Dubai's office market publishes two kinds of number with confidence. One counts space: how much is let and how much stands empty. The other counts contracts: how many leases were registered in a quarter. Neither counts the people who turn up on a Monday morning.
That gap matters more here than in most cities. A business in Dubai needs a licence to trade. On the mainland, the UAE government's guidance requires a physical address and a lease registered with Ejari as part of that process. In some free zones, flexible-space offers have been linked to licences and visas, according to a 2021 Cushman & Wakefield note, so for some companies a desk can be part of how the paperwork is completed. When the licence is part of the product, a signed lease may tell an investor something different from what it tells one in Frankfurt or London.
The tempting thesis follows: headline occupancy may be counting companies rather than people. We set out to test it. In that form it does not survive. What survives is narrower, and more useful to anyone underwriting an office.
What the headline numbers measure
Start with vacancy, the figure most investors quote. JLL's second-quarter 2026 figures put citywide vacancy at 6.1%, down from 7.7% a year earlier. Grade A stood at 4.2%, Grade B at 8% and Grade C at 10.9%, with availability in prime space at 0.7%. These are measures of area: space that is leased or not leased, in square feet.
Subtract 6.1% from 100 and you get roughly 93.9%, which is how "occupancy" is often understood. That is our arithmetic, not a JLL statistic, and it shows the nature of the number. It is a leased-space figure. A floor counts as occupied whether one person or fifty work on it, and whether the tenant uses it daily or rarely.
The other indicator counts contracts. Savills recorded about 20,200 rental transactions in the third quarter of 2026. Some 51% were new leases and 49% were renewals. Two thirds of all transactions, 66%, were for space below 1,000 sq ft. Savills draws on Dubai Land Department data that excludes some free-zone registrations, so it is a count of registered contracts, not a census of the city.
Cushman & Wakefield describes occupancy as "high" in both its first and second quarter reports, without giving a percentage. In the sources we reviewed, no one defines occupancy as a count of companies, and no one defines it as a count of people. The statistics are honest about what they measure. The risk lies in how readers translate them.
Why licences complicate the picture
Dubai's company registers grow quickly, and they measure several different things. The Dubai Chamber of Commerce reported 71,830 new members in 2025, with active membership at 292,486 against 258,318 at the end of 2024, a rise of 13.2%. Chamber membership is not a licence count, and it is not office demand.
The licensing authority adds another set of figures. The Dubai Business Registration and Licensing Corporation (DBLC), part of the Department of Economy and Tourism, was cited by Gulf News as showing that licences issued across 2023 to 2025 ran 84% above 2020 to 2022. For the first half of 2026 the same report gives 58,337 licences issued and 173,652 renewed. Renewals are not new demand, and a renewed licence may carry no space at all. We could not find a split between mainland and free-zone licences in any official release.
Underneath sits real economic growth. Digital Dubai's preliminary statistics show 4.69 million employed persons in 2025, against 4.48 million in 2024, an increase of about 4.7% on preliminary official figures. Population reached an estimated 4.58 million at the end of 2025, up 7.5%. The employment definition is not stated, so we do not build ratios from these totals.
How would a licence become a desk? Cushman & Wakefield noted in 2021 that some free zones ran flexible-space offers tied to business licences and visas, helping new entrants to set up quickly. That note is dated and qualitative. We found no recent official source that measures how many licences rest on a minimal workspace arrangement.
The counterargument is strong
The case against the thesis deserves more than a paragraph. Vacancy fell from 7.7% to 6.1% in the year to the second quarter of 2026, while Dubai Chamber membership grew 13.2% in 2025 and licence issuance across 2023 to 2025 ran well above 2020 to 2022. The periods differ, but the pattern is consistent with absorption. Grade A vacancy of 4.2% and prime availability of 0.7% do not describe a market propped up by paper tenants.
Flexible space, the obvious home for a licence-plus-desk product, is small. Cushman & Wakefield's October 2026 study puts it at 2.6% of Dubai office stock. JLL reports flex supply of more than 1.2 million sq ft, which would be about 1.2% of stock on JLL's own stock figure (our arithmetic, not a JLL statement). Either way, it is a slim slice of the city's roughly 100 million sq ft.
So the thesis would need something else to be true. A larger part of ordinary, conventionally leased space would have to be held mainly for registration. No source we reviewed measures that, and nothing we found suggests it. We can neither prove it nor rule it out. We note only that the evidence at the top of the market points the other way.
