Restaurant fit-out cost in Dubai 2026: AED 350–2,000+/sqft and 5 approvals

The number that sinks F&B budgets in Dubai is rarely the marble. It is the kitchen exhaust riser that does not exist in the tower you just signed a five-year lease on, or the kitchen layout you built before Dubai Municipality Food Control approved it. Neither line appears on a per-square-foot table, and both can cost more than the finishes package. Price the engineering and the approval chain first, then argue about the terrazzo.

Restaurant fit-out cost in Dubai: the 2026 bands by format

Restaurant fit-out cost in Dubai splits by kitchen load more than by design ambition. A room full of imported stone with a two-burner counter behind it is cheaper to build than a plain casual dining room with a full hot line, and that surprises people every time.

These are working market bands for the construction scope, not a DOMECO rate card. Kitchen equipment, loose furniture and your own contingency sit outside them.

• Coffee counter or takeaway kiosk, no hot line: AED 350–550/sqft. At this level the unit prices closer to retail than to F&B, because there is no extraction canopy, no gas and no grease-laden drainage.
• Café or quick service with a light kitchen: AED 450–700/sqft. One canopy, electric cooking, a small cold room.
• Casual dining with a full kitchen: AED 500–800/sqft. This is the band most Dubai operators land in.
• Premium casual and concept-led venues: AED 800–1,200/sqft. Bespoke joinery, feature lighting, acoustic treatment, a bigger kitchen with more equipment on the line.
• Fine dining: AED 1,200–1,800/sqft, and complex venues with imported finishes and a display kitchen run past 2,000.

Two of those bands need a caveat. Fit-out cost per square foot in Dubai runs AED 220 to 1,500+ across all commercial categories, and F&B sits at the top of that spread for engineering reasons rather than aesthetic ones. If you want the full ladder including offices, retail and warehouse, we broke it down in our guide to fit-out cost per square foot in Dubai.

The second caveat is area. Kitchen, stores and staff facilities typically take 30 to 40 percent of the floor area in a full-service restaurant. A 2,000 sqft unit therefore carries roughly 600 to 800 sqft of back-of-house, and the AED per square foot in that zone runs well above the dining room. When a contractor quotes you one blended rate for the whole unit, ask them to split front and back of house. If they cannot, they have not sized the kitchen yet.

The approval chain: DM Food Control, Civil Defence, DEWA and your landlord

This is where F&B fit out in Dubai diverges from every other commercial fit-out, and where most competitor cost guides go quiet. The building permit is the easy part. The food permit is the one that decides whether you open.

Landlord or mall design criteria comes first. Before any authority sees a drawing, your landlord issues the fit-out guidelines and reviews your concept package. In a mall this is a formal design criteria manual with fixed shopfront lines, nominated MEP subcontractors and a handover date with penalties attached. Allow 2 to 4 weeks for the landlord review loop, longer if your shopfront pushes their line.

Dubai Municipality Food Control approves the kitchen layout before you build. The Food Safety Department reviews the plan against the Dubai Food Code: separation of raw and ready-to-eat flows, receiving and storage, wash-up, waste route, staff facilities and the position of hand wash basins. Inspectors report kitchen flow separation as the most commonly failed requirement. Approval typically takes 2 to 4 weeks with a competent consultant and a clean drawing set, and it is the gate you cannot skip. Building a kitchen and then applying is the single most expensive mistake in Dubai F&B fit-out.

Dubai Civil Defence covers fire, and a restaurant triggers more of it than an office. DCD looks at fire alarm and sprinkler modification, escape routes, fire-rated grease duct construction, the wet chemical suppression system over the cooking line, and the gas installation with its leak detection and automatic shut-off. Budget 2 to 4 weeks for approval plus the site inspection, and note that DCD signs off after the works, so a failed inspection sits directly on your opening date.

The building permit runs in parallel, through Dubai Municipality on the mainland, Trakhees for Nakheel-developed areas including Palm Jumeirah, DDA for TECOM communities, DMCC for JLT and DIFC for its own district. 1 to 3 weeks is normal.

