Fit-out rates per square foot in Dubai: the published ranges

Every rate table you find online for Dubai fit-out is someone's marketing. That does not make it useless — it makes it a range.

The figures below are compiled from published contractor and agency pages and are presented with their sources so you can see where each one comes from and judge it yourself. They are indicative ranges for budgeting. They are not quotations, and they are not an average of the market.

Rates per square foot

The reason these ranges overlap so heavily is that "fit-out" is not one thing. A design-only fee covers drawings and specification. A basic package covers a defined list of finishes and trades. A turnkey contract covers design, procurement, construction, coordination and defects liability. Comparing a design-only rate to a turnkey rate produces nonsense, and it happens constantly in early budgeting conversations.

Whole-project totals

Project totals can help test a rate, but published totals and per-square-foot rates can cover different scopes. Access, protection, preliminaries, permits, insurance and site supervision do not scale down with the size of the job, which can make a small scope cost more per square foot.

The outlier, and why we show it

One source, fixitdubai.ae, publishes figures well above the rest. Published renovation ranges use different scopes and cannot be ranked directly against the package bands. They are additional examples, not a market average.

We keep it visible as a separate published renovation example. Its scope differs from the other rates, so compare written inclusions rather than assuming it is the top of one market range.

What actually moves the number

• Property type. Villas cost more per square foot than apartments, because multi-floor circulation, external works, landscape and larger MEP scopes all add cost without adding usable area.
• Finish level. The gap between a developer-standard finish and an imported specification is the largest single variable in the whole budget.
• MEP scope. Relocating air conditioning, power or drainage is disproportionately expensive relative to its visibility in the finished result.
• Approvals. Consultant fees, authority fees and the time cost of the approval process are real and are frequently omitted from early estimates.
• Contractor tier. Verify the contractor registration and insurance required for your permit; compare like-for-like quotations.
• Programme. Compressed timelines cost more, because they require more labour in parallel and often out-of-hours working.
• Access. A tower with booked service-lift slots, or a low-rise block with no lift large enough for the worktop, both add preliminaries.

How to use these numbers

1. Establish your floor area in square feet accurately. Use the area converter if your documents mix square feet and square metres.
2. Decide which scope you are actually buying — design only, design and build, or turnkey — before you compare any rate.
3. Multiply and get a range, not a number. Take the low and high of the matching row.
4. Add only costs excluded from the selected written scope. Check furniture, appliances, window treatments, landscaping and authority fees individually, then choose a planning reserve.
5. Use the budget calculator for the published fit-out package ranges, any excluded costs and your chosen reserve.
6. Get three quotations against an identical written scope. The comparison is only meaningful if the scope is the same.

Step six is where most budget surprises come from. Two quotes for different scopes cannot be compared, and the cheaper one is frequently the one that omits something you will pay for later as a variation.