A furnished 1-bedroom apartment in Al Barsha listed on Property Finder this week asks a median AED 85,000 a year. An unfurnished one asks AED 65,000. That is 30.8% more for a sofa, a bed and a fridge, and it is the largest gap I found for 1-bedroom flats in ten Dubai areas.
Tenants moving to Dubai ask the same question every year: is it cheaper to rent unfurnished and buy the furniture? Landlords ask the mirror question: does furnishing a flat pay? Both start with one number, the premium a furnished flat commands over an unfurnished one in the same area. Property Finder has a furnishing filter, so I pulled both sides with Python and compared them. The median premium across the ten areas is 11.3% for 1-bedroom flats and 12.5% for 2-bedroom flats. The bigger lesson is in Dubai Hills Estate, where furnished flats look cheaper and are not.
The data
Every listing here was pulled through the Property Finder API. Its /search-rent endpoint takes a furnishing parameter (furnished, unfurnished or partly), so the split costs nothing extra: one call per area, bedroom count and furnishing state.
On 4 November 2026 I made 40 calls: ten areas, 1- and 2-bedroom apartments, furnished and unfurnished, the first page of yearly rentals sorted by newest. That returned 1,465 rows. After dropping project cards and a few broken rows (more on both below), 1,307 listings were left, about 33 per area, bedroom count and furnishing state. Each response also carries total_count, the number of matching listings on the site, which shows how much of each market is furnished: 15,800 furnished against 16,920 unfurnished listings in these twenty segments.
The ten areas fall into three groups: the waterfront (Dubai Marina, Emaar Beachfront, Palm Jumeirah), the central towers (Downtown Dubai, Business Bay, Jumeirah Lake Towers or JLT) and the suburbs (Jumeirah Village Circle or JVC, Dubai Hills Estate, Al Barsha, Dubai Silicon Oasis). /autocomplete-location turns each name into a location ID.
The code
This is the whole comparison for one area and bedroom count. Install requests, set the RAPIDAPI_KEY environment variable to your RapidAPI key, and run it.
import json import os import statistics import requests HOST = "uae-real-estate-property.p.rapidapi.com" # Property Finder API on RapidAPI BASE = os.environ.get("API_BASE", "https://" + HOST) def headers(): if "API_BASE" in os.environ: return json.loads(os.environ.get("API_HEADERS", "{}")) return {"x-rapidapi-host": HOST, "x-rapidapi-key": os.environ["RAPIDAPI_KEY"]} def get(path, **params): r = requests.get(BASE + path, params=params, headers=headers(), timeout=120) r.raise_for_status() return r.json() def location_id(name): found = get("/autocomplete-location", query=name)["data"] exact = [x for x in found if x["name"].lower() == name.lower()] return (exact or found)[0]["id"] def rents(loc, bedrooms, furnishing): """Newest yearly rents for one furnishing state: (rent, size in sq ft) pairs, and the total count.""" body = get("/search-rent", location_id=loc, property_type="apartment", bedrooms=bedrooms, rent_frequency="yearly", furnishing=furnishing, sort="newest", page=1) rows = [] for x in body["data"]: price, size = x.get("price") or {}, (x.get("size") or {}).get("value") # Skip new-project cards (sale prices), non-yearly prices and rows with no size if (x.get("listing_type") != "property" or not price.get("value") or price.get("period") != "yearly" or not size): continue if price["value"] / size > 1000: # a sale price, or a size typed in square metres continue rows.append((price["value"], size)) return rows, body["total_count"] area, beds = "Jumeirah Lake Towers", 1 loc = location_id(area) furn, furn_total = rents(loc, beds, "furnished") unfurn, unfurn_total = rents(loc, beds, "unfurnished") for name, rows in (("furnished", furn), ("unfurnished", unfurn)): print("%-12s %2d listings, median AED %s a year, AED %.0f per sq ft" % ( name, len(rows), format(statistics.median(r for r, s in rows), ",.0f"), statistics.median(r / s for r, s in rows))) premium = statistics.median(r for r, s in furn) / statistics.median(r for r, s in unfurn) - 1 premium_psf = statistics.median(r / s for r, s in furn) / statistics.median(r / s for r, s in unfurn) - 1 print("furniture premium: %+.1f%% on the median rent, %+.1f%% per sq ft" % (premium * 100, premium_psf * 100)) print("furnished share of listings: %.0f%%" % (100 * furn_total / (furn_total + unfurn_total))) For a 1-bedroom in JLT it printed:
furnished 33 listings, median AED 95,000 a year, AED 110 per sq ft unfurnished 33 listings, median AED 79,999 a year, AED 101 per sq ft furniture premium: +18.8% on the median rent, +8.9% per sq ft furnished share of listings: 58% The API_BASE switch is there so the same script can point at a test server; with only RAPIDAPI_KEY set it calls RapidAPI. The full version loops over the ten areas, caches every response and also compares listings building by building. Two numbers come out of every pair, and you need both: the premium on the median rent and the premium per square foot.
