Why UAE Residents are Acquiring Second Residencies without Planning to leave the UAE

The UAE has spent years becoming a place international residents are increasingly able, and willing, to call home for the long term. Its millionaire population almost doubled over the decade to the end of 2024, reaching around 130,500. Yet some of those increasingly established residents are also acquiring residence rights elsewhere.

They are not necessarily preparing to leave. In many cases, quite the opposite. The UAE remains the base, while a second residency is being acquired for what it can make possible without requiring a move.

So what is the value of having the right to live somewhere you have no plans to move to?

Wealth is settling, but families remain international

By the end of 2025, Dubai International Financial Centre was home to 1,289 family-related entities, 61% more than a year earlier. At the same time, the number of foundations established by DIFC-based families had risen 66% to 1,115.

As families organise more of their long-term wealth from the UAE, their planning increasingly extends across generations and jurisdictions. Around US$1 trillion is expected to pass between generations in the Middle East over the coming decade, and those inheriting it will make their own decisions about where to study, work and live.

The person who built the wealth may remain firmly based in Dubai while the next generation develops stronger connections elsewhere. Residence rights can be established around that future without requiring the family to make a relocation decision today.

Greater permanence in the UAE can therefore coexist with greater international mobility. One concerns where the family is based. The other concerns the choices available beyond that base.

Long-term residence changes the calculation

That base has itself become more secure. Qualifying UAE Golden Visa holders can obtain renewable five or ten-year residence, allowing many investors, entrepreneurs and other eligible residents to plan much further ahead here.

Another residence, therefore, no longer needs to answer the question of where the family can remain long term. Instead, the decision can start with the rights it expects to need elsewhere.

Family eligibility can make the timing important. Residency programmes determine which relatives can be included with the principal applicant, while dependent children can cease to qualify as they get older. The family eligible to apply together today may therefore look different under the same programme several years from now.

If those residence rights are expected to benefit the next generation, waiting until the principal applicant wants to use them personally can miss the reason for acquiring them in the first place.

Family plans can outlast immigration programmes

The family may be thinking decades ahead, yet the programme itself can change much sooner. Spain abolished its Golden Visa in April 2025 after almost 12 years, Portugal removed real estate as a qualifying investment under its investment residence route and Greece increased the investment required across important parts of its property programme.

For families with a clear future use for residence rights, acting early can preserve a route, and family eligibility, that may not be available on the same terms when the need eventually arises.

The future use still has to come first. Otherwise, policy uncertainty becomes an argument for acquiring a residence the family may never need.

The Route has to fit the life

Even with a clear purpose, the conditions attached to a residence can determine whether it works for someone continuing to live primarily in the UAE.

Portugal, for example, allows its investment residence to be maintained with limited physical presence. Citizenship is a separate question, governed by requirements that need to be considered against the family’s longer-term intentions.

The same separation applies to tax. Holding immigration residence abroad does not automatically make someone tax resident there, although greater use of that residence can change the position under the second country’s domestic rules.

The relevant conditions therefore extend beyond obtaining the residence. A family needs to understand what is required to keep it and what changes if it eventually wants more from that status.

Start with the right, not the programme

If children are expected to establish stronger ties elsewhere, their eligibility and future rights deserve attention. Where citizenship is the longer-term objective, the route needs to support it on terms the family can realistically meet. If the residence will largely be held for future use, its renewal conditions need to accommodate that.

These are different objectives, even when they sit under the same broad heading of residency by investment. A programme may look attractive on cost, investment structure or minimum presence, but those features only become useful when they serve the family’s intended outcome.

For some families, that assessment will reveal no need for another residence at all. Secure UAE residence may already provide what they require, with no clear benefit from establishing another legal status elsewhere.

Residence planning from a UAE base

What appears at first to be a contradiction is closely connected to the UAE becoming a more established home for internationally connected families. Greater security here allows families to plan further ahead, including for a next generation whose lives may develop across different countries.

A second residence can form part of that planning without becoming a new home. Its value depends on what those rights are expected to do, who is expected to use them and whether they can be maintained until they are needed.

Discuss your second residency options with Apollo IMA

Apollo IMA is an independent global advisory firm working across citizenship by investment, residency by investment, international real estate and international company formation.

If you are established in the UAE, we can look at your family’s longer-term plans before considering individual programmes. We can assess where another residence would add to your existing position, how family eligibility may change over time and what maintaining or eventually using that residence would require.

Contact Apollo IMA to discuss your plans.