Two official sources say different things about Dubai prices
The Land Department's transaction data and the Statistics Centre's index are ten points apart. Knowing why stops you quoting the wrong one.
Rebase both to 2019 and follow them forward. By 2025 the Dubai Land Department's transaction data says Dubai home prices are at 172. The Dubai Statistics Center index says 163.
Nine points apart, and neither is wrong.
How the gap opened
| Year | DLD median, rebased | DSC index | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 94.4 | 96.0 | −1.6 |
| 2021 | 105.0 | 102.8 | +2.2 |
| 2022 | 126.6 | 117.2 | +9.4 |
| 2023 | 144.2 | 132.6 | +11.6 |
| 2024 | 158.9 | 148.0 | +10.9 |
| 2025 | 172.3 | 162.5 | +9.8 |
They agreed until 2021. The gap opened in 2022 and has held near ten points since.
Why
A median is not an index. The Land Department figure here is the median price per square metre of everything that transacted. If the kind of property being sold changes, the median moves even when no individual property has changed price.
An index adjusts for that. The Statistics Centre index is constructed to track a comparable basket, so it tries to answer "what happened to the price of the same home" rather than "what did the middle transaction cost".
Between those two questions sits everything that changed about Dubai's transaction mix since 2022: villas rose far faster than apartments, and off-plan went from 44% of sales to more than two thirds. When the mix shifts toward things that are rising, a raw median rises faster than the underlying prices did.
So the raw median overstates growth, and the index is the better answer to "did my property go up".
Which to use
Use the index when you want to know what happened to prices. It is the honest answer to whether your home is worth more.
Use the transaction data when you want to know what the market actually did: how many sales, at what values, in which areas, for which building. It is the only one of the two that can tell you what a specific building transacted at, and that is what matters when you are pricing one property.
Never mix them in the same sentence. A nine-point gap is more than enough to manufacture a headline in either direction, and the number quoted at you is usually the one that suits whoever is quoting it.
The wider point
Two official sources disagreeing by ten points is not a scandal. It is what happens when two bodies measure related but different things carefully.
It does mean that a single confident number about "Dubai property prices" deserves a follow-up question: which source, and measuring what. If the person quoting it cannot answer, they have read a press release rather than the data.
Method
Dubai Land Department registered transactions, median price per square metre by year, residential, rebased so 2019 = 100. Dubai Statistics Center residential property price index, general index, base year 2019, averaged by year. Figures derived by a script kept with this site.