60,000	AED 80,000	AED 120,000	AED 140,000
Dubai Hills Estate	AED 72,000	AED 90,000	AED 140,000	AED 235,000
JVC	AED 46,000	AED 68,000	AED 90,000	AED 120,000

A useful pattern emerges in the rent per square foot numbers (shown on each area page): smaller units command the highest rent per square foot. A Dubai Marina studio rents at about AED 147/sq ft, against roughly AED 95/sq ft for a 3-bed — which is exactly why studio and one-bed stock is the engine of yield for most landlords.

Where rents rose fastest

The 2025 story isn’t the prime core — it’s the mid-market spreading outward. As prime rents hit affordability ceilings, demand pushed into well-connected value communities, and that’s where growth concentrated:

1. Dubai South — +15.6%
2. Motor City — +13.8%
3. Arabian Ranches (villas) — +11.4%
4. Dubai Silicon Oasis — +10.4%
5. Jumeirah Village Circle — +10.3%

By contrast, Mohammed Bin Rashid City apartment rents softened (−8.6%) as a wave of handovers added supply — a reminder that community-level data tells a very different story than the citywide average.

Affordable vs premium

• Most affordable apartment rents: Dubai South (AED 52,000), Dubai Silicon Oasis (AED 52,000), and Mirdif (AED 62,920).
• Most premium: Al Barari (AED 245,000), City Walk (AED 207,900), Palm Jumeirah (AED 195,000), and Emaar Beachfront (AED 180,000).

That’s a nearly 5x spread between the city’s most affordable and most premium apartment communities — the kind of dispersion that makes location-level data essential for anyone pricing, investing, or building in this market.

What about rental yields?

Pairing median apartment rents with median apartment asking prices gives an indicative gross yield. Where both datasets are deep, the mainstream apartment communities cluster around 4.5–6%:

• Dubai Marina: ~4.4%
• Jumeirah Village Circle: ~5.9%
• Business Bay: ~5.3%

For a full methodology on computing yields from listing and transaction data, see our guide on analysing UAE rental yields.

How this report was built

Rent figures are medians of annualised residential lease contracts (monthly rent × 12), using the 24 months of DLD-registered transactions to 24 October 2026 and reported as medians to avoid distortion from luxury outliers. Year-over-year change compares the 2025 median with 2024. We restrict the headline numbers to residential stock (apartments, villas, townhouses, penthouses) and report villa-led communities separately. All numbers are aggregated, anonymised market statistics.

The underlying records — every lease contract, sale transaction, price trend, and live listing — are available as clean JSON through the API:

• Transactions endpoint — historical sale and rental contracts by location and period
• Price trend endpoint — monthly price-per-square-foot trends per community
• Search rent — live rental listings and asking prices

Explore the interactive, always-updated version of this data in the UAE market data hub, or get a free API key and pull the numbers yourself.