The Dubai Maritime Authority published a full registry snapshot on 7 September 2026, and it is worth treating as a dataset rather than a story. The headline count is 8,415 registered marine craft, held by owners from 116 countries, with British owners the largest single group. The authority also tracks more than 14,000 companies operating along the 72 km of coastline it regulates, plus a supply side of 20 marinas offering 4,214 wet berths.
The registry breaks the fleet into five categories: 3,269 motorised pleasure boats, 2,377 watersports craft, 1,064 tourism vessels, 897 commercial water sports craft and 224 marine public transport vessels. A separate count covers 87 floating restaurants (58 wooden), with a combined seated capacity of about 9,600.
What makes this useful for analysis is the ratio it exposes: 8,415 registered craft against 4,214 berths works out to roughly 2 boats per berth, a demand to supply figure that holds before any visiting yacht is counted. That number is a proxy for berth scarcity and could feed into a simple index of waterfront pressure if tracked over successive years.
The floating restaurant subset also clusters geographically, concentrated in 4 districts: Dubai Marina, Dubai Creek, Dubai Harbour and Al Jaddaf Waterfront, the same areas where berth demand is highest. If the authority keeps publishing this breakdown annually, it becomes a small but clean time series for anyone modeling Dubai's marine infrastructure capacity.
Originally published on Doment, Dubai property intelligence.
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