Answers · Returns, renting and running costs

Which Dubai areas have the highest rental yields?

Motor City apartments give the highest gross yields in Dubai at roughly 7 to 9%, with Jumeirah Village Circle at 7 to 8.5% and Al Jaddaf studios at 7.5 to 8.5%. After service charges the ranking changes, because service charges cost between 0.75 and 1.3 percentage points of yield depending on the area.

Updated September 2026 · By Ahmed Kandil

These are the gross figures from my own community guides as they stand in September 2026, and the citywide number to measure them against is the August 2026 average of 6.34% across everything, which splits into 6.66% for apartments and 4.45% for villas.

Two things are worth noticing before you go any further. The first is that the spread between the top of that table and the bottom is about four percentage points, which is a lot of money on a AED 1.5 million unit. The second is that smaller units carry the higher numbers almost everywhere, so a studio in Al Jaddaf sits at 7.5 to 8.5% while a three-bed in the same area sits at 6 to 7.5%, and the same pattern repeats in JVC and in Business Bay.

Here’s the issue. Every table you will find online, including the one above, is a gross yield, which means it is the annual rent divided by the purchase price and nothing has been subtracted from it yet. The single largest thing you subtract is the service charge, and the amount it costs you is not the dirham figure, it is the dirham figure as a share of what you paid per square foot.

Prices and gross yields are the midpoints of the ranges published in my community guides for September 2026. Service charges are the midpoints of the ranges on the Service Charge Index in the Dubai REST app, also September 2026. The arithmetic is mine and I have shown it so you can redo it with your own building’s actual numbers, which is what you should be doing anyway.

Look at the first two rows. Motor City starts a quarter of a point ahead of JVC on gross and finishes behind it on net, because AED 11 of service charge on a unit bought at AED 850 per square foot is a bigger proportional bite than AED 13 on a unit bought at AED 1,350.

Now look at Downtown, where the service charge is AED 32.50 and everybody tells you the service charges are punishing. They are punishing in dirhams, and as a share of what you actually paid they cost you 0.92 of a point, which is less than Motor City costs you. What people don’t realise is that the service charge and the purchase price tend to move together, so the cheap area is not automatically the efficient one, and the expensive area is not automatically the inefficient one. You have to run the ratio.

Of course there is a downside to everything, and the downside of a table like the one above is that it stops at service charges. Sitting underneath it are the things that vary by unit rather than by area, so you still have agency and renewal commission, maintenance on an older tower, the DEWA and chiller arrangement, and whatever your vacancy actually runs at. One month empty on a twelve month lease is about 8% of your gross rent, which is worth more than the entire gap between the best and worst service charge ratio in that table.

Which means the areas at the top of the gross table earn their position partly through demand depth rather than through the yield itself. A studio in JVC at 8% that lets in two weeks is a different asset from a studio somewhere quieter at 8% that lets in three months, and the yield number is identical for both of them.

What is a good rental yield in Dubai in 2026?

The citywide gross average was 6.34% in August 2026, and 6.66% for apartments. Anything above about 7% gross is genuinely strong, and anything you are shown above 10% deserves a question about what has been left out of it.

Do villas have lower yields than apartments in Dubai?

Yes, and by a wide margin. The August 2026 figures put apartments at 6.66% gross and villas at 4.45%. Villas tend to compensate on capital growth rather than on income, so which one suits you depends on whether you are buying for the rent or for the resale.

Is a high rental yield area a good place to buy?

Not on its own. A high yield usually means the purchase price is low relative to the rent, and the reason the price is low is information about the area. It really comes down to what you are looking for, because a buyer who needs the income and a buyer who needs the exit are not looking at the same table.

What rental yield can I expect in Dubai? · What are service charges in Dubai? · What’s the minimum budget to buy property in Dubai? · Jumeirah Village Circle guide · Motor City guide · All answers

• Citywide gross yields, market transaction data to August 2026 (6.34% overall, 6.66% apartments, 4.45% villas). Set out in full on my rental yield page
• Service charge ranges by community, Service Charge Index on the Dubai REST app, September 2026, as published on my own service charges page
• Dubai REST app and Service Charge Index, Dubai Land Department
• Price per sq ft and gross yield ranges, my own community guides, September 2026: Jumeirah Village Circle · Motor City · Business Bay · Dubai Creek Harbour · Downtown Dubai · Al Jaddaf

Method note. The “yield lost to service charge” column is the service charge per square foot divided by the price per square foot, both at the midpoint of the published range, expressed in percentage points. The net column is the midpoint gross yield less that figure. It is arithmetic on sourced inputs, not a published statistic.