Almost every client arrives with a number in mind and almost none of them arrive with a breakdown. That is not carelessness. Fit-out pricing in Dubai is genuinely opaque: the same brief can return quotes that differ by forty percent, and the cheapest is rarely cheap by the end. What follows is how we break a budget down before design starts, and which lines tend to move.
Start with the shell, not the finishes
The single biggest variable is what you are starting from. A warm shell in a newer tower already has floors screeded, a fire system stubbed out and a chilled water connection waiting. A bare shell has none of those, and the first thirty percent of your budget disappears into work you will never see again once the ceiling closes.
Before anyone talks about stone or joinery, establish which of these you have. It changes the shape of the whole budget, not just its size.
The lines people forget
Across the projects we have delivered, the same items go unpriced in early estimates. None of them are optional.
- Authority submissions and NOCs, including the drawings prepared specifically for them.
- Builder's work in connection with MEP: the cutting, chasing and making good that sits between trades.
- Long-lead joinery and imported stone, where the cost is in the programme rather than the material.
- Site supervision during construction, which is what keeps the built result matching the drawings.
- Snagging and the second fix that follows it, typically two to three weeks nobody scheduled.
Where the money actually sits
On a typical high-end residential fit-out, joinery and stone together account for roughly forty percent of the construction cost. MEP takes another quarter. Loose furniture, which is the part clients enjoy choosing, is often less than fifteen percent, and it is also the only part that can be deferred without stopping work.
The parts of a budget you can defer are almost never the parts you are tempted to cut.
Why the cheapest quote usually is not
A quote can only be compared against another quote if both were priced from the same information. Where a contractor has priced from a concept pack rather than a tender set, they have made assumptions, and those assumptions become variations once work begins. A full specification package is not an administrative step; it is what makes competitive pricing possible at all.
A realistic contingency
We advise ten percent on a warm shell and fifteen on anything involving an existing occupied space, where what is behind the wall is genuinely unknown until it is opened. A contingency is not slack in the budget. It is the line that prevents a single surprise from renegotiating the entire scheme.
What to settle before design begins
Three things, in order: the shell condition, the total figure including approvals and contingency, and the date you need to be operating. Everything downstream is a consequence of those three, and every one of them is cheaper to change now than later.
