Dubai’s General Directorate of Identity and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA) granted approximately 66,000 golden visas in the first half of 2026, alongside 1 million new residence permits, above 900,000 renewals, and more than five million entry permit transactions.
GDRFA published no comparable golden visa figure for the first half of 2025, so a year-on-year reading is not possible from public data. Annualized, the pace implies roughly 132,000 grants for 2026, below the 158,000 Dubai issued in the program’s record year of 2023 but well above any year before it.
Conversions From Below
Rafael Cintron, CEO of Dubai-based Wealthy Expat, sees holders of shorter permits trading up as the engine behind the volume.
“I would say the main driver of the increase is people converting their two-year residency permits to golden visas,” he observes. “We’ve had over 100 clients that applied for golden visas this year so far, and more than 50 of them already had regular residency permits.”
The conversion pipeline widened in May, when Dubai removed the minimum property value for its two-year investor visa, presumably to offset the impact of the war on its property market. That permit now functions as an entry ramp: Investors buy in at any price point, then upgrade to the ten-year UAE Golden Visa once their holdings reach AED 2 million (approximately US$545,000).
Cintron expects that threshold to hold. “I don’t see a drop in the minimum property value, given that it’s possible to obtain a golden visa by investing in off-plan developments and not having to invest the full amount upfront,” he explains, adding that “many investors are taking this route currently.”
Stress-Tested by Conflict
Jeremy Savory, founder and CEO of Savory & Partners, reads the half-year figures as “a continuation of years of compounding demand for the UAE across business, tourism, real estate, and relocation.”
The factors driving people out of their home countries and toward Dubai, he says, range from rising anti-immigrant and anti-wealth sentiment in First World countries to instability across the Global South, eroding confidence in political leadership, and concerns around personal safety.
The pull, as he sees it: stable leadership, low taxes, and open immigration policy. In his view, 2026 has tested that proposition directly.
The first half of the year brought the Iran conflict, the Strait of Hormuz blockade, repeated airspace closures, and the evacuation of some 500 Golden Visa holders stranded abroad. “If anything, people still feel safe here, given the relatively little outflow of population and the incredible job the UAE did in defending citizens and residents,” Savory argues.
He draws a parallel to an earlier crisis. “The UAE boomed when it showed how it coped with Covid compared to Australia, Canada, and Europe,” he recalls. “This time, it showed it can keep the population safe.”
His firm’s data indicate that those who have left were driven by the war’s business fallout in sectors like tourism, entertainment, and real estate, “more than fears of safety.”
Cintron agrees that the damage to the UAE’s safe haven reputation is not permanent, though not everyone is staying the course. “I don’t see irreparable damage to the UAE with the conflict, but some clients we had that would have chosen the UAE are now choosing other jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands, or Greece with the flat tax regime,” he notes.
The H2 Question
Both advisors anticipate a slowdown in applications and approvals for the rest of the year, followed by a recovery.
“Volumes will drop considerably, then pick up, because the rest of the world’s issues remain and are mainly getting worse,” says Savory, albeit adding that it remains difficult to predict how fast the recovery will be “given Trump’s temper tantrums.”
Cintron, on the other hand, expects the dip to be shallow, anticipating that application volume “will remain significant, especially for outside investors that want to capitalize on the cooling of the real estate market and the drop in property prices.”
Savory’s long-term case for Dubai is geographic. “Wealthy people still need a nexus to meet, and there’s nothing from Switzerland to Singapore,” he argues, “and a third of the world’s population lives a four-hour flight from Dubai.”
