Living in Dubai

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, about 3,790,000 people. What you would earn and keep, the climate month by month, and every open figure we hold, each with its source, period and licence.

Weigh Dubai against other cities, with your own numbers

Key facts

• Dubai has about 3,790,000 residents (GeoNames).
• On a gross salary of AED 250,000 a year, an employee in Dubai takes home about AED 249,880 a year (AED 20,823 a month) after income tax and employee contributions, an effective rate of 0.0% (United Arab Emirates 2026 rules).
• In Dubai the average daily high (air temperature in the shade) peaks at 43.0 °C in August and the average daily low falls to 14.3 °C in January (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• Dubai has about 119 nice days a year, days that are dry, mostly clear and feel 18 to 30 °C on average from 8 am to 8 pm, most of them in March (23) (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• Between 2021 and 2025 the air in Dubai reached 47.9 °C at its hottest and 7.9 °C at its coldest (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo).
• It rains or snows (at least 1 mm) on about 8 days a year in Dubai (Historical weather (ERA5 reanalysis), Open-Meteo, 2021-2025).
• The shortest day in Dubai lasts 10 h 35 min and the longest 13 h 42 min (computed from latitude).
• Fine dust (PM2.5) in Dubai averages 35.0 µg/m³ a year, 7.0 times the WHO guideline of 5 µg/m³ (WHO Ambient Air Quality Database v8.0 (2026), World Health Organization, 2024).
• Everyday prices in the United Arab Emirates sit at 68.8 on an index where the United States is 100 (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2025).
• Life expectancy at birth in the United Arab Emirates is 83.1 years (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2024).
• The United Arab Emirates records 0.69 intentional homicides per 100,000 people a year (World Development Indicators, World Bank, 2022).
• Only citizens of the United Arab Emirates can live and work in Dubai without a visa or permit; everyone else needs one.

What you would take home

Expatriate employee: no income tax; the compulsory unemployment insurance (ILOE) premium is the only deduction. Rules for 2026. Sources: UAE government portal: taxation (no income tax on individuals), UAE government portal: unemployment insurance scheme, UAE government portal: end-of-service benefits in the private sector.

• The UAE levies no income tax on individuals; 5% VAT applies to most spending instead.
• Assumes an expatriate. Emirati employees fall under the pension and social security law and pay pension contributions, which are not modelled.
• The employer's end-of-service gratuity is a lump sum on leaving, not part of yearly take-home pay.
• The unemployment insurance band uses the whole salary; it is set on basic salary, which is often lower, so the AED 10 band may apply less often than shown.

A month in Dubai

Assumed: one person, €60,000 gross a year, renting a one-bedroom home, and everyday spending of €1,200 a month in Lisbon scaled by each country's price level. These are the app's defaults; change any of them there.

Who can live and work here freely

• Citizens of the United Arab Emirates.
• Everyone else needs a visa or permit.

Climate

Daylight is computed from latitude: the shortest day lasts 10 h 35 min, the longest 13 h 42 min.

Every figure

No open figure yet for: rent, one bedroom, rent, three bedrooms, childcare fees, one child, childcare fees, two children, childcare, net of support: couple, one child, childcare, net of support: couple, two children, childcare, net of support: single parent, one child, childcare, net of support: single parent, two children, your childcare cost, health insurance premium, public holidays on working days, paid leave for mothers, paid leave for fathers, life satisfaction, public swimming pools (official), green urban areas (official), commuting by public transport, commute time, monthly transit pass, road deaths, born abroad, everyday needs on foot, walking or cycling to work, out of the dense city, politics, left to right, abortion in law, same-sex couples in law. A country-wide figure is marked as such where it stands in for the city.

Compare Dubai with

• Dubai vs Athens
• Dubai vs Budapest
• Dubai vs Kraków
• Dubai vs Melbourne
• Dubai vs Naples
• Dubai vs Singapore
• Dubai vs Sydney
• Dubai vs Warsaw

Elsewhere

Sources we link to but do not copy, because their licences forbid it.

• Numbeo: cost of living in Dubai
• WeatherSpark: year-round weather in Dubai
• Wikipedia: Dubai

Credits

• Unicode CLDR territory information. Copyright © 1991-2026 Unicode, Inc. Used under the Unicode License v3 (https://www.unicode.org/license.txt) (Unicode License v3)
• Founders Running Club communities list (facts of presence and links only) (No licence from the publisher: only facts of presence are stored)
• Places, coordinates, populations and time zones from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
• Counts of GitHub profiles by stated location, from GitHub's public user search (counts only, no profile data) (No data licence from the publisher: only total counts are stored, no record about anyone, as its terms allow public, non-personal information in openly published research)
• Borgo contributors, from the labour codes cited in each figure's note (CC BY 4.0)
• The M-Lab NDT Data Set, 2023-01-01–2023-12-31. https://measurementlab.net/tests/ndt (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• Made with Natural Earth (public domain) (Public domain (dedicated by the publisher))
• Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (https://open-meteo.com/), CC BY 4.0 Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2021-2025. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains. (CC BY 4.0)
• OpenAlex (openalex.org), CC0 (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) (Open Database License 1.0)
• © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) (Open Database License 1.0)
• Airports from OurAirports (ourairports.com), public domain (Public domain (dedicated by the publisher))
• Research Organization Registry (ror.org), CC0 (CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication))
• Terrain Tiles on AWS Open Data (Mapzen, a Linux Foundation project): SRTM and GMTED2010 terrain data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey; ETOPO1, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Canada terrain data contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada (Terrain Tiles source terms: public domain (USGS, NOAA) and Open Government Licence – Canada, with attribution)
• World Health Organization, WHO Ambient Air Quality Database (Version 8.0), 2026, accessed 2026-10-27; data provided by the national and regional agencies named in each value's note WHO does not endorse Borgo, its use of these data, or any city ranking built from them. Values are as published by WHO; WHO advises against using the database to rank cities or compare countries directly, because monitoring differs between places. (WHO terms and conditions for data compilations)
• WMO Member Nations (2023). WMO Climatological Standard Normals for 1991-2020 (NCEI Accession 0253808), sunshine duration. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. https://doi.org/10.25921/800j-vn07 (No licence attached: NCEI public access with a requested citation, under the WMO Unified Data Policy)
• World Bank, World Development Indicators, CC BY 4.0 (underlying sources named in each figure's note: ICP, IMF, UNODC, UN Population Division, WHO, ILO, UNESCO Institute for Statistics) (CC BY 4.0)
• World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators, Control of Corruption estimate, CC BY 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)

Cite this page

Borgo, “Living in Dubai”, https://borgo.abcastor.com/city/dubai-ae/, figures as of 2026-11-05. Please also name the original source of any figure you use; each is listed above with its licence. Data: dubai-ae.json.