Three brokers, three readings of one quarter
Where the data conflict, it is better to show the conflict than to resolve it by averaging. The second quarter of 2026 is a clear case. The three firms below describe Dubai office rents differently:
- JLL reports Grade A rents up 8.8% on the quarter and Grade B up 8.7%, as reported by Khaleej Times from JLL's second-quarter report. On the year, that is 26.2% and 31.5%.
- Savills reports an average of AED 238 per sq ft, the first quarter without rent growth since the first half of 2021.
- Cushman & Wakefield reports a city-wide average of AED 205 per sq ft, down 2% on the quarter, the first quarterly fall in nearly five years.
None of the three, in the material we read, says whether the rents are asking or achieved. The methods differ too. Savills works from registered contracts, a sample dominated by small deals. Cushman & Wakefield does not explain the basis of its citywide average. These are three different indicators, not three readings of one thing, and an investor should resist averaging them into a comfortable midpoint.
Savills' newer third-quarter data describes rents as stable at AED 241 per sq ft. That is a later period and does not settle the second-quarter disagreement.
Cushman & Wakefield alone noted more strata stock coming back to market and put Grade B at nearly 70% of inventory. JLL reads the same segment the other way: it reports Grade B vacancy down to 8% from 10.9% and Grade B rents up 31.5% on the year. That is the segment where small, short-lease and licence-led demand would sit, if it exists. The brokers do not agree on how it is behaving, and the data are thinnest there.
What a better measure would look like
If the question is how many people use Dubai's offices, the answer needs different data. We would want to see:
- Headcount per sq ft, by building or by submarket.
- Visa or badge counts against leased area.
- The share of occupiers on flexible desks against dedicated desks.
- A de-duplicated company count that does not double-list a firm holding both a mainland and a free-zone licence.
The last may become possible. Gulf News describes the Dubai Unified Licence as giving a company a single commercial identity whether it is licensed on the mainland or in a free zone. That may make a de-duplicated count possible; no such count has been published in the sources we reviewed.
Forecasts add a further caution. Savills expects limited new supply in 2026, with volumes rising from 2028. Cushman & Wakefield counts 0.88 million sq ft delivered in the second quarter and a further 1.13 million due by the end of the year. JLL expects about 940,000 sq ft in the second half. Those are projections and completion schedules, not observed demand, and none of the three says how it defines what counts as delivered.
What it means for investors, lenders and occupiers
For investors, vacancy remains a valid measure of the space market. It is a weaker guide to the durability of income. A lease signed for a small suite to satisfy a registration requirement may renew steadily, or it may vanish if rules change. Both outcomes are compatible with today's statistics.
For lenders, the question is covenant quality. A building let to many small tenants on short leases carries different risk from one let to a few large occupiers, even at identical vacancy. Asking for tenant-level utilisation evidence is reasonable and, in time, may become routine.
For occupiers, the lesson is simpler. Rent and vacancy figures from different brokers describe different markets. Read the method before the headline.
None of this implies that Dubai's office demand is overstated. The top of the market is tight, employment is growing and flexible space is small. The point is narrower. A market that counts leases cannot yet tell its investors how many of those leases are lived in, and in a city where the licence can be the product, that is the number worth asking for.
Sources
- JLL UAE Market Dynamics Q2 2026, via Khaleej Times, 2026-08-30
- JLL Q2 2026 via Zawya
- Cushman & Wakefield MarketBeat Office Q2 2026, 2026-06-24
- Cushman & Wakefield MarketBeat Office Q1 2026, 2026-04-27
- Savills Dubai office Q3 2026, 2026-10-15
- Savills Q2 2026 via Khaleej Times, 2026-07-22
- Cushman & Wakefield UAE flexible office study via Arabian Post, 2026-10-28
- JLL MEA Flexible Workspace Market Report 2026 via Zawya
- Dubai Chambers via Dubai Media Office, 2026-02-17
- Dubai Business Licensing interview, Gulf News, updated 2026-09-03
- Digital Dubai employment figures via GDN Online, 2026-07-29
- Dubai population end-2025 via Dubai Eye 103.8
- Cushman & Wakefield on Dubai flex space, 2021-10-28
- UAE Government, Steps to start a business on the mainland
This analysis was inspired by themes explored at RealTimes' Dubai Office Summit 2026, where senior market participants examined the changing dynamics of Dubai's office sector. The discussion was held under a non-attribution editorial approach.
