How Many of Dubai's 2026 Handovers Are Actually Close to Finished?

What the register actually says

Of the 321 projects carrying a 2026 completion date, 62 are logged at 100% complete and a further 25 sit between 90 and 99%. That is 87 projects, 27% of the cohort, that will plausibly finish this year. Another 51 are between 70 and 89% and could still make it with a strong final quarter.

Below that the arithmetic gets harder. Sixty-three projects are between 50 and 69% complete, 81 are between 20 and 49%, and 39 are under 20%. Taking a building from half-built to handover inside four months is unusual; taking one from under a fifth is not something that happens.

So the honest reading is that this year's handover cohort will substantially under-deliver against its own filed dates, and the shortfall will roll into 2027. That is not a scandal and it is not new — filed dates have always been optimistic, in every market. It is simply the difference between a schedule and a forecast, and it is worth knowing which one you are being quoted.

Eleven projects are at exactly zero

The tail of the distribution is the part worth looking at directly. Eleven projects carry a 2026 completion date and a construction percentage of exactly 0.0 — four of them filed for October, now weeks away, and seven for December.

A figure of zero does not always mean an empty plot. Registers lag, and a project that broke ground last month may not have been re-surveyed. But a completion date inside three months against a progress figure that has not moved is the clearest signal the register produces, and it is checkable by anyone: the data is public and the project names are in it.

For a buyer holding a unit in one of these, the practical step is narrow and worth taking now rather than in December. Ask the developer for the current contractual completion date in writing, and for the penalty clause that applies if it is missed. A filed date is a filing. The date in your sale agreement is the one that binds anybody.

Escrow is not the problem here

It is worth separating two things that often get argued together. Of the 321 projects in this cohort, 311 hold an open escrow account — 97%. Whatever is happening with construction schedules, the legal machinery that protects buyer payments is in place across almost the entire group.

That is a genuinely reassuring number and it deserves saying plainly, because delivery-delay stories and buyer-protection stories get blurred together and they are not the same risk. A late building is a financing and planning problem. An absent escrow account is a legal one. This cohort has the first problem, not the second.

Where escrow does still split sharply is by developer experience rather than by completion year: on the 2026 registration cohort, developers with a single project lack an open account 39.5% of the time against 14.9% for developers with several. That gap has held steady across every reading we have taken.

What this does and does not tell you

The limitation matters as much as the finding, so here it is without hedging. The register returns no unit counts in this view — every row comes back with zero homes — so this analysis counts PROJECTS. A headline given in homes cannot be answered with a number in projects, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If a report says 56,600 homes are coming, nothing here confirms or refutes that figure.

What it does establish is the shape of the cohort those homes sit inside: most of it is not close to finished. A large project at 30% complete contributes far more to a homes total than a small one at 100%, so the unit-weighted picture could be better or worse than the project-weighted one. We cannot see which, and neither can anyone else from this data.

The useful takeaway is not a revised total. It is that any year-end delivery number should be read as an upper bound built from filed dates, and filed dates are the most optimistic input available.