Dubai’s Rental Contracts in 2024: What the Record Count Merges

A rental contract, in the data the Dubai Land Department publishes, is a tenancy registered with the department, and nothing narrower than that. The record count of 965,067 for 2024 therefore covers two populations that answer different questions: tenancies signed for the first time, and tenancies renewed by a sitting tenant. The Dubai Real Estate Annual Report 2024 reports both, and it reports the second one three times, in three different values. An owner reading the headline alone gets a number that no single leasing decision can act on.

This material sets out how the count is built, what the two halves measure, where the price averages merge markets that are moving in opposite directions, and where the published data stops. The figures throughout are for the calendar year 2024, the last year the department has reported in full. Nothing here is extrapolated to 2025 or 2026, because the department has not published the equivalent series for those years.

What the record rental contracts count contains

The annual report states that Dubai’s rental market reached a record 965,067 contracts in 2024, a 101% increase compared to 2017. It splits that total into two streams. New contracts rose by 19.7% against 2023 to reach 466,180, which the department reads as a demand indicator, driven by relocations, the arrival of international talent and the establishment of new businesses. Renewals it describes as reaching approximately 499,887, a 10.4% year-on-year increase, and reads as tenant stickiness and occupancy strength.

The proportions matter more than either number alone. New tenancies account for 48.3% of the 2024 total, which means that slightly more than half of all registered contracts in the record year were signed by tenants who were already in place. The same report gives the earlier years in the same two streams: 2023 stands at 451,691 renewals against 389,231 new contracts, 2020 at 267,902 against 263,880, and 2017 at 258,081 against 220,835. The mix has shifted, but not dramatically: renewals have carried the majority in each of those years.

The department also anchors the growth to two reference points. Total contracts jumped from 531,000 in 2020 to 965,000 in 2024, an 81% increase in four years, which it attributes to the pandemic response, Golden Visa and remote work reforms, and business migration. Against 2017 the increase is the 101% already quoted. Both comparisons are stated in the report as round figures, and both can be checked against the year-by-year series it prints alongside them.

One number, three values

The renewal count does not survive that check cleanly. The report’s prose puts renewals at approximately 499,887. The chart on the same spread labels the 2024 bars 489,887 and 466,180. And the headline total of 965,067, minus the new-contract figure of 466,180 that both the prose and the chart agree on, leaves 498,887. Three values, one indicator, one document.

The report’s own growth claims settle which of the three is internally consistent, without anyone having to guess. Renewals of 498,887 against the 2023 figure of 451,691 produce a 10.4% increase, exactly the rate the report states. The chart label of 489,887 produces 8.5%, and the prose figure of 499,887 produces 10.7%; neither matches. The same test applies to the total: 965,067 against 2017 is a 101.5% increase and against 2020 an 81.5% increase, matching the stated 101% and 81%, while the chart labels sum to 956,067 and produce 99.6% and 79.8% instead. The new-contract growth checks out either way, at 19.8% computed against 19.7% stated, a difference that is rounding and nothing more.

Three independent checks therefore point the same way, and the honest conclusion stops there. The department has not published a correction, so the correct way to cite the renewal count is as a range with its base stated: between 489,887 and 499,887 as printed, with 498,887 the only value consistent with the growth rates in the same document. Choosing one and presenting it as the figure would be exactly the kind of false precision that makes a market analysis less useful than the raw document, and it will not be done here. What the discrepancy does not do is unsettle the direction: on every reading, renewals grew, new contracts grew faster, and the total set a record.

Why the split changes what an owner reads

The two streams answer different commercial questions, and merging them removes the answer to both. New contracts measure absorption: how much space found a tenant that did not have one, which is the number that matters when a building is in lease-up or when an owner is testing whether a submarket can take more stock. Renewals measure retention: how much of the existing tenant base stayed, which is the number that matters for underwriting a stabilised asset and for judging whether asking rents have run ahead of what sitting tenants will pay.

An owner comparing the two streams year by year gets a signal that the blended count cannot give. New contracts grew 19.7% in 2024 while renewals grew 10.4%, which means the faster-moving half of the market was the half that had to be won rather than kept. That gap is the useful part. A single figure of 965,067, growing at a blended rate, would have suggested a market expanding evenly on both sides, and the underwriting implications of those two pictures are not the same.

The limits of this reading should be stated as plainly as the reading itself. The department publishes the contract counts for the market as a whole and does not split them between commercial and residential tenancies. Nothing in the 965,067 can therefore be attributed to offices, warehouses or shops specifically, and no share of it will be assigned to the commercial segment here. The split that is available by asset type sits in the price series, not in the counts, and that is where the next section goes.

The price average merges two markets moving apart

The report’s rental price analysis measures the average price per square foot and separates units from villas, and within each of those, commercial from residential. That separation is where the most consequential merging in the whole dataset becomes visible, because the two halves of the unit market moved in opposite directions in the same year.

