Tehran vs Dubai property prices: what a square metre really costs in both

Almost every comparison of Tehran and Dubai property is useless, and the reason is always the same: somebody quotes a toman price without saying what a toman was worth on the day. In a currency that has lost three quarters of its dollar value in under three years, that is not a rounding problem. It reverses the answer.

So this article does it the other way round. Every Tehran figure below is shown in toman, in dollars and in dirhams, with the exchange rate used and the date of that rate printed next to it.

The number that breaks every comparison

Between the end of 2023 and today the free-market rate went from about 50,500 toman to the dollar to 203,700. That is not inflation in the ordinary sense. It means any price quoted in toman two years ago is describing roughly a quarter of the value the same number describes today.

If you own an apartment in Tehran, this has a strange consequence. You can be genuinely richer in toman and genuinely poorer in dollars, at the same moment, on the same asset. Neither feeling is wrong. They are just measured in different units.

For anyone deciding between keeping capital in Tehran and moving some of it to Dubai, this is the whole question, and it cannot be answered in toman.

One Tehran square metre, in toman and in dollars

Here is the same square metre at four dates, priced both ways.

Read the last two columns together. The toman column looks like a market that has almost tripled. The dollar column looks like a market that has lost a third. The apartment did not move. The unit of measurement did.

This is the single most useful thing an Iranian owner can understand about their own asset, and it is why so many people feel that their property has done well and that they are somehow worse off. Both are correct.

One square metre, in three currencies

Now the actual comparison, at one date and one rate, so nothing is hidden.

Dubai costs about 4.9 times Tehran per square metre. That is the honest headline and I am not going to dress it up: Dubai is far more expensive per unit of space, and anyone telling an Iranian buyer otherwise is selling something.

The ratio is the part worth remembering rather than the absolute figures, because the ratio survives the next exchange rate move and the absolute numbers do not.

Where these numbers come from, and what I could not get

I want to be straight about sourcing, because this is the part of a Tehran comparison that is usually hidden.

The Tehran prices come from the Central Bank of Iran's monthly Tehran housing series, which is the proper authority: it measures transacted prices through registered agencies, not asking prices. I could not pull it from the CBI site directly, because that site is behind an image CAPTCHA, so the figures here are the CBI numbers as reported by Iranian financial media, and I have kept only readings I could date confidently.

One important caveat on the most recent figure. The 209 million for August 2026 is an asking price from listing data, not a CBI transacted average. Asking prices in Tehran currently run above transacted prices because the market is in a deep freeze: monthly transactions have been running under 3,000 units against a normal level several times that. So the real transacted figure is probably lower, which would make the dollar decline larger, not smaller.

The exchange rates are the annual closes from a public Iranian rate archive, plus this site's own daily bonbast feed for today's number. Every one is printed on the chart next to the price it converted.

What I could not build is a clean month-by-month series for the last two years, because the secondary reporting mixes Persian calendar years and I would rather show four dates I can stand behind than twenty-four I cannot.

Rent works differently, and it changes the yield completely

This is where most comparisons quietly break, and it is the reason I would not trust a Tehran yield figure that does not explain itself.

Iranian rentals are not a monthly rent. They are a large refundable deposit, رهن, usually combined with a smaller monthly payment, and often taken as رهن کامل with no monthly rent at all. You cannot compare that to a Dubai rent until you convert it.

The market convention is that roughly 3 percent of the deposit per month is the equivalent monthly rent. Working it through:

• Full رهن on a 70 square metre Tehran apartment runs about 1 to 7 billion toman depending on the district.
• Take the lower end, 1 billion. At 3 percent a month that is about 30 million toman a month, or 360 million a year.
• That same 70 square metre unit at 209 million per square metre is worth about 14.6 billion toman.
• Gross yield: 360 million over 14.6 billion, roughly 2.5 percent.

Against that, Dubai runs about 7 percent citywide and 8.2 percent in JVC. Even the prime, capital-preservation end of Dubai, City Walk at 5.5 to 6 percent, is more than double Tehran.

Two honest caveats. The 3 percent conversion is a market convention, not an official rate, and at 2.5 percent the Tehran yield falls to about 2.1. And Tehran rents are themselves quoted in toman, so they inflate too. The point is not the decimal place. It is that the gap is roughly three times, and it is structural rather than a moment in the cycle.

Tehran districts and their Dubai equivalents

This is the question I get asked most often, and the useful way to answer it is by position within each city's own price ladder rather than by how a place looks.

That table is my own read, not a published mapping, and it maps price position rather than character. A Vanak apartment and a Downtown apartment are nothing like each other to live in. They occupy the same rung of their respective ladders.

One aside that is not a valuation point but is genuinely interesting. Jumeirah Village Circle is laid out as a ring with districts radiating from the centre, and anyone who has looked at a map of Hamedan will recognise the shape: Hamedan's centre is a famous radial plan, six avenues spoking out from the central square. Two cities, ninety years and three thousand kilometres apart, arriving at the same geometry. It tells you nothing about yield. I mention it because once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.

What the ratios say

Strip out the currency entirely and three ratios carry the whole comparison.

• Price per square metre: Dubai is about 4.9 times Tehran.
• Gross rental yield: Dubai is about 2.8 times Tehran, roughly 7 percent against 2.5.
• Currency: the toman has lost about three quarters of its dollar value since the end of 2023. The dirham is pegged to the dollar and has lost none of it.

The first ratio favours Tehran and the second two do not. That is the real trade, and it is why the answer is not the same for everyone. You are paying roughly five times the price per metre to buy an asset that earns nearly three times the income in a currency that does not move against the dollar.

What this does not mean

It does not mean sell in Tehran and buy in Dubai. I am not in a position to tell anyone that and I would be suspicious of anyone who is.

A home you live in is not an investment position, and moving capital out of Iran is a serious, sometimes difficult, sometimes restricted process that has nothing to do with which market has the better yield. Transfer routes, timing and cost can move the arithmetic more than anything in this article. That is a conversation with your own advisers, not with a property consultant.

It also does not mean Tehran property has been a bad asset. Over long periods it has protected Iranian savers from inflation better than almost anything else available to them, and that is exactly what most owners bought it for. Judged as inflation protection in toman it has done its job. Judged as a dollar asset it has not, and those are different questions.

My take

The number I would want an Iranian owner to sit with is the one in the first chart: up 175 percent in toman, down 32 percent in dollars, same apartment, same dates.

If your costs, your life and your children's future are all in toman, the toman number is the one that matters and Tehran has served you. If any part of your future is priced in a currency that is not the toman, and for a growing number of the people I speak to that is now most of it, then the dollar column is the one that describes your actual position.

Dubai is not cheap and this article has not argued that it is. It is 4.9 times the price per square metre. What it offers instead is income at roughly three times the rate, in a currency pegged to the dollar, with a title you can hold as a foreigner and a residency attached to it. Whether that trade is worth it depends on which currency your life is denominated in, and that is a question only you can answer.

If you want this run on your own numbers rather than city averages, send me the district and the size and I will do the conversion both ways with the rate of the day printed on it.

Sources: Tehran prices from the Central Bank of Iran monthly Tehran housing series as reported by Iranian financial media; the August 2026 figure is listing asking-price data and is labelled as such. Exchange rates from a public Iranian rate archive and this site's daily bonbast feed. Dubai price per square foot from Dubai Land Department data for July 2026. Yield calculations are mine, with the conversion assumptions stated. For information only, not financial advice.