UAE central bank counts AED 15.9 billion of loans under payment relief

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Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

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The Central Bank of the UAE said on Monday 5 October 2026 that banks had deferred payments and waived fees and commissions on loans totalling AED 15.9 billion by the end of August 2026. Its press release, issued in Abu Dhabi after the Governor met the chief executives of the country's banks, puts the number of customers helped at 155,971: individuals, small and medium-sized enterprises and large companies.

The relief comes from the Financial Institutions Resilience Package, which the central bank launched in March 2026. Khaleej Times, reporting the announcement the same day, recalls that the package followed the regional military conflict that broke out on 28 February 2026.

One thing is missing from the release, and it matters to anyone who works with property buyers. Neither the central bank nor the two newspapers that reported the figures, Khaleej Times and Gulf News, says how much of the relief concerns mortgages. The words mortgage, home loan and real estate do not appear in the release. What follows is therefore a report on loans in general, and it should be read that way.

Central Bank of the UAE press release, 5 October 2026. Figures to the end of August 2026.

What the central bank announced

The release is short and built around two sets of numbers. The first is the count of relief granted under the package. The second is a health check of the banking system, which is covered further down.

On relief, the central bank gives a total and three groups. Large private-sector companies are few and account for most of the money. Individual customers are many and account for the least. The table gives each group as the release states it, with its share of the total amount worked out from those figures.

The wording differs slightly from one line to the next. For companies, the release speaks of support. For enterprises and for individuals, it speaks of loan repayment deferrals. For the package as a whole, it speaks of payment deferrals and waivers of fees and commissions on loans. The release does not say how long a deferral lasts, how many instalments it covers or which fees were waived.

One customer more or less

Readers comparing reports will find two totals. The central bank's release gives 155,971 customers, which is exactly the sum of its three groups: 849, 6,441 and 148,681. Khaleej Times and Gulf News both report 155,970, with Khaleej Times describing the figure as approximate. The gap is a single customer, and two of the three group counts are themselves given as approximate in the release. This article uses the release's figure.

The amount has a similar wrinkle. The Gulf News headline rounds the relief to AED 16 billion, while the body of the same article, like the release and Khaleej Times, gives AED 15.9 billion. The three amounts in the table add up to AED 15.9 billion, so that is the figure to keep.

Individuals are 95% of the customers and 14.5% of the money

Set side by side, the two columns of the table tell different stories. Individual customers make up 95.3% of everyone helped, yet their deferrals come to AED 2.3 billion of the AED 15.9 billion, or 14.5%. The 849 or so large companies are 0.5% of the customers and 67.3% of the amount.

Simple division gives an order of size for each group. It is only arithmetic on rounded totals, and the central bank publishes no average of its own. Across about 148,681 individuals, AED 2.3 billion works out at roughly AED 15,500 each. Across 6,441 enterprises, AED 2.9 billion is roughly AED 450,000 each. Across about 849 companies, AED 10.7 billion is roughly AED 12.6 million each.

These averages say nothing about the kind of loan behind them. A deferral for an individual could concern a personal loan, a car loan, a credit card balance or a home loan, and the sources do not split the figure.

How the relief built up since March

The package dates from March 2026. Gulf Business reported on 18 March 2026 that the central bank's board, chaired by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, had approved what it called a financial institution resilience package with five pillars. As Gulf Business described them, banks were allowed to draw on up to 30% of their reserve balances and to use term liquidity facilities in dirhams and US dollars; liquidity and funding ratios were eased for a time; two capital buffers were released; banks were permitted to defer the classification of certain loans for customers affected by the conditions; and lenders were urged to keep supplying credit to the economy.

In other words, the package was aimed first at the banks. It gave them room, in liquidity, in capital and in the way a troubled loan is labelled, so that they could give room to their customers. The deferrals and waivers counted in October are what the banks did with it. Gulf Business gave no end date for any of the measures, and the October release gives none either.

Gulf News, in an article on the October figures last updated on 7 October 2026, supplies two earlier counts. By 8 May 2026, 65,300 customers had benefited and the relief stood at AED 6.2 billion. By 30 July 2026, the figures were 135,031 customers and AED 13.5 billion.

