General guidance on the Dubai market, not legal, tax or financial advice. Fees and regulations change. Ask one of our consultants to confirm the current position before you commit to anything.
In Dubai you do not get a licence and then find premises. The two are linked, and the sequence catches first-time occupiers constantly.
A mainland company licensed by Dubai Economy and Tourism needs a registered tenancy for a physical address before the licence can be issued or renewed, and the address has to be appropriate to the licensed activity. A free zone entity is licensed by its own authority, and its premises almost always have to sit inside that free zone, whether that is a full office, a serviced suite or a flexi-desk package.
Before you sign anything, check that the unit’s permitted use matches the activity on your licence. A retail unit permitted for food and beverage is not automatically permitted for a clinic, and a landlord’s willingness is not the same as a regulator’s approval.
The practical order is: confirm your licensed activity, confirm the unit’s permitted use, confirm the authority that governs the building, then negotiate. Doing it the other way round is how occupiers end up holding a lease they cannot license.
Two things make Dubai commercial quotes harder to compare than they look.
First, there is no single area-measurement standard in the emirate. CBRE states this plainly, and notes that newer buildings increasingly quote on a net leasable, that is useable, basis. So two quotes at the same rate per square foot can represent materially different amounts of usable space. Always ask which basis a rate is on.
Second, rent is not the whole cost. Service charges, DEWA and chilled water are operating expenses separate from the rent, so a headline rate tells you less than you think until you have the full occupancy cost.
We will not publish per-square-foot figures by district on this page. The numbers circulating online are inconsistent and largely unsourced, and a stale rate is worse than no rate. Ask us for current evidence on the specific building you are considering.
Shell and core handover is the standard, which means your fit-out is a construction project with its own approvals, budget and programme. Plan it before you commit to a rent, not after.
Negotiate the fit-out period explicitly, as a stated number of months rent-free with a defined start trigger. Whether you get one and how long it runs is deal-specific, and the current market is not generous: CBRE reported Dubai office occupancy steady at 95 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, with landlords "broadly bullish" and showing no real change in negotiating stance. Go in expecting to earn any concession.
In our experience these are where commercial occupiers lose money, and all of them are negotiable at the point of signing and immovable afterwards.
This is better regulated than most occupiers realise, and it applies to commercial property, not only residential.
Dubai Law No. 6 of 2019 on the ownership of jointly owned real property states in Article 3 that it applies to all master projects and jointly owned real property in the emirate, including those in special development zones and in free zones, and its definition of a unit covers residential, commercial and industrial use. Two consequences follow for anyone paying a service charge in a strata building:
The Dubai Land Department administers this through Mollak, its system for regulating and monitoring service charges in jointly owned property. If you are being charged in a strata building, there should be an approved, audited budget behind the number.
A single-owner building is different. Where a tower is owned outright by one party rather than subdivided into units, the jointly owned property regime does not apply and the service charge is purely a contractual term of your lease, with no RERA-approved budget behind it. Ask which situation you are in, because it changes what you can challenge.
Many Dubai commercial buildings are on district cooling rather than individual air conditioning, and it is a regulated utility rather than a landlord charge.
District cooling is governed by Executive Council Resolution No. 6 of 2021, administered by the Regulatory and Supervisory Bureau, with tariffs approved by the Dubai Supreme Council of Energy. The charge has two parts: a capacity charge based on the cooling capacity contracted for your space, and a consumption charge based on what you actually use. The regulation sets the framework and the Supreme Council sets the caps.
The commercial point is simple. The capacity charge accrues on contracted capacity regardless of occupancy, so an over-specified contracted capacity is a permanent overhead. Ask what capacity is contracted for the unit and whether it can be adjusted.
Have the corporate documents ready before you start viewing. On commercial deals the paperwork, not the decision, is usually what sets the timeline.
This is commonly stated wrongly in both directions, and it turns on the specific property and lease, so we will not give you a blanket answer here. Treat the rent review as a commercial negotiation, get the mechanism written into the lease for the later years of the term, and take legal advice on your particular agreement rather than relying on a general rule.
A registered tenancy is what links your premises to your trade licence, so in practice registration is part of getting or renewing a mainland licence rather than an optional step. Free zone entities register through their own authority. Confirm the exact requirement with the authority that licenses you, because it differs between mainland and each free zone.
The space is handed over as a concrete structure with building services brought to the boundary and capped off. There are no floors, ceilings, partitions, lighting or distributed air conditioning. CBRE confirms it is the standard handover condition for Dubai offices, so your fit-out is a construction project you need to budget and programme for.
Yes, if the lease says so, and many do. A reinstatement or make-good clause can be a very large liability on a fitted floor. It is negotiable before you sign and effectively immovable afterwards, so read it at heads of terms stage rather than at expiry.
Whoever is the registered customer with the cooling provider, which the lease should state explicitly. It matters because the capacity element of the tariff accrues on the capacity contracted for your unit whether or not you are occupying it.
Give us the activity on your licence, the headcount and the budget. We will shortlist space that your licence actually permits and your fit-out budget can deliver.