What it really costs to import a car to the UAE.

In short: Importing can save you real money, but only on the right cars. Once you add VAT, customs, shipping and clearance, plenty of cars land at roughly what you'd pay here anyway. About 1 in 4 actually beat the local price, and on those the typical saving is around AED 13,000. The math below shows you where the line falls.

I've inspected over 5,000 cars, and I'll tell you the thing most importers won't: bringing a car in from abroad is not automatically cheaper. People assume "imported" means "discount." It doesn't. Some cars come in a clear win, some come in a wash, and a few cost you more than just walking into a showroom down the road. The trick is knowing which is which before you commit, not after.

So let me walk you through the real numbers, the ones we see on our own import stock every day.

What importing actually adds to the price

Here's the part that surprises people. The sticker price abroad is never the price you pay. By the time a car reaches you in the UAE, you've stacked on 5% VAT, 5% customs duty, the shipping, and a clearance fee of AED 734. Shipping alone runs AED 5,500 from Korea and AED 4,771 from China. None of that is optional, and none of it shows up in the cheap-looking figure you first saw online.

Take a car that costs USD 20,000 in Korea. On paper, a bargain. Watch what happens once it's actually standing in front of you, registered and ready:

So a USD 20,000 car becomes an AED 87,040 car. That's the number that matters, the landed cost, and it's the one you have to put next to what the same car sells for locally. Compare anything else and you're fooling yourself. I've seen buyers fall in love with a foreign price and forget that roughly AED 13,000 of extras was coming whether they liked it or not.

The honest truth: only about 1 in 4 beats buying here

This is where I lose some people, but I'd rather be straight with you. Across our live import stock that has a UAE price to compare against, that's 4,727 cars, only about 1,276 actually come in under the local price once everything's added. Call it 27%. Roughly one in four. The other three? They land at about what you'd pay in a UAE showroom, sometimes a touch more.

Read that again, because it's the opposite of what every import ad implies. Most cars are not cheaper to import. The paperwork and shipping eat the gap. If a dealer tells you importing always saves money, they're either not counting properly or hoping you won't.

But the one in four that do beat the local price make it worth the hunt. On those cars the typical saving is around AED 13,000, which is about 13% off. Most land somewhere between AED 5,000 and AED 31,000 cheaper than buying the identical car here. That's not pocket change. That's a real dent in what you pay, and it softens the depreciation hit down the line too.

How we find the ones that actually save you money

The savings aren't random, and they aren't luck. They sit on specific cars that happen to be mispriced in a specific market at a specific moment. The whole game is finding those cars before someone else does. That's the work. Anyone can ship a car; the value is in picking the right one to ship.

Here's the gap most dealers can't close. They buy through the same one or two channels everyone else uses. They've got a contact in maybe one country, no one in the rest, so a genuinely good car sitting in a market they don't touch just sails right past them. They never even see it. We go looking in the places they don't, which is the only reason we keep finding cars that come in well under the UAE price.

So when you see a saving on one of our cars, it's not because importing is magic. It's because we found a car that was underpriced where it sat, did the full landed-cost math, and only put it up if the number genuinely beat what you'd pay here. The ones that don't clear that bar, we don't pretend about. You can see the live list on our import cars page.

Is it worth it for you?

Depends entirely on the car, and I won't pretend otherwise. If you've found one of the cars that lands several thousand dirhams under the local price, importing is an easy yes. AED 13,000 in your pocket for the same car is not a hard decision. If the saving comes out at a few hundred dirhams on a six-figure car, the local one might suit you better, especially if you'd rather drive it home this week than wait on shipping.

My honest advice: ignore the word "imported" entirely. It tells you nothing about whether you're getting a deal. What tells you is one comparison, the all-in landed price against the local price for the exact same year, model and trim. We run that comparison on every single car and publish both numbers, so you're never guessing. Our how to buy page walks through how the price you see is the landed, ready-to-register figure, not a base price that quietly grows by AED 13,000 before you can drive away.

Common questions

Is importing a car to the UAE always cheaper than buying locally?

No, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you something. Across our live import stock, only about 27%, roughly one in four cars, actually come in under the local price once you add 5% VAT, 5% customs, shipping and the AED 734 clearance fee. The rest land at about the same price you'd pay here. The win is real, but only on the right car.

How much do you actually save when you do find a good one?

On the cars that beat the local price, the typical saving is around AED 13,000, which works out to about 13% off the identical car bought here. Most fall between AED 5,000 and AED 31,000 cheaper. The exact figure depends on how mispriced the car was in the market we sourced it from, which is why we publish the real number on every one.

Why can you find these cars when other dealers can't?

Most dealers buy through the same one or two channels and have no partner in many countries, so the better-priced cars sitting elsewhere never reach them. We source from places they don't touch, run the full landed-cost math on each one, and only list it if the number genuinely beats the UAE price. That sourcing gap is the whole reason the savings exist.