Around town
This is how expensive Dubai rent is compared to the rest of the world
If I had a dirham for every time someone started talking about rent, I’d be able to afford a much bigger apartment… in the Burj Khalifa, probably. Armani Residences. I’d walk through that little door with private access to The Dubai Mall every day… *Stares into the distance in a daydream*
Anyway, you get the picture; it’s a hot topic. For most people, it’s their biggest outgoing every month… or every six months if you live in Dubai! Some have it worse than others (we’ve all seen the horror stories of people paying 60 percent of their monthly pay cheque to live in a cupboard in Manhattan), but how does Dubai compare?
looked at the rental prices of the world’s 30 best cities to live in. They decided on this list by choosing 30 global hubs from PwC’s “Cities of Opportunity list”, and then compared them to the median incomes in each destination. And the results are surprising.
Lagos, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore and Mumbai are also on the less affordable side of the scale, with residents spending over 40 percent of their salary on rent.
Dubai is further down the table, and although it tips to the less affordable side of the scale, ranking as the tenth least affordable hub, it’s considered more affordable than London and San Francisco. According to the study, the median salary in Dubai is $80,800 per year, while rent is $31,200 per year, which means that people are spending 39 percent of their salary on rent.
The study puts the threshold of affordability at 30 percent, which means that 13 of the coveted cities in the top 30 have a relatively comfortable rent-to-income ratio.
Kuala Lumpur is considered the most affordable, with people spending 20 percent of their income on rent, closely followed by Moscow and Johannesburg.