The unit row is the one to read twice. Commercial units rebounded from 156.7 to 170.4 AED per sq ft, an 8.7% increase that the department associates with renewed leasing momentum in Business Bay, DIFC and JLT. Residential units softened from 95.2 to 77.3 AED per sq ft, an 18.8% decline that it attributes to attractive pricing and improved selection for tenants. The blended Dubai unit average fell 13.1%, from 104.4 to 90.7. That headline decline describes neither segment: the commercial half rose, the residential half fell by more, and the average landed in a place where no actual asset traded.

The villa rows show the same structure with the signs reversed. Residential villas rose 19.6%, from 37.3 to 44.6 AED per sq ft, while commercial villas edged down 1.7%, from 23.2 to 22.8. The blended villa average rose 18.9%, tracking the residential half almost exactly, because that half dominates the volume. In both asset classes, the published average is a weighted result whose weights are not published, which is precisely why the segment rows rather than the average belong in an underwriting model.

One consequence deserves stating for anyone benchmarking a commercial lease. On the unit side, the commercial figure of 170.4 AED per sq ft sits 88% above the blended 90.7, and an owner who benchmarks a commercial asking rent against the Dubai unit average is comparing it to a number that is mostly residential. Averaging the two would misrepresent the market rather than summarise it, and the two rows should be carried separately through any model that uses them.

Where the money concentrates

The community-level analysis in the same report ranks the districts by total rental value in 2024, and the ranking rewards concentration rather than size. Business Bay leads at AED 3.54 billion with 23.44% year-on-year growth, followed by Burj Khalifa at AED 3.45 billion and 16.36%, and Marsa Dubai, listed as Dubai Marina, at AED 3.40 billion but with growth of only 2.15%. Al Thanyah Fifth follows at AED 2.23 billion and 13.05%, and Al Barsha First at AED 2.11 billion and 4.52%.

The spread in growth rates matters more than the ranking. The top three are separated by AED 140 million in rental value, which at this scale is close to indistinguishable, but by more than 21 percentage points in growth. A district can hold its position in the value table while the flow into it slows to almost nothing, which is what the 2.15% figure describes. For an owner choosing between two assets of similar quality in two of these communities, the growth column carries the information that the value column hides.

Where the published data stops

The Dubai Land Department’s Open Data section offers real estate data through a dated query form across nine categories, from transactions and rents to brokers and developers, and its Research section lists exactly two report types: the annual report and the Dubai Commercial Property Price Index. The Mo’asher index sits alongside them. That is the published perimeter, and it has a specific gap that shapes what any commercial analysis can honestly say.

There is no official series for commercial vacancy in Dubai in those sections. A vacancy rate is the number most often quoted in commercial market commentary and the one most often sourced to nobody in particular, and a figure will not be manufactured for it here. The same applies to a commercial-only contract count: because the department does not split the 965,067 by asset purpose, any percentage attributing part of that record to offices or warehouses would be an invention dressed as a statistic. The Real Estate Data section returns its series only through a form with mandatory date fields, which is why the figures in this material come from the published annual report rather than from a custom query.

What the department does publish is enough to work with, provided the labels are read literally. Contract counts are counts of registrations, not of tenants, buildings or square feet. Price per square foot is an annual average of registered contracts, not an asking rent and not a valuation. Community rental value is a sum of contract values, so it rises when either rents or contract numbers rise, and the two causes are not separated in the published table. Each of those definitions narrows what the number can support, and each of them is visible in the report itself rather than inferred.

Conclusions

Dubai registered a record 965,067 rental contracts in 2024, but the record is two records: 466,180 new tenancies, 48.3% of the total and up 19.7% on 2023, and renewals that the report prints as 499,887 in prose, labels 489,887 on its chart, and implies at 498,887 once the new contracts are subtracted from the headline — with only the last of the three producing the 10.4% growth the report itself states, just as only the headline total produces the stated 101% increase on 2017 and 81% on 2020. The price series divides the same market again and in the opposite direction: commercial units up 8.7% to 170.4 AED per sq ft while residential units fell 18.8% to 77.3, leaving a blended unit average of 90.7 that dropped 13.1% and describes neither half, and commercial villas down 1.7% to 22.8 against residential villas up 19.6% to 44.6. Value concentrates in Business Bay at AED 3.54 billion, Burj Khalifa at AED 3.45 billion and Dubai Marina at AED 3.40 billion, three communities within AED 140 million of each other and more than 21 percentage points apart in growth. For an owner, the operative discipline is to carry the segment rows rather than the averages, to read new contracts and renewals as separate signals of absorption and retention, and to accept that Dubai publishes no commercial vacancy series at all — which means the honest analysis is bounded by the data that exists rather than completed with the data that would be convenient.

This material is informational in nature and does not constitute legal, tax or financial advice.