Dubai Office Fit-Out Cost 2026: AED 150-350 a Square Foot

What does an office fit-out cost in Dubai in 2026?

AED 150 to AED 350 a square foot at entry level, depending entirely on whose price page you read. Six Dubai fit-out firms publish a 2026 rate card; all six were opened on 21 September 2026; and their cheapest tier — the one variously called Category A, basic or light refurbishment — starts anywhere between AED 150 and AED 350. On a 1,000 sq ft floor that is AED 150,000 against AED 350,000 for a specification nobody has yet written down.

The premium tiers agree far better than the cheap ones. Five of the six put the top of the market between AED 1,200 and AED 1,500 a square foot, and all six start their premium band at AED 700 to AED 900. It is the bottom of the range — the number a founder actually budgets against — where the market cannot agree with itself.

The six published rate cards, side by side

All figures are each firm’s own published per-square-foot range, in AED, read on 21 September 2026. Tier names differ between sources; they are aligned here by rank, cheapest to dearest. Two of the six add a fourth, ultra-premium band above AED 1,200. A seventh page, interiofy.ae, blocks automated reading in its robots.txt and is therefore not in this table.

Why do six firms quote the same basic office from AED 150 to AED 350?

Because “entry level” is not a specification, it is a marketing position. The spread between the cheapest floor and the dearest floor at the same tier is 2.33× — wider than the step from entry level to standard inside a single firm’s own card. At Rady Interior, moving from entry to standard multiplies your budget by 1.57. Choosing a different contractor at the same tier can multiply it by 2.33. Who you ask matters more than what you ask for.

The vocabulary makes this worse rather than better. Three of the six use the British leasing terms Category A and Category B; three use basic, mid-range and premium; the ranks do not line up between them. Nowhere in the six pages is there a written definition of what is inside the cheapest band — whether it includes partitions, whether it includes the ceiling, whether it includes anything at all beyond paint and power.

What Category A and Category B actually mean

Category A is the landlord’s shell finish: raised floor or screed, suspended ceiling, basic lighting, air conditioning brought to the space, fire detection, and nothing else. Category B is the tenant’s office: partitions, meeting rooms, joinery, flooring finishes, furniture, branding, cabling. If your landlord has already delivered Category A, a Category A quote is refurbishment of work that exists; if the floor is a grey shell, the same words mean building it from nothing. Ask which of the two you are being quoted for before you compare two numbers.

What does the fit-out permit actually cost?

AED 0.90 a square foot, with a floor of AED 200 and a ceiling of AED 10,000, plus an AED 10 Knowledge Dirham and an AED 10 Innovation Dirham. That is the Dubai Development Authority’s own published tariff for a fit-out permit, on the fit-out permit page of dda.gov.ae, read on 21 September 2026. DDA is the authority for Business Bay, Dubai Design District, Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City and the other TECOM districts; offices elsewhere in the city go through Dubai Municipality instead, and free zones such as Jebel Ali through their own engineering departments.

What the permit costs at four sizes

Source: dda.gov.ae, fit-out permit service page, read 21 September 2026. The AED 200 minimum binds below 223 sq ft; the AED 10,000 cap binds above 11,112 sq ft.

Set that against the build. On 1,000 sq ft, the permit is AED 920 against a fit-out of AED 150,000 to AED 350,000 — between 0.3% and 0.6% of the job. Two of the six price pages fold “approval fees and drawings” into a single line of AED 5,000 to AED 25,000. That line is not wrong — it also carries consultant drawings, third-party NOCs and civil defence clearance — but none of the six breaks it down, and the one component with a published tariff is buried inside it.

What do you need before the permit is even issued?

Six documents, and the two that hold up the file are not the contractor’s. DDA lists the fit-out permit request form, a contractor appointment letter signed by the tenant, a copy of the Ejari, an NOC from the building owner, NOCs from any other relevant authorities, and approved stamped drawings alongside the proposed ones. The applicant of record is the contractor — but the Ejari and the landlord’s NOC come from the tenant, which is why fit-out programmes slip in the week before they start rather than during the build.

The Ejari is the usual bottleneck, because it sits downstream of a signed tenancy contract and upstream of everything else: no Ejari, no permit, and separately no utilities account. We have not repeated any Ejari fee here — the process, the documents and the current charges are set out in our complete guide to how Ejari works in Dubai. The utility side runs on its own clock too, and we costed it separately in the DEWA move-in breakdown.

How long does a fit-out take, and how long is the permit good for?

Two working days for the permit, six to twenty-four weeks for the build, and the permit expires after six months. That asymmetry is the single most useful thing on this page for anyone planning a move: the paperwork is never the long pole, and the approval clock starts before the slow part does.

A twenty-four week premium build is about five and a half months. The permit runs six. That leaves roughly two weeks of slack on the longest programme any of these firms advertises, and about six weeks on a twenty-week one. If the drawings come back for revision, or the landlord’s NOC arrives late, the permit can expire under a job that is still running.

Where does the money actually go inside a fit-out?