DEWA is last and slowest to recover if you get it wrong. Load application, meter and energisation take 2 to 6 weeks. On a restaurant this is not a formality, because your connected load is a different order of magnitude from the retail tenant next door.

Approval fees for an F&B unit, including the approved consultant who stamps and submits, commonly total AED 15,000 to 50,000. That is the upper half of the general commercial range, and Food Control is the reason. Every authority revises its own tariff, so verify against your address before you commit a date to an investor.

Commercial kitchen fit out in Dubai: where the money actually goes

A commercial kitchen fit out in Dubai is two budgets pretending to be one. There is the construction scope, and there is the equipment package, and they are procured on completely different timelines.

Equipment first, because it is easier to price. A café package with an espresso machine, undercounter fridges, a small combi and a dishwasher starts around AED 80,000. A casual dining kitchen with a hot line, walk-in cold rooms and proper wash-up runs AED 150,000 to 350,000. Fine dining with a display kitchen and blast chillers passes AED 500,000. European brands carry 8 to 14 week lead times, which matters more to your programme than to your budget.

Now the construction lines that owners leave out:

• Grease trap. Mandatory for every commercial kitchen in Dubai, with cleaning by a Municipality-approved contractor and a maintained log for inspection. Supply and install runs AED 4,500 to 14,000 depending on capacity and whether it sits under the sink or goes in the ground. In-ground means breaking the slab, and in a mall or a tower you may not be permitted to break it at all.
• Kitchen exhaust riser. Check this before you sign the lease. A restaurant needs a dedicated fire-rated grease duct to roof level. If the building has no spare riser, your options are a long negotiation with the landlord, a routed duct through someone else's space, or walking away. We have seen operators discover this in week three of design.
• Wet chemical fire suppression over the cooking line. AED 15,000 to 45,000 depending on nozzle count and hood length, plus the DCD submission.
• Drainage falls, gullies and tanking. Kitchen floors need falls to gullies and a waterproofing layer under the screed. That build-up needs slab depth you may not have, and retrofitting it into an existing unit is disruptive and slow.
• Gas. LPG bank or piped gas installed by an approved contractor, with leak detection interlocked to a solenoid valve and to the extraction system. Gas approval sits inside the DCD scope and adds time, not just cost.
• HACCP documentation. A HACCP-based food safety management system is required under the Dubai Food Code, and consultants charge AED 5,000 to 15,000 to write and submit it. It is not a construction cost, which is exactly why it falls out of the fit-out budget and surprises people in the last fortnight.

Stainless steel is the other quiet line. Bespoke tabling, shelving, extraction canopies and wall cladding are fabricated to your layout, and on a full kitchen the metalwork package alone can reach AED 60,000 to 180,000.

MEP on an F&B unit runs 45 to 55 percent, not 30 to 40

Search for restaurant fit-out costs and you will read that MEP takes 30 to 40 percent of the budget. That figure is correct for an office. On F&B it is 45 to 55 percent, and pricing your restaurant against the office number is how a project runs 15 percent over before anyone changes a finish.

Extraction is the reason. A 3-metre canopy over a heavy-duty cooking line typically moves 4,000 to 7,000 m³/h, and you have to replace 80 to 90 percent of that with tempered makeup air. Skip the makeup air and the kitchen runs negative, the front doors become hard to open, and the extraction never achieves its design capture rate. In a Dubai summer, tempering that makeup air is a real cooling load in its own right.

Electrical load is the second reason. A combi oven draws 12 to 20 kW three-phase, an induction range 5 to 10 kW per zone, a dishwasher with a booster heater 8 to 12 kW, and cold room condensing units run continuously. A full-kitchen restaurant commonly lands at 100 to 250 kW connected load. Past roughly 150 kW you are in a different DEWA conversation about supply capacity, and that conversation adds weeks rather than days.

Ask any contractor bidding your restaurant for two numbers before you compare rates: the design extraction volume in m³/h with its matching makeup air volume, and the total connected load in kW with a distribution board schedule behind it. A bid that undercuts the field by 30 percent is almost always thin here, because the extraction and the electrical infrastructure are invisible on opening night and expensive to reach afterwards.

