Dubai issued roughly 66,000 golden visas in the first half of 2026. The figure needs context.

The headline figures

Dubai's General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA) reported about 66,000 golden visas granted in the first half of 2026. Alongside them sat one million new residence permits, more than 900,000 renewals, and over five million entry-permit transactions. That is a large machine moving a lot of paper in six months.

A word on what these counts are. A golden visa is a ten-year residency. A residence permit is the broader category, covering shorter stays for work, family sponsorship, or investment. The five million entry-permit transactions are movements, not people. Read together they describe throughput, not headcount, and the golden-visa slice is the part worth watching for anyone tracking property-linked residency.

Some of the volume is conversion rather than fresh demand. Residents already in Dubai on a work or investor permit crossed the AED 2M property line and upgraded to the ten-year visa. That mechanic matters, because it means the golden-visa number partly reflects people the city already had, moving up a tier.

Why you cannot call it a record, or a slump

GDRFA did not publish a comparable golden-visa figure for the first half of 2025. Without that baseline, a clean year-on-year read is not available from public data, so treat any "up X percent" claim about the first half with caution.

The pace itself is legible, though. Annualise 66,000 over six months and 2026 lands near 132,000 grants. That sits below the 158,000 Dubai issued in 2023, the program's record year, and above every year before it. So the honest framing is the second-strongest run the golden visa has had, not a peak, and not a decline.

That distinction is the whole story. A market can post big absolute numbers while cooling underneath, and that is roughly where Dubai is: high residency throughput carried through a soft patch in the property market, helped along by conversions and an easier qualification path.

What a golden visa actually buys

The ten-year golden visa removes the parts of Gulf residency that used to deter long-term buyers. No local sponsor. Renewable for another decade. You can sponsor a spouse and children, household staff too, and you can spend long stretches outside the UAE without the residency lapsing.

For property investors the route is straightforward on paper: hold real estate valued at AED 2M or more. We keep the mechanics current in the Dubai Golden Visa property threshold answer, and the wider residency-through-property picture sits in the Golden Visa guide. Both are worth reading before you structure a purchase around the visa rather than around the home.

The rule change quietly driving the numbers

A federal policy circular in February 2026 dropped the old 50 percent down-payment condition for the property route. Applications are now assessed on the Dubai Land Department valuation certificate confirming the asset meets or exceeds AED 2M, regardless of how much of the price has actually been paid.

That is a bigger deal than it sounds. It pulls off-plan buyers and mortgaged buyers into eligibility far earlier, because a DLD valuation at or above the threshold now does the work that a large cash down-payment used to. A meaningful share of the first-half golden-visa volume traces back to this single change. It widened the funnel without touching the AED 2M line itself.

The AED 2M threshold, for its part, has survived every revision this year intact. Other visa tiers saw their minimums moved or removed. The golden-visa property number did not.

The cooling market behind the count

The backdrop to these grants is a property market that has come off the boil after the 2022 to 2024 run. Prices in several segments have softened, and the Gulf spent much of the year under geopolitical strain. Residency volumes stayed high through it anyway, which tells you demand for the visa is structural rather than a function of the last price cycle.

For a buyer, a cooling market is the friendlier half of this story. AED 2M stretches further than it did eighteen months ago, and the qualifying purchase that felt out of reach at the peak is back within range in more communities. If the visa is the goal, a softer market is closer to an opening than a warning.

None of that makes the timing automatic. Softening is uneven across communities and building types, and a valuation that clears AED 2M today is what matters, not a headline asking price. Which is where the buy-side homework starts.

How to read this as a property buyer

If residency is the point of the purchase, structure the deal around the DLD valuation, not the marketing price. The certificate is what GDRFA assesses. Browse current stock in the live projects list and check which Dubai communities clear the AED 2M line comfortably, since that headroom is what protects the visa if the market moves again after you buy.

The ownership case underneath the visa has not changed. Freehold title in designated zones, no personal income tax, no capital-gains tax on the sale, and no inheritance tax on property held by individuals. We keep the detail current in the Dubai property tax answer. The visa is the residency wrapper. The tax position is why the asset holds up around it.

What to watch in the second half

Three things will tell you whether 2026 holds its second-place pace. Whether the second-half grant rate tracks the 132,000 annualised run or fades. How heavily the mix leans on renewals and conversions rather than genuinely new investors. And whether any further tweak lands on the AED 2M line, which so far has been the one constant in a year of moving rules.

Our read: the qualification change from February has more room to run, the cooling market keeps the entry maths attractive, and the visa demand is sticky. A repeat of the first half in the second would put 2026 comfortably in the program's top tier. We will update this post when GDRFA publishes the full-year figures.