Average non-Emirati (expat) household income: AED 94,717 a year, or about AED 7,893 a month. Average non-Emirati household expenditure: about AED 16,910 a month at the household level, or AED 4,747 a month per person. Dominant income source: salaries, wages and in-kind benefits, at roughly 79% of total income. Source: Dubai Data and Statistics Establishment (DDSE), Household Income and Expenditure Survey, published via data.dubai.
Most of what gets written about expat finances in the UAE is anecdotal โ a salary here, a rent figure there, rarely anything that's been formally surveyed across the population. Dubai's open data portal, data.dubai, is a genuine exception. Among its published datasets sits the Household Income and Expenditure Survey, run by the Dubai Data and Statistics Establishment (DDSE), which breaks down average household income and spending by household type โ including a category specifically for non-Emirati households, which is the closest official proxy available for "expat households" in the city.
We pulled the figures directly from the dataset rather than relying on a summary, so what follows is sourced straight from the government's own published data tables.
What the average expat household earns
According to the Income component of the survey, the average non-Emirati household in Dubai brings in AED 94,717 a year, which works out to roughly AED 7,893 a month. That's an average across the entire non-Emirati household population โ from single blue-collar workers sharing accommodation to dual-income professional families โ so it sits well below what a typical mid-career professional household earns, and well above what a single entry-level worker earns. It's a citywide mean, not a benchmark for any one household type.
| Income measure โ non-Emirati households | Amount (AED) |
|---|---|
| Total average annual household income | 94,717 |
| Total average monthly household income | 7,893 |
| โ of which: salaries, wages & in-kind benefits (annual) | 75,064 |
| โ of which: salaries, wages & in-kind benefits (monthly) | 6,255 |
Salaries, wages and in-kind benefits make up the clear majority of that total โ about 79% of average household income โ which isn't surprising in a city where the overwhelming majority of non-Emirati residents are here on employment visas. Property and investment income, end-of-service gratuity payouts and transfers from family abroad all show up in the data too, but each is a small fraction of the total compared with employment income, since most households don't receive a gratuity payout or rental income in any given year.
What the average expat household spends
The Expenditure half of the same survey gives a separate, independently published figure: average non-Emirati household spending comes to AED 16,910 a month at the household level, which annualises to roughly AED 202,920 a year. On a per-person basis โ dividing by the number of people in the household rather than the number of households โ that works out to AED 4,747 a month per person.
| Expenditure measure โ non-Emirati households | Amount (AED / month) |
|---|---|
| Total household expenditure | 16,910 |
| Total expenditure per person | 4,747 |
| Cash spending on food | 1,973 |
| Non-food cash spending (all other categories combined) | 11,924 |
| Furniture, furnishings & household equipment | 421 |
| Clothing & footwear | 301 |
Non-food spending dwarfs the food budget, which lines up with what anyone living here would expect once rent, utilities, transport, schooling and insurance are factored in โ those categories sit inside the "non-food" total rather than being broken out as their own headline figures in this particular dataset.
Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the published average monthly expenditure figure (AED 16,910) is higher than the published average monthly income figure (AED 7,893) for the same non-Emirati household category. Income and Expenditure are published by DDSE as two separate components of the same underlying survey, using different collection methods, and they aren't designed to be netted against each other to produce a "savings rate." We're flagging this transparently rather than picking only the flattering number โ it's a genuine feature of how the two datasets are published, not something we've smoothed over.
How current is this data?
Worth being upfront about: this survey is run roughly every five years, and the figures currently published on data.dubai are from the 2014โ2015 round โ the most recent wave DDSE has made available on the open data portal at the time of writing. AED values will have moved since then, particularly on the expenditure side given how much Dubai's rental and cost-of-living picture has shifted over the past decade. Treat these as the official structural baseline โ the shape of where a typical household's money comes from and goes โ rather than as today's exact AED figures.
Using this to plan your own budget
The real value in a dataset like this isn't the precise AED numbers โ it's the structure. Employment income dominating total household income by a wide margin is exactly why a job loss or notice period hits UAE household finances harder than the equivalent event might in a country with unemployment insurance or a larger safety net; there's very little non-salary income cushioning most households here. That's the same logic behind building an emergency fund sized for the UAE specifically, rather than copying a generic three-month rule built for a different labour market.
On the spending side, the fact that non-food spending so heavily outweighs food spending is a useful prompt to actually track where the bulk of your own budget goes โ for most expat households in Dubai today, rent is the single biggest lever, which is exactly why we've also pulled the official Dubai property price data straight from the Land Department for a companion piece.
Official survey data like this is rare enough in the region that it's worth using even when it's a few years old โ the structure of where money comes from and goes changes far more slowly than the AED figures themselves. If salaries make up roughly four-fifths of your own household income too, the practical takeaway is the same one this data quietly makes: build a buffer that doesn't depend on that one income source continuing uninterrupted, and know your own monthly spending number precisely rather than estimating it.
Our savings rate guide for GCC expats and free SIP Growth Calculator are both built around turning a number like this into an actual monthly plan.