Dubai Residency

Golden visa 2 min read

Dubai issued 66,078 golden visas in the first half of 2026

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A residency category stops being exclusive at some point, and the only honest way to find that point is to count.

Dubai golden visas, in numbers

The General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs — Dubai reported 66,078 golden visas issued between January and June 2026, alongside 29,456 five-year multiple-entry tourist visas. Across every category the directorate processed more than seven million visa and residency transactions in the same six months, with a reported 95% customer satisfaction rate.

Who reported it

Lieutenant General Mohammed Ahmed Al Marri, Director General of GDRFA Dubai: «The results reflect our commitment to delivering efficient, flexible and digitally driven services that enhance customer experience and support Dubai’s position as a leading global destination.» Major General Khalaf Ahmed Al Ghaith, Assistant Director General of the Entry Permits and Residency Sector, presented the sector detail.

What the two numbers say together

Seven million transactions against 66,078 golden visas is the ratio worth holding on to. The golden visa is the category that gets written about; it is a fraction of a percent of what the directorate actually does, and the bulk of that work is ordinary entry permits, renewals, cancellations and status changes for people already here.

The five-year tourist visa

At 29,456 issued in six months, the five-year multiple-entry visit visa is now a mainstream product rather than a curiosity — roughly one for every two golden visas granted in the same period.

Half-year issuance figures are useful for one thing and misleading for another. They are a good measure of throughput: a directorate that clears seven million transactions in six months is not the bottleneck in anyone’s application, and the practical delays applicants meet are almost always upstream — a medical, an attestation, an employer’s establishment card. They are a poor measure of how hard the golden visa is to get, because the published total mixes categories with entirely different tests: an investor route, a specialist-talent nomination and a top-of-class student nomination all land in the same figure. Anyone reading 66,078 as evidence that the bar has dropped should note that no category-level breakdown was published, which is exactly the number that would settle the question. On the five-year visit visa, the practical caution is that it is a multiple-entry permission, not a residence: it does not carry an Emirates ID, it does not open a bank account on its own terms, and stays are still capped per entry. It is a travel document for people whose life is somewhere else.

Source: Gulf News checked against the source

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