Furnished flats ask about 11% more
For 1-bedroom apartments, furnished listings ask more than unfurnished ones in 7 of the 10 areas. The median premium is 11.3%.
Al Barsha leads at 30.8%, then Downtown Dubai at 25.0% (AED 150,000 furnished against AED 119,999) and JLT at 18.8%. Business Bay shows no premium at all: both sides have a median of AED 90,000. Palm Jumeirah furnished 1-beds ask 3.1% less, and Dubai Hills Estate 12.7% less.
For 2-bedroom flats the median premium is 12.5%, and furnished asks more in 9 of 10 areas. Downtown Dubai stands out again at 33.3%: AED 220,000 against AED 165,000. Dubai Silicon Oasis shows 64.7%, but only 24 furnished 2-bedroom flats were listed there in total, and they are much bigger than the unfurnished ones (a median of 1,501 sq ft against 1,082). That is a sample to note, not a finding.
| Area | 1-bed unfurnished (AED) | 1-bed furnished (AED) | 1-bed premium | 1-bed per sq ft | 2-bed premium | 2-bed per sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dubai Marina | 85,000 | 95,000 | +11.8% | +17.5% | +3.9% | +6.8% |
| Downtown Dubai | 119,999 | 150,000 | +25.0% | +47.8% | +33.3% | +51.6% |
| Palm Jumeirah | 160,000 | 155,000 | -3.1% | +4.1% | +13.6% | +27.2% |
| Business Bay | 90,000 | 90,000 | 0.0% | +3.3% | +6.3% | +8.5% |
| JVC | 72,000 | 80,000 | +11.1% | +5.5% | +9.5% | +5.9% |
| Dubai Hills Estate | 106,500 | 93,000 | -12.7% | +16.2% | -21.9% | +14.7% |
| Emaar Beachfront | 130,000 | 145,000 | +11.5% | +8.3% | +11.4% | +17.8% |
| Dubai Silicon Oasis | 62,000 | 64,999 | +4.8% | +28.7% | +64.7% | +36.9% |
| Al Barsha | 65,000 | 85,000 | +30.8% | +35.6% | +26.3% | +28.0% |
| JLT | 79,999 | 95,000 | +18.8% | +8.9% | +14.3% | +16.0% |
Medians of the newest yearly listings, about 33 per cell, collected on 4 November 2026. "Per sq ft" compares the median yearly rent per square foot.
In money, the premium is easy to read. A furnished 1-bed in JVC asks AED 8,000 a year more than an unfurnished one; in JLT the gap is AED 15,001, and in Downtown Dubai about AED 30,000. That Downtown figure compares different buildings, though: in the 6 Downtown buildings with both kinds of 1-bed listing, the median furnished flat asked 13.5% less than the unfurnished one. Whether that beats buying your own furniture depends on how long you stay, but it is a yearly cost, paid again at every renewal.
Divide by the size and every gap turns positive
Dubai Hills Estate was the result that made me look twice. On the median rent, furnished flats there are 12.7% cheaper for 1-bedrooms and 21.9% cheaper for 2-bedrooms. That would make it the one area where landlords pay you to take their furniture.
They don't. The furnished flats in Dubai Hills are smaller. The median furnished 1-bed is 645 sq ft against 743 sq ft unfurnished, and the median furnished 2-bed is 748 sq ft against 1,118. My reading is that the compact 2-bedroom units are the ones landlords furnish, while the large family layouts are let empty. Per square foot, furnished flats in Dubai Hills ask 16.2% more for 1-bedrooms and 14.7% more for 2-bedrooms.