The pace has slowed. Between the May and July counts the amount more than doubled, from AED 6.2 billion to AED 13.5 billion. Between the July count and the end of August it rose by a further AED 2.4 billion, while the number of customers grew by 20,940 on the central bank's total. From the May count to the end of August, the amount was multiplied by about 2.6.

Banks also acted on their own account. Gulf News names Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank and Emirates NBD as lenders that ran their own deferral and fee-waiver schemes alongside the central bank's package, without giving their terms.

For scale, Gulf News sets the figures against 2020. That year, it recalls, the central bank announced a stimulus of AED 256 billion, including an AED 50 billion liquidity tool for customers seeking deferrals, and retail borrowers were given three-month deferrals at no charge. The two programmes are not built the same way, so the amounts are not like for like, but the comparison shows that deferring payments in a shock is a tool the UAE has used before.

A banking system that kept lending

The second half of the release is the health check. At the end of August 2026, compared with a year earlier, the central bank reports that banking assets were up 12.9%, total bank loans up 18.8% and deposits up 13.0%. The non-performing loan ratio, the share of loans on which borrowers have stopped paying as agreed, declined to 2.6%. The net ratio, which takes account of the provisions banks have already set aside, improved to 1.2%.

According to the release, the Governor, Khaled Mohamed Balama, told the chief executives that these indicators reflected the strength and resilience of the UAE's financial system and the effectiveness of its supervisory and prudential frameworks. Assistant governors and senior officials attended the meeting. Khaleej Times adds that participants commended the outcomes of the package and discussed progress in carrying it out.

One caution on reading the bad-loan ratio. Part of the March package, as Gulf Business reported it, allowed banks to defer the classification of certain loans held by affected customers. The October release does not say how many loans that concerns, so the ratio and the relief figures are best read together.

What it means for home buyers and brokers

For property professionals, the announcement is a reading of the climate more than a rule change. It tells them that roughly 148,700 individuals had loan payments deferred between March and the end of August 2026, and that banks, by the central bank's own count, kept growing their loan books while this happened. It does not tell them anything specific about home finance.

The nearest evidence on mortgages comes from elsewhere, and from earlier. The National reported on 17 September 2026 that mortgage rates had been broadly flat over the previous year. A mortgage broker it did not name put the lowest three-year fixed rate at 3.89%, against 3.99% a year before, and two large banks, also unnamed, gave a range of 3.99% to 4.24% on a loan of AED 1 million. The same article reported that the central bank had raised its base rate by 25 basis points that week.

The National also cited the central bank's Credit Sentiment Survey for the first quarter of 2026, in which banks' overall appetite to lend fell to minus 3.2 percentage points, with lower risk tolerance and a weaker outlook among the reasons given. It reported that employees of sectors affected by the conflict, a list that includes real estate and construction alongside aviation, hospitality and tourism, were finding credit harder to obtain. That point touches brokers twice: as people who arrange finance for clients, and as applicants themselves.

Carol Glynn, a financial consultant based in the UAE, summed up the position for The National: "Cheaper and easier are two different things, and right now they're not moving in lockstep."

A deferral is also a postponement. The payments are pushed back, and nothing in the release says the sums are forgiven. Whether a deferred payment affects a later home loan application is a question for each lender, and none of the sources answers it.

What comes next

The release sets no date for a further count and announces no new measure. What it records for the months ahead is a list of priorities. The Governor asked banks to keep accelerating innovation and digital transformation, to strengthen consumer protection and financial inclusion, and to hold to the highest standards of governance, risk management and compliance. He also thanked the chairmen and chief executives of the banks as partners in the country's economic agenda.

Three things remain unpublished as of 8 October 2026: how long the package will stay in place, how the relief divides between types of loan, and how many of the deferred loans have returned to normal repayment. Until the central bank or the banks publish those figures, the home-loan share of the AED 15.9 billion is unknown.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Agents Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for real estate professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

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