Who may buy
Freehold, and where it applies
Since 2019 foreign buyers — outside the UAE and the GCC — hold full freehold title inside Abu Dhabi's designated investment zones, under Law 13/2019 amending Law 19/2005. Outside those zones the same buyer is offered long leasehold instead, which is a different thing wearing a similar word.
Saadiyat Island is one of those investment zones. So is most of the waterfront a buyer is shown. The list matters more than the brochure: two addresses a few minutes apart can sit on opposite sides of it.
What the state takes
The fees, and who pays which half
Registering an off-plan sale costs 2% of the price, and Administrative Decision 247/2015 §34 splits it down the middle between seller and buyer. Quoted as a single number it looks like twice what a buyer actually pays, which is why we write the split rather than the headline.
There is no personal income tax and no annual tax on owning a home. There is no capital gains tax and no inheritance tax for individuals. The five per cent municipal charge that gets quoted in this context sits on rent and is paid by an expatriate tenant under Resolution 49/2018 §4 — not by the owner, and not on a purchase.
Ask for your own arithmetic
Send the address you are weighing up. We come back with the registration split, the payment schedule as published, and what the first year of ownership actually costs — each line with the document it came from.
Off-plan money
The escrow account, and why its number is public
Money for a project still being built goes to an escrow account, not to the developer's own. Law 3/2015 articles 18 and 19 make it compulsory and bar the developer from drawing on it before a fifth of the works are done. The 2025 amendment, Law 2/2025, goes further: land payments and broker commissions may not come out of that account at all.
The account number of any registered project is published by the regulator itself, on its own public portal. That makes it something a buyer can check rather than something a seller asserts, and it is the first thing worth checking about any off-plan address — ask us and we send the entry as it stands on the register today.
Residency
The threshold we print, and the term we do not
Property-linked residency starts at AED 2M, and that threshold is confirmed by three separate official sources. A mortgaged purchase and an off-plan purchase both count, measured on what has actually been paid.
We do not print how long the visa runs. The Abu Dhabi Residents Office and the federal portal state different terms, and the third source we would use to break the tie is unreachable. Rather than pick the flattering one, we say what is settled and send the current rules as the department states them on the day you apply.
The part nobody publishes
There is no official page describing the purchase procedure for a non-resident — documents, power of attorney, signing from abroad. We will not write one from brokers' blogs. Ask and we send the order of steps as our partner agency runs it, marked as their practice rather than as regulation.
Who else is buying
The one demand figure that is actually published
Buyers of 116 nationalities registered non-resident purchases in Abu Dhabi in the first half of 2026, according to ADREC's own release of 17 July 2026. Russia, Germany and France are named among the largest inflows.
That is the whole of it. Rankings of buyer nationalities by share circulate widely and trace to nobody: published transaction data is broken down by continent, not by country. When a page tells you which nationality bought what percentage, ask it for the document.
Talk to us
Put a question to us
A name and a number is enough to start. We answer in writing first and telephone only if you asked us to.