Fitout companies in Dubai: how the market actually splits

The market behind one search term

The word fitout covers a spread of business models in this city, and each one prices, staffs and programmes itself differently.

Luxury hospitality and landmark work is the top tier. Hotel refurbishments, museums, themed leisure, projects measured in hundreds of millions of dirhams and staffed by companies with a thousand people or more. These contractors work for developers and hotel operators, not for a tenant with a 2,000 sqft unit.

Large-volume commercial fitouts sit under that. Long-established firms with their own joinery factories, working across malls, hotels and corporate offices, often carrying a client list of hotel brands. Their minimum viable project is large enough that a small unit gets little attention.

Residential renovation is a separate market again: villa kitchens and bathrooms, whole-house refurbishment, work priced and programmed to a domestic timeline. The suppliers barely overlap with commercial fit-out, and the approval route is its own animal entirely.

Then there is the mid-market commercial contractor. Units between roughly 80 and 500 square metres. Offices in JLT and Business Bay towers, restaurants on Sheikh Zayed Road, shops inside Emaar and Majid Al Futtaim malls, clinics, salons. This is where we work, and it is the segment the cost guides serve worst, because their per-square-foot numbers are usually scaled down from projects that had a developer's budget behind them.

The named firms people are actually searching for

A short list of company names drives a large share of the fitout searches in Dubai, and they are not competitors of each other.

ALEC FITOUT was founded in 2009 and is part of the ALEC group. Their published profile is five-star hotels and resorts, cultural and immersive venues, luxury mixed-use, delivered across the MENA region with a team well over a thousand people. If you are fitting out a hotel tower, they belong on your tender list.

THE FITOUT LLC has been trading since 1987 and publishes a client list that includes Ritz-Carlton, Marriott, Mall of the Emirates, Crowne Plaza and The Address. In-house manufacturing, design and build, project management, several hundred staff. Again, a serious contractor built around large repeat corporate and hospitality work.

THE BIG FITOUT is a residential design-and-build company specialising in villa kitchens and bathrooms. Good at what it does and completely irrelevant to a commercial tenant. If you landed on this page while looking for home renovation, that is the search you want, not this one.

Naming them matters because the search term flattens the market. A restaurant operator with a 400 sqm unit who tenders to a hotel contractor gets either a polite decline or a price shaped by a much bigger cost base. The same operator who tenders to a residential firm gets a team that has never argued with Food Control about a grease trap.

Fitout works in Dubai and renovation are priced differently

Fitout works in Dubai normally means taking a unit from shell or from a previous tenant's condition to something you can trade from. Renovation means changing part of a space that already functions.

The gap in price is structural. A shell unit has no ceiling, no partitions, no distribution, sometimes only a capped chilled water connection and a builder's power supply. Everything comes in new, and everything needs to be designed, submitted and inspected as new. A renovation inherits working services. If the AC distribution, sprinkler layout and drainage stay where they are, you are buying finishes and joinery rather than a whole engineering package, and the approval route is usually lighter.

That is also why the same tenant gets two wildly different quotes for what they described as the same job. One contractor priced a fit-out from shell. The other priced a refresh of what exists. Neither is wrong. The scope is different, and the scope was never written down properly. Our note on what a fit-out quotation should contain sets out the line items that make two prices comparable.

Cat A and Cat B in plain language

Cat A is the landlord's base build. Raised floor or screed, suspended ceiling grid, primary air conditioning distribution, basic lighting, fire detection and sprinklers to an open-plan layout, a blank painted shell that is legally habitable and completely unusable as a business.

Cat B is your fit-out. Layout, partitions, meeting rooms and their acoustics, doors and glazing, floor finishes, joinery, kitchenette, branding, and the reworking of the AC, lighting, sprinklers and detection to match your actual plan. That last part is where budgets slip. Every partition you add is a sprinkler head to relocate, a detector to move, a diffuser to rebalance and a light circuit to redraw.

Ask the landlord in writing what Cat A actually exists in your unit before pricing anything. We have taken over units described as Cat A that had ceiling grid and no tiles, or a chilled water valve with no fan coil units beyond it. Those are not small deltas.

What a 2,000 sqft office budget contains, line by line

The published Dubai cost guides put standard commercial fit-out somewhere around AED 300 to 550 per square foot, and luxury specification from about AED 550 upward past AED 1,000. Those numbers are the market's orientation figures, not a rate card, and certainly not ours. We price from drawings and a site visit, because two units of identical area in the same tower can be a third apart once you look at the ceiling void and the existing services.