Into the ceiling, mostly. Two of the six firms, independently, put mechanical, electrical and plumbing at 40–55% of the total — air conditioning distribution, power, data containment, fire and lighting. It is the half of the budget nobody photographs and nobody shows a client, and it is the half that a landlord’s Category A finish may or may not have already paid for.

Read the last-but-two line again. Detailed design alone is quoted at AED 150 to AED 300 a square foot by one of the six — the same money another of the six charges for an entire entry-level fit-out. Neither page says whether design is inside or outside its headline per-square-foot rate. That single ambiguity is large enough to account for most of the 2.33× spread in the first table, and it is the first question to put to anyone quoting you.

How does a fit-out compare with a year of rent in the same building?

The cheapest entry-level fit-out quoted in Dubai costs more, per square foot, than a full year of mid-grade Business Bay rent. Office rent in Business Bay runs about AED 95 to AED 125 a square foot a year in mid-grade towers, up to AED 160 in Grade A stock such as the Oberoi, with small units and shared zones starting near AED 80 — figures published by Driven Properties’ Business Bay office listings, read on 21 September 2026. Against that, AED 150 a square foot of fit-out is 1.2 years of rent, paid once, before the first working day.

Rent range: Driven Properties, Business Bay office listings, read 21 September 2026. Fit-out range: the six rate cards in the first table. Years are fit-out per square foot divided by rent per square foot per year.

This is the comparison the price guides never draw, and it changes how the decision looks. A three-year lease with a median fit-out spends roughly two of those three years’ worth of rent on the build. A five-year lease makes the same fit-out look cheap. The fit-out does not price the office — it prices your confidence in the lease.

What does 1,000 sq ft really cost in year one?

AED 335,920 on the median numbers, of which AED 225,920 is paid before anyone sits down. The arithmetic below uses 1,000 sq ft in a mid-grade Business Bay tower at AED 110 a square foot a year — the midpoint of the AED 95–125 band — and the median entry-level fit-out quote of AED 225 a square foot.

Rent and fit-out as sourced above. The permit is the DDA tariff. Nothing else is included in this table — see the next section for what is missing.

What do the fit-out price guides leave out?

Everything that arrives after handover. None of the six rate cards includes service charges, utilities, business internet, cleaning, a receptionist, meeting rooms, security, maintenance contracts on the air conditioning they just installed, or the make-good clause that may oblige you to strip the whole thing out at the end of the lease. The AED 185 a square foot a year in the table above is a floor, not a total.

Three omissions are worth naming, because each one is an invoice:

• Furniture is quoted separately. AED 1,500 to AED 5,000 a workstation, on top of the per-square-foot rate — twenty desks is AED 30,000 to AED 100,000.
• The 5% to 10% contingency reserve is yours, not theirs. One of the six says so plainly; the other five quote a range and leave the risk unpriced.
• Nothing is recoverable. A fit-out is a sunk cost in someone else’s building. Leave in year two and the AED 225,000 does not follow you; in many leases you pay again to remove it.

Which of these costs disappear in a serviced office?

All of the ones above. That is the actual trade, and it is worth stating plainly rather than selling: a serviced private office costs more per square foot per year, and costs nothing at all up front. The eight private offices we publish in Business Bay work out between AED 540 and AED 622 a square foot a year, everything included, against roughly AED 185 for the three-year build-your-own case in the table above.

Our prices exclude 5% VAT, added at payment. Private offices start at AED 6,000 a month across the network; the eight offices published in Business Bay run from AED 6,000 to AED 12,420 a month. A hot desk is AED 950 a month, a day pass AED 120, and a dedicated desk AED 1,500 a month — Downtown only. Members have 24/7 access; reception is staffed Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm. Our Design District address opens on 1 October 2026.

The meeting-room allowance is worth its own line, because it is the piece a fit-out budget usually gets wrong: a private office here includes 6 hours of meeting room a month, a dedicated desk 4 hours and a hot desk 1 hour, all on the monthly subscription. Build your own and a meeting room is a room you paid AED 225 a square foot to create and will use a few hours a week.

When does building your own office actually win?

When you are certain about three things: the headcount, the address and the horizon. On pure square footage over five years, a self-built office is cheaper — the same AED 225,920 of fit-out and permit spread over five years of AED 110,000 rent comes to about AED 155 a square foot a year before services, against AED 540 and up for a ready office. The honest answer is that the arithmetic favours building if you will genuinely be there in 2031 with roughly the team you have today.

It stops winning fast when any of the three moves. A team that doubles needs a second fit-out. A move to a better address abandons the first one. An eighteen-month runway turns AED 225,920 of pre-opening spend into the largest single line in the budget. This is the same calculation we walked through for smaller footprints in what a private office costs in Dubai, and from the other direction in traditional versus serviced offices. If your answer to any of the three is “probably”, the flexible route is not a compromise — it is the cheaper way to stay wrong cheaply.

How did we check these numbers?