The honest timeline for an F&B fit out in Dubai

Contractors quote 8 to 16 weeks. That is the site window, and it is broadly accurate for the site window. It is not the answer to the question owners are actually asking, which is how long from lease signature to first cover.

Here is the realistic sequence.

1. 1. Design and drawings, 3 to 6 weeks. Concept, kitchen layout with the equipment schedule locked, MEP coordination, authority-ready drawing set. Our design work starts from AED 10,000 and runs 3 to 6 weeks, and an F&B unit sits at the longer end because the kitchen has to be coordinated with the equipment supplier before anything can be submitted.
2. 2. Approvals, 3 to 6 weeks. The landlord, the building permit, DCD and Food Control run partly in parallel. Partly, not fully, because DCD wants an approved layout and the landlord wants both.
3. 3. Site works, 8 to 14 weeks. A café with a light kitchen finishes at the short end. A fine dining venue with bespoke joinery and imported stone does not.
4. 4. Inspections and final approvals, 3 to 6 weeks. DCD inspection, DEWA energisation, Food Control final inspection and permit issue. Each one can bounce back.

Add it up honestly and you get 17 to 32 weeks, which is four to seven months. Any programme that promises you a full-service restaurant open in ten weeks from lease signature is either counting only the site window or assuming nothing bounces.

Two Dubai-specific realities compress into that number. From mid-June to mid-September the midday outdoor working ban and the humidity affect deliveries, screed curing and paint schedules even on an indoor job. And in a mall, all works happen at night around trading hours, which cuts your productive working day roughly in half.

We fix the programme and the price in the contract, we carry a penalty per day for missing the agreed handover date, and the works guarantee runs 12 months. Fixed price means fixed. There are no additions after mobilisation, which is worth checking in writing with whoever you appoint, because the standard alternative is a provisional sum that becomes a negotiation in month three.

Location: Downtown, DIP, a mall unit and the free zones

The district changes your restaurant fit-out cost through access rules and logistics rather than through postcode markup.

Downtown and prime residential towers add roughly 5 to 10 percent. Restricted delivery windows, night-only material movement, service lift booking and stricter noise rules all cost labour hours. The kitchen riser question is sharpest here, because towers were rarely designed with three F&B tenants in mind.

Mall units add 15 to 25 percent. You work at night, the landlord's design criteria dictates a good part of your specification, MEP tie-ins go through landlord-appointed specialists at their rates, and hoarding and access charges are set rather than negotiated. The handover date in a mall lease usually carries a daily penalty, which changes how you should think about contingency. We fitted a boutique in Dubai Hills Mall on a landlord-set night schedule and an office in Platinum Tower JLT that answered to DMCC rather than Dubai Municipality. The two jobs looked nothing alike in rate or in programme.

Dubai Investment Park, Al Quoz and the industrial belt run 20 to 30 percent below a Downtown equivalent for the same specification. Daytime working, kerbside unloading, taller slabs and easier drainage routes. This is where cloud kitchens, central production units and staff canteens make commercial sense, and it is where our own workshop and office sit.

Free zones change the authority rather than the price. Trakhees covers Nakheel areas including Palm Jumeirah, DDA covers TECOM communities, DMCC covers JLT, DIFC runs its own building control. Confirm which body issues the food permit for your specific address before design closes, because it is not always the same body that issues the building permit. Submitting a valid drawing set to the wrong authority costs four to six weeks and the consultant fee twice.

One honest note on our own record. Our named commercial work sits in retail, offices and hospitality interiors rather than a wall of restaurant logos: a fur boutique in Dubai Hills Mall, City Walk, a spa in Media City with its own wet-area drainage and waterproofing headaches. The transferable part is the approvals discipline and the MEP coordination, which is most of what an F&B fit-out actually is. Ask any contractor you shortlist which specific authority submissions they have personally handled, not how many projects they claim. How we approach the commercial side is set out in commercial interior design in Dubai.

The lines owners leave out of the restaurant fit-out budget

Hold 10 percent of the construction value as your own contingency, separate from anything the contractor has priced. On F&B, 5 percent is optimistic. The things it covers are predictable in type even when they are not predictable in timing.