The same thing happens on Palm Jumeirah, where furnished 1-beds look 3.1% cheaper and are 4.1% dearer per square foot. Measured per square foot, furnished flats ask more in all 20 area and bedroom pairs. The median premium per square foot is 12.6% for 1-bedrooms and 16.9% for 2-bedrooms.
Per square foot is still not a perfect control, because a furnished flat can sit in a newer or better building. So I also matched listings building by building. In 132 cases the same building had both furnished and unfurnished listings in my sample. Comparing the medians inside each building, furnished asked more in 91 of them (69%), and the median premium was 9.6%: 6.5% for 1-bedrooms and 13.6% for 2-bedrooms. That is the cleanest estimate here, and it is a little lower than the area figures, which suggests part of the area premium is the building, not the furniture.
How common furnished flats are does not set the premium
The total_count field gives the share of each market that is furnished, and it varies more than the premium does.
Downtown Dubai (67.9%), Palm Jumeirah (65.7%) and Emaar Beachfront (64.4%) list most 1-beds furnished. My guess is that they draw more short stays and new arrivals, though this data cannot show it. At the other end, only 19.9% of 1-bed rentals in Al Barsha and 12.6% in Dubai Silicon Oasis are furnished.
It would be neat if scarcity set the price, but the data does not say so. Al Barsha has one of the smallest furnished shares and the largest 1-bed premium, 30.8%. Dubai Hills Estate is mostly unfurnished too (23.7% furnished), and its furnished 1-beds ask 12.7% less, because they are smaller. Dubai Silicon Oasis, where furnished is rarest, asks only 4.8% more. And in Downtown, where furnished is the norm, the area median still shows 25.0% more for a 1-bed, perhaps because furnished Downtown flats are often serviced units in branded towers, even though the same-building comparison above points the other way. Across all twenty segments, 48.3% of the listings are furnished.
Pitfalls I hit in the listings
Project cards ignore the filter. 154 of the 1,465 rows were new-project cards (listing_type is project), with a "from" sale price instead of a yearly rent. 77 of them were identical in the furnished and unfurnished results for the same search, so the furnishing filter does not apply to them. Keep only listing_type == "property" with a price.value and price.period == "yearly".
Some rents are not rents. One unfurnished 1-bed in Dubai Hills Estate was listed at AED 4,000,000 a year for 757 sq ft, which is a sale price in the wrong box. Two others had sizes of 11 and 135 sq ft, most likely square metres typed as square feet. A ceiling of AED 1,000 per sq ft a year removes all three and nothing else. The median barely notices them; an average does.
The median rent hides the size mix. This is the Dubai Hills lesson. Before you report a furnished premium for an area, check the median size on both sides. If they differ by more than a few percent, report the rent per square foot too.
There is a third option. Property Finder also has furnishing=partly. I left it out, so the furnished share above is furnished against unfurnished only, not against the whole market.
"Newest" can reach back months. Where a segment is small, the first page of the newest listings is most of the segment. The oldest listing in my sample was posted on 20 May 2026. In Dubai Silicon Oasis the 24 furnished 2-beds are the whole furnished market for that size, not a sample of it.
Asking is not signed. All of these are asking rents. The registered lease records in /get-transactions do not say whether a flat was furnished, so this data cannot check the premium against signed rents. Treat the figures as what landlords ask for furniture, not what tenants end up paying for it.
Where I would take it next
I would repeat the building match with more pages per segment, so each building has five or more listings on each side, and add furnishing=partly as a middle group. I would also track the same buildings over a few months: if furnished listings stay on the market longer, the premium is partly wishful.
For the signed-rent side of these areas, the Al Barsha rent page and the Dubai Hills Estate rent page on UAEPropertyAPI show median lease rents by bedroom count, updated monthly. The parameters used here are documented in the Happy Endpoint reference for the Property Finder API, more Python and JavaScript examples sit in the GitHub repo, and a key is a sign-up away on RapidAPI. For every Property Finder listing with its price changes as one file, see the listings dataset, or contact us for something custom.
