Which Dubai Off-Plan Projects Are Behind Schedule?

The projects furthest behind

These are the projects whose filed completion date has passed and whose recorded construction percentage is under 20%. A building that is one fifth built does not complete in the months remaining, so for practical purposes these dates have moved to a year the register does not yet show.

NIKI LAUDA TOWER — 0.4% complete, due 31 March 2026.
INDIGO ZEN 1 — 4.4% complete, due 30 April 2026.
THE LAKEVIEW VILLAS BY ELLINGTON — 9.8% complete, due 30 August 2026.
ENSO AMBER — 11.3% complete, due 30 June 2026.
Vitalia by Pinnacle — 12.3% complete, due 30 June 2026.
Keturah Resort — 15.3% complete, due 26 February 2026.
Binghatti Moonlight — 19.2% complete, due 15 June 2026.

Every one of these holds an open escrow account, which matters and is covered below. The gap here is between a filed schedule and a building site, not between a buyer and their money.

The longest overdue are not the least built

Eighteen projects are more than six months past their filed completion date. The furthest out is MAG 777, due 15 January and 7.8 months past it — but recorded at 67.4% complete. Biltmore Sufouh is 7.3 months past its date at 87.6%. Aria By Beyond is 7.2 months past at 73.5%.

That combination is worth understanding rather than skimming. A project at 88% that is seven months late is in fit-out and snagging, where slippage is measured in weeks and the building will exist. A project at 12% that is two months late has not started in earnest, and the two-month figure is meaningless.

So the filed date alone ranks these badly. Read the construction percentage first and the date second: the percentage tells you whether a building is coming, and the date only tells you that the schedule was optimistic, which is true of nearly every schedule in every market.

Where the delays cluster

The late cohort is not spread evenly. Al Barsha South Fourth — the district marketed as Jumeirah Village Circle (JVC) — holds 22 of the 124, far more than anywhere else. Al Satwa follows with 10, then Business Bay, Wadi Al Safa 3 and Jabal Ali First with seven each.

By developer, Binghatti Developers accounts for 14 of the 124, Ellington Properties for five, and Roz Real Estate and Samana for three each. That ranking needs a caveat stated plainly: a developer with forty live projects will appear in a late list more often than one with three, and this counts projects rather than measuring reliability. It is a map of where the delays are, not a scorecard of who is worst.

If you are buying in JVC specifically, the concentration is worth knowing. Twenty-two projects in one district past their filed completion date suggests a local constraint — contractors, utilities connections, or simply the volume registered there — rather than twenty-two unrelated failures.

Escrow is open on 123 of the 124

One thing this data does not show, and it is worth saying because delay coverage tends to imply it: buyer payments are not unprotected. Of the 124 projects past their filed date, 123 hold an open escrow account. That is the legal mechanism that ring-fences instalments and it is in place across effectively the whole late cohort.

A late building and an absent escrow account are different risks with different remedies. The first is a financing and construction problem, and your recourse runs through the sale agreement. The second is a legal one. This cohort has the first.

That is not a reason to relax about a project at 12% complete whose date has gone. It is a reason not to confuse the two things when deciding what to do about it.

What the register cannot tell you

Three limits, and they matter enough to state before anyone acts on this.

The register lags. A construction percentage is a filing, not a site survey taken this morning. A project recorded at 20% may have moved since it was last updated, and a project recorded as due in August may have completed without the record catching up. Where a figure looks wrong to someone who has visited the site, the site is right and the register is stale.

The filed date is not your date. It is what the developer registered with the Land Department. The date that binds anyone is the one in your sale and purchase agreement, together with its grace period, and those are frequently different documents saying different things.

And this covers only projects with a 2026 completion date. The gateway returns nothing for 2025 or earlier — we tested it directly — so a project that was due in 2024 and is still unfinished does not appear here at all. The real number of late projects in Dubai is larger than 124. This is the part that is checkable.

What to do if you hold a unit in one

Ask the developer, in writing, for the current contractual completion date and the penalty clause that applies if it is missed. Do it as a written request rather than a phone call, because the reply is the thing you may later need.

Check your own SPA for the grace period. Dubai contracts commonly allow twelve months beyond the contractual date before any remedy is triggered, so a project three months past its filed date may be nowhere near the point where you have a claim.

Verify the construction percentage yourself through Dubai REST, the Land Department's own app, rather than relying on this page or on the developer's newsletter. And if the figure there is far below what you were told at purchase, that gap — documented, with dates — is the substance of any conversation you later have with RERA.

Correction, 16 September 2026

An earlier version of this article described Al Barsha South Fourth as the district marketed as Arjan. That was wrong. In the Dubai Land Department register, Al Barsha South Fourth is Jumeirah Village Circle (JVC); Arjan is filed under Al Barsha South Third. We checked this against the projects we track in each district — Serenz by Danube, Sky Level 1 and Violet Tower in JVC, Binghatti Hillcrest and One Beverly in Arjan — and corrected every reference above. The count of 22 late projects was right; only the name we attached to the district was not.