Property in Maldives

Not freehold. The Maldivian constitution prohibits foreign ownership of land, and the 2015 amendment that created a narrow freehold exception was repealed with effect from 23 April 2019. Foreign buyers acquire a long leasehold instead: the state grants a head lease to the resort developer (typically 50 years, extendable to a maximum of 99), and the buyer takes a registered strata sub-lease of an individual villa beneath it.

Under the Maldives Tourism Act (Law No. 2/99) and the Regulation on Long Term Strata Leasing of Villas or Rooms (Regulation No. 2023/R-154, in force 5 September 2023). The strata lease must be registered with the Ministry of Tourism, which issues a Strata Title Registry entry. The lease is tied to the unit and cannot be separated from it, and the unit cannot be further sub-leased. No Maldivian company is legally required — a foreign national can contract directly.

There is no stamp duty (the Revenue Stamp Act was repealed) and no annual property tax on a strata villa owner — the recurring land charge is tourism land rent paid by the resort as head lessee, which reaches owners indirectly through the service charge. Strata registration costs MVR 5,000. The GST/TGST treatment of the purchase price itself is genuinely unsettled and project-specific, so obtain written Maldivian tax advice before signing.

There is no separate capital-gains tax regime. The old 15% land sales tax was repealed on 1 January 2020 and gains now fall under the Income Tax Act. What actually bites on exit is the capital-gains withholding tax: a non-resident seller has 10% deducted from the GROSS sale proceeds — not from the profit — so it applies even if you sell flat or at a loss, and Maldivian anti-avoidance rules expressly catch selling the holding company instead of the property itself. The widely repeated "10% property transfer tax" is a garbled reference to this and does not exist as a transfer duty.

No. Ownership of a strata villa confers no residence right whatsoever. The government signed a partnership with Henley & Partners in July 2025 to develop a residence-by-investment programme, and a launch has been targeted since April 2026, but as of now it is not open for applications and no threshold has been officially published. Treat any advertised figure as unconfirmed.

The Maldives is the Indian Ocean's benchmark rate market: resorts traded at roughly 67% occupancy, US$558 average daily rate and US$360 RevPAR across 2025, against US$221 RevPAR in Mauritius and US$58 in Sri Lanka. However, no Maldives developer publishes a residence yield, and returns depend entirely on the operator's optional rental programme — whose revenue split, owner-night caps and blackout terms are usually not public. Ask for them in writing before you buy.

Three stand out. Around 80% of Maldivian islands sit less than a metre above sea level, so erosion, coastal protection and insurance costs bear directly on a 50-to-99-year lease. The economy is tourism-dependent — roughly 21% of GDP — and the World Bank cut 2026 growth to about 0.7% with public debt near 137% of GDP. Finally, foreign-currency access and profit repatriation depend on the rufiyaa's dollar peg holding, so confirm how your rental income will actually be paid out.

There is no evidenced answer, and we would be cautious of anyone who gives you a confident one. The Maldives publishes no residential property price index — the IMF recommended one be built and it still does not exist — and there is no meaningful resale history for branded residences in this market, so headline claims of 8–10% annual growth cannot be traced to any statistical series. Developers' own financial models routinely assume no capital appreciation at all. Underwrite on use, income and covenant, and treat capital gain as unquantified upside: a brand premium paid at purchase, a lease that shortens every year, a growing pipeline of competing branded supply, and a 10% withholding on gross sale proceeds all have to be overcome before nominal growth becomes realised gain.

The villa reverts. A strata sub-lease cannot outlive the resort's head lease from the state, so what you are really buying is the remaining term of that head lease — typically granted for 50 years and extendable to a maximum of 99. Two things follow. Ask for the head lease's actual expiry date and the precise terms of extension: who pays the extension premium, and whether the extension has already been granted or is merely permitted, because a right to apply is not a right to receive. And expect the asset to behave like a wasting one in its later decades — every year shortens the term a future buyer inherits, and there is no Maldivian equivalent of the statutory lease-extension rights a UK leaseholder enjoys. With a long term remaining this barely moves value year to year; with twenty-five years left it dominates it.

By transferring the lease with the Ministry of Tourism's clearance, not by a simple private sale. Strata villa leases are registered with the Ministry, and a transfer of those lease rights requires an application to the Ministry and its approval before it takes effect, alongside any consent the resort operator's own documents demand. Read the transfer clause before you buy, not when you want out: restrictions on who may take an assignment, operator approval or pre-emption rights and any transfer fee all narrow your exit. The commercial constraint is larger than the legal one — the buyer pool for one villa on one resort island is small and entirely international, so allow a long marketing period, and remember that the 10% withholding on gross sale proceeds applies whatever price you achieve.

Usually yes, but on the operator's terms — and those terms are the deal. A branded resort residence is normally placed in an optional rental programme run by the operator, which typically allows the owner a capped number of nights each year, often excluding peak season and subject to advance booking. None of this is fixed by statute; it lives in the rental management agreement and varies widely between resorts. Ask in writing before you sign: how many owner nights, whether they are blacked out over Christmas and New Year, whether you pay a discounted resort rate for food, beverage and seaplane transfers while in residence, how the revenue split is calculated and who sets the nightly rate. If the answers are not in the contract, they are not promises.

A service charge — and it is the single number to interrogate hardest. There is no annual property tax on a strata villa and no stamp duty, but the resort levies a service or maintenance charge covering the island's shared costs: power generation, desalinated water, staffing, coastal protection, insurance and periodic refurbishment of shared areas. Because an island imports everything by boat or seaplane and runs its own utilities, these costs are high in absolute terms and move with fuel prices. Ask how the charge is calculated, whether it is capped or indexed, who audits it, how a sinking fund for refurbishment is built, and whether it is netted from rental income or invoiced separately in dollars. A residence that generates real rental revenue can still be cash-flow negative in a weak year once the service charge is paid.