This site exists to give people moving to Dubai answers that are dated, name their sources and are not written to sell a policy.
In short
Written by Mike Johson, whose background is in property and rental management, about the paperwork, the insurance and the money side of moving to Dubai. We do not sell insurance, we take no commission from any insurer, and no company on this site has paid to appear here.
Every guide lists its sources, with links, and shows the date it was last checked.
Who writes this
Mike Johson writes this site. The guides set out to give you the rules and the prices, the sources behind them, and the date they were last checked, with no policy to sell.
His background is in property and rental management. It is why the money side of a move to Dubai gets more room on this site than the sightseeing does: when you have worked with leases, deposits and service charges in one market, you know which questions to ask in another, and you know how much of the answer is usually left out.
He is not a broker, not a licensed adviser, and not selling anything. Where something falls outside what he can verify, the guide says so rather than filling the gap.
How we check things
Prices and rules in Dubai change, and old figures stay online long after they stop being true. Our own earlier homepage priced the minimum health plan at AED 5,000 to 7,000 a year, more than six times DHA’s AED 550 to 750 price band.
So we work to a simple rule.
- Each price, threshold and rule in a guide is tied to a named source, with the date it was published or read
- Each guide lists its sources at the bottom, with links you can follow
- Every guide shows the date it was last checked, at the top
- Where sources disagree, we say so and give the range instead of picking the flattering number
- Where we cannot verify something, we leave it out rather than repeat it
The official sources we rely on most are the Dubai Health Authority, the Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Port Security (ICP), GDRFA Dubai, the Federal Tax Authority, RTA, KHDA and the UAE government portal.
How this site makes money, and how it does not
We do not sell insurance. We are not brokers, we take no commission from any insurer, and no insurance company on this site has paid to appear here. That firewall is the whole point of the site and it is not for sale.
That matters because a page paid by referral fees has a reason to steer you towards a policy. We have no such reason, so we can tell you plainly that the cheapest compliant policy is priced between AED 550 and 750 a year plus VAT (our cost guide gives the source).
One of our guides, on buying an abaya, carries two links to Amazon. If you buy through one of them we earn a small commission, and you pay exactly the same price you would have paid anyway. Those links are labelled on the page where they appear. We only place affiliate links in clothing and travel guides, and they will never appear in anything about insurance, visas, banking or tax. We also say plainly what each item is and is not, including when a garment sold as one thing is really another.
What we are not
We are not licensed advisers. Nothing here is regulated financial, legal or medical advice, and it should not be the only thing you rely on for a decision that matters. What we can do is tell you what the rules are, what things cost, and which questions to ask the person who is advising you.
If something on this site is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it. That happens, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it there.
Getting in touch
We read every message. If you are stuck on a policy wording, a visa threshold or a number that does not add up, send it over and we will tell you what we know, including when the answer is that we do not know.
Something here wrong, or a question we have not answered?
Tell us