Every fit-out rate in this article was read on the publishing firm’s own page on 21 September 2026, and every figure is that firm’s, not ours. The permit tariff, the document list, the two-working-day turnaround and the six-month validity come from the Dubai Development Authority’s fit-out permit service page, read the same day. The rent band comes from a Business Bay office listings page, also read the same day. One further rate card, interiofy.ae, is excluded because its robots.txt blocks automated reading; we would rather name the gap than guess at it.

One note on the FAQ below. Google Search Console records no search traffic at all to this site on the fit-out vocabulary — zero impressions across two consecutive 28-day periods for “fit out”, “renovation” and “contractor”. The ten questions are therefore drawn from measured Semrush keyword demand in the UAE database rather than from our own search data, and we say so rather than inventing the provenance.

FAQ: 10 quick answers

1. How much does an office fit-out cost in Dubai? AED 150 to AED 350 a square foot at entry level, and AED 700 to AED 1,500 or more for a premium build. Those are the published 2026 ranges of six Dubai fit-out firms, read on 21 September 2026. On 1,000 sq ft, an entry-level job is therefore quoted anywhere between AED 150,000 and AED 350,000 — the spread reflects how little the phrase “basic fit-out” is defined, not how different the offices are.

2. What does a fit-out permit cost in Dubai? AED 0.90 a square foot from the Dubai Development Authority, with a minimum of AED 200 and a maximum of AED 10,000, plus an AED 10 Knowledge Dirham and an AED 10 Innovation Dirham. A 1,000 sq ft office therefore pays AED 920. DDA covers Business Bay, Dubai Design District and the TECOM districts; elsewhere in Dubai the permit is issued by Dubai Municipality and priced on its own schedule.

3. How long does an office fit-out take in Dubai? Six to twenty-four weeks, depending on scope. The six rate cards quote 2–6 weeks for a light refurbishment, 6–8 weeks for a simple upgrade, 8–16 weeks for a standard project from approvals to handover, and 16–24 weeks for a large or premium turnkey build. The permit itself is issued in two working days, so the approval is almost never the delay.

4. Who applies for the fit-out permit, the tenant or the contractor? The contractor is the applicant of record on the DDA service page. The tenant still supplies most of the file: the contractor appointment letter, the Ejari copy and the NOC from the building owner all originate on the tenant’s side, which is why permits stall on tenant paperwork rather than on the authority.

5. Do I need an Ejari before a fit-out permit? Yes — a copy of the Ejari is on DDA’s list of required documents for a fit-out permit. It sits downstream of a signed tenancy contract and upstream of the permit and the utility account, so an Ejari delay stops the build and the electricity at the same time. Our Ejari guide sets out the documents and the current charges.

6. What is the difference between Category A and Category B fit-out? Category A is the landlord’s shell finish — floor, ceiling, basic lighting, air conditioning brought to the space, fire detection. Category B is your office on top of it: partitions, meeting rooms, joinery, finishes, furniture and cabling. Two quotes for “Category A” can mean refurbishing existing work or building it from a grey shell, which is why they differ so widely.

7. How long is a Dubai fit-out permit valid? Six months from approval, per the DDA service page. That matters on long programmes: a twenty-four-week premium build runs about five and a half months, leaving roughly two weeks of slack. Revised drawings or a late landlord NOC can push a running job past the expiry of its own permit.

8. What is the biggest single line in a fit-out budget? Mechanical, electrical and plumbing, at 40–55% of the total — a figure two of the six firms publish independently. That covers air conditioning distribution, power, data containment, fire systems and lighting. It is also the line most affected by what the landlord has already installed, so establish the existing Category A condition before comparing any two quotes.

9. Is it cheaper to fit out an office or take a serviced one in Dubai? Over five years and with a stable team, building is cheaper per square foot; over one to three years, or with any uncertainty about headcount or address, it is not. A median entry-level fit-out of 1,000 sq ft is AED 225,920 of non-recoverable spend before opening day, against a private office from AED 6,000 a month with no capital outlay at all.

10. Does a fit-out price per square foot include the design? Usually it is not stated, and that is the problem. One of the six firms prices concept design at AED 50–150 a square foot and detailed design at AED 150–300 a square foot as separate lines — as much as another firm charges for an entire entry-level fit-out. Ask in writing whether design, drawings and authority submissions sit inside or outside the headline rate.

What to do next

Three things, in order. Before you compare two fit-out quotes, get both firms to state in writing whether the rate includes design, drawings and authority submissions, and which Category the landlord has already delivered — those two answers explain most of the 2.33× spread on this page. Second, price the permit yourself from the published tariff rather than accepting an “approvals” line: AED 0.90 a square foot plus AED 20 is a number you can check. Third, be honest about the horizon, because a fit-out is a bet on the lease, not on the office.

And if the answer is that you are not ready to bet AED 225,920 on a building, come and look at ours instead. A private office starts at AED 6,000 a month in Business Bay, furnished, connected and with six hours of meeting room a month included; a hot desk is AED 950 a month and a day pass AED 120. Nothing to build, nothing to permit, nothing to strip out at the end. Book a free tour at Downtown or Business Bay — and our private offices in Dubai Design District open on 1 October 2026.