We moved here knowing almost no one.
No job lined up, nobody to ask, and a year of working it out one mistake at a time. We wrote all of it down so you do not have to start where we did.
We moved from Australia in our late twenties. One of us came out first, with no job lined up, just a plan and the flights already booked. The other followed two months later with every suitcase we owned.
We knew almost nobody here, and very little about how anything actually worked.
Moving to Dubai is exciting. What nobody mentions is how many separate small systems are waiting once you land. Visas. Housing. Banking. Utilities. Transport. Phone lines and school runs and where on earth you buy a fridge. Each one has its own rules, its own order, and its own way of going wrong.
Most of what we learned, we learned by getting it wrong first.
The things nobody tells you
Some of the most confusing parts of moving to Dubai are not the big decisions. It’s actually the small things that catch you off guard.
A few of the ones that caught us out in our first months:
- Turned away from a government office over what we were wearing.
- A 5% housing fee, split into twelve instalments and added to the DEWA bill the moment Ejari is registered. Nobody mentions it at the viewing.
- Rent paid more commonly in annual or quarterly cheques rather than weekly or monthly like back home, where the number of cheques is itself negotiable and worth 5 to 10% off the rent.
- Where to shop for your groceries, or even where to start looking for furniture, out of many many options available, all at varying prices.
Why we built this
Someone in your group chat has already told you Dubai is tax-free and therefore cheap. They are half right, and the wrong half is the expensive one.
That is roughly what our first year cost us to find out. Not in one catastrophe, but in a hundred small overpayments and wrong turns, each obvious afterwards and invisible at the time.
So we started keeping notes. Everything we found out from trial and error, every landmine we dodged because we happened to ask the right person first.
Those notes became 152 articles, laid out in the order you will actually meet them.
We kept it reader-funded on purpose. Most free Dubai guides earn a commission when you sign a lease, open an account or set up a company through them. That is a fair business, but it means the page has a stake in where you end up. Nobody pays us for a mention, so the only thing this guide has to get right is your move.
It is the guide we wish someone had handed us when we landed.
We already paid for these mistakes.
Make sure yours are cheaper.
152 articles, in the order the move actually happens.
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