Take a 2,000 sqft office as a worked example. Here is what sits inside the construction number:

Now the items that live outside that per-square-foot headline, and which get left off comparisons almost every time:

Run the market band across 2,000 sqft and you get a construction envelope in the hundreds of thousands of dirhams before any of that second list. The second list is routinely 15 to 25 per cent again on top. That is the single most common reason a tenant who budgeted from a blog article ends up short. A structured figure for your own unit takes a drawing or an address and a site visit, nothing more.

• Enabling works: protection, hoarding, strip-out of the previous tenant's partitions and floors, waste removal with the building's approved carrier.
• Partitions and ceilings: drywall, glazed office fronts, acoustic infill, plasterboard or mineral tile ceilings, bulkheads.
• MEP: usually the largest single package, commonly twenty to thirty per cent of an office fit-out budget on a straightforward Cat A floor and well above that once the ceiling comes down and services move. Ductwork and diffuser relocation, fan coil rework, sprinkler relocation and testing, fire detection changes, small power and lighting circuits, containment.
• Flooring: screed correction, carpet tile, vinyl, tile, skirting.
• Joinery: reception desk, storage walls, kitchenette units, worktops.
• Doors, ironmongery and glazing, including any fire-rated sets the drawings call for.
• Painting, wall finishes, glass film, blinds.
• Fire and life safety commissioning, emergency lighting and exit signage.
• Site management: supervision, safety, access equipment, out-of-hours labour when the building only allows noisy work at night.
• Design drawings by a licensed consultant, stamped for submission. Some contractors carry this inside a design-and-build price; others bill it separately.
• Authority submission and permit fees, plus the consultant or contractor fee for running the submission.
• Dubai Civil Defence review and, where relevant, DEWA load application or upgrade.
• Landlord or mall charges: fit-out deposit, supervision fee, NOC processing, security passes, temporary power and water, chiller metering, waste disposal levy.
• FF&E: loose furniture, chairs, task lighting, artwork. Nobody's construction price includes these unless it says so.
• IT and AV: cabling terminations, racks, screens, access control, CCTV. Often the tenant's own supplier, working alongside us.
• Signage, which usually carries its own permit and its own lead time.
• VAT at 5 per cent on the lot.
• Contingency. Ten per cent of construction value held by you, not by the contractor, is the cheapest insurance in the project.

Approvals decide your opening date, not the build

Programmes rarely fail on carpentry. They fail because a drawing went back for a comment, sat for a week, went back again, and the sprinkler contractor could not start.

The route depends on where the unit is. Dubai Municipality handles most mainland fit-out permits through the Building Permits System. TECOM clusters and Dubai Design District go through the Dubai Development Authority. DMCC handles JLT. Trakhees covers Palm Jumeirah and other Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation areas. DIFC runs its own building control. Dubai Civil Defence review applies to commercial work, and for food premises the food safety review runs alongside the fit-out submission. On top of all of it sits the landlord or mall NOC, which is not a code requirement at all but a contractual condition, and no authority submission happens without it. We set out who reviews what in our guide to Dubai fit-out approvals.

On timings, be careful with anyone quoting you a guaranteed number. Dubai Municipality's own service catalogue does not publish a stated duration against the modification permit, so every figure in circulation is trade experience rather than a published standard. What we see in practice is roughly 10 to 12 working days on a clean commercial submission, longer where a Civil Defence NOC and a food safety review run in parallel, and considerably longer where the drawings arrive incomplete. Resubmission is the expensive outcome, and it is almost always caused by drawings that do not match the unit as built.

Sector changes the load. An office is the lightest route. A restaurant carries kitchen extraction, gas, grease interception and food safety layout review, which is why our 455 sqm restaurant on Sheikh Zayed Road at nine weeks on site is a harder credential than any office we have delivered. A shop inside a mall answers to the mall's fit-out manual, night work windows and a fixed opening date. A clinic adds a health authority layer before anything else moves.

Reading a fitout company before you sign

Check the trade licence activity, not the website copy. Interior decoration and fit-out contracting is a specific activity, and a firm licensed for something adjacent will be subcontracting your permit route to someone you never met.

Ask who signs the drawings and who is registered as the Civil Defence delegate. Those are often two different organisations, and if neither is in the room during your kick-off, you are the one carrying the coordination.

Ask for the last three completed units of your type and size, with the month they handed over. Delivered work in your format is the only relevant reference. Ours includes offices at Platinum Tower in JLT, the Saudi Dates Centre unit in Dubai Hills Mall, and restaurant work on Sheikh Zayed Road. The office fit-out pages carry the areas and programmes for each.

Then read the payment schedule against the programme. A schedule weighted heavily toward the front, with no milestone tied to authority approval or to snagging completion, tells you how the contractor intends to manage their cash rather than your project.