• Rework after a failed inspection. If Food Control or DCD flags something at final inspection, you fix it and re-apply, and the delay costs you rent on a closed unit as well as the works. This is the single strongest argument for approving the kitchen layout before you build it.
• Strip-out of a previous tenant. Removing old partitions, ceilings, flooring and dead MEP with licensed disposal typically adds AED 20 to 50 per square foot, before a single new thing goes in. A second-generation F&B unit is not automatically a saving, and if the previous kitchen fights your layout you pay to demolish work someone else paid for.
• Landlord deposits and access charges. Often AED 5,000 to 20,000 refundable, plus non-refundable hoarding, permit and supervision fees.
• Long-lead procurement. Imported stone, glazing, joinery hardware and European kitchen equipment run 4 to 14 weeks. This causes more delays than site productivity does.
• Signage above the shopfront line, which is usually excluded from fit-out quotes and separately approved.
• Furniture and loose items, commonly 10 to 20 percent on top of the construction rate for an F&B venue, and more if the seating is bespoke.

We covered the mechanics of contingency and the way these lines usually surface in hidden renovation costs and contingency in Dubai.

The blunt version: if your total available budget for a 2,000 sqft casual dining unit is AED 1,000,000, do not spend AED 1,000,000 on the fit-out. Spend AED 750,000 on construction, hold AED 100,000 for the kitchen equipment gap and the approvals, and keep AED 100,000 as contingency you never touch. Operators who ignore that split tend to open late with a compromised kitchen, and the kitchen is the part that has to work every service for the next five years.

FAQ

How much does a restaurant fit-out cost in Dubai in 2026?

Restaurant fit-out cost in Dubai runs AED 350 to 2,000+ per square foot in 2026. A coffee counter or takeaway kiosk sits at AED 350 to 550, café or quick-service at 450 to 700, casual dining with a full kitchen at 500 to 800, premium casual at 800 to 1,200, and fine dining at 1,200 to 1,800, with complex display-kitchen venues running past 2,000. Kitchen equipment, furniture and contingency are separate budgets.

What does Dubai Municipality approval for an F&B unit actually cover?

Food Control reviews your kitchen layout against the Dubai Food Code before construction: separation of raw and ready-to-eat flows, receiving and storage, refrigeration capacity, wash-up, waste route, hand wash basin positions and staff facilities. Approval typically takes 2 to 4 weeks and is required before fit-out starts. Kitchen flow separation is the requirement inspectors report failing most often.

How long does the full approval and fit-out cycle take?

Four to seven months from lease signature to opening. Design and drawings take 3 to 6 weeks, approvals 3 to 6 weeks, site works 8 to 14 weeks, and inspections with final permit issue another 3 to 6 weeks. The 8 to 16 weeks quoted by most contractors describes the site window only.

Does a small café need a grease trap?

Yes. Every commercial kitchen in Dubai needs a grease trap, sized to the fixtures discharging into it, with cleaning by a Municipality-approved contractor and a maintained service log. Supply and install runs AED 4,500 to 14,000. A small café with an electric hot plate and a sink needs a smaller unit, not no unit.

Why is a Downtown restaurant fit-out more expensive than one in DIP?

Access rules and logistics rather than location markup. Downtown and prime towers add roughly 5 to 10 percent for restricted delivery windows, night-only material movement and service lift booking, and a mall unit adds 15 to 25 percent because works run at night and MEP tie-ins go through landlord-appointed specialists. DIP and the industrial belt run 20 to 30 percent below Downtown for the same specification.

Can I start construction before the kitchen layout is approved?

No, and doing it is the most expensive mistake in Dubai F&B. Food Control approval authorises fit-out to proceed according to the approved plans. If you build first and the inspector flags flow separation or drainage, you demolish and rebuild that part of the kitchen, re-apply, and pay rent on a closed unit while you wait.

What does HACCP documentation cost separately?

Consultants charge AED 5,000 to 15,000 to prepare and submit a HACCP-based food safety management system, which the Dubai Food Code requires from every food establishment. It sits outside the construction contract, which is why it routinely falls out of fit-out budgets and surfaces in the final fortnight before opening.