Commercial document attestation for the UAE

A commercial document is any company paper: a certificate of incorporation, a memorandum or articles of association, a board resolution, a certificate of good standing, a commercial licence, a trademark registration. To use one in the UAE it has to be legalised in the country that issued it and then attested again by MoFAIC here. MoFAIC charges AED 2,000 for that, per document. A degree certificate, a birth certificate or a marriage contract at the same counter costs AED 150.

That gap of AED 1,850 is the entire subject of this page. It is published, it is not negotiable, and almost nobody spells out what it means for a company formation until the invoice arrives.

If you are here because a shareholder in your new UAE company is a foreign company, read documents required for UAE business setup alongside this page. That one lists everything the licensing authority asks for and which parts of it need legalising. This one is the money and the mechanics of the legalising itself.

How much does MoFAIC charge for a commercial document?

MoFAIC charges AED 2,000 per commercial document and AED 150 per individual affairs document. Both figures come from MoFAIC’s own published fee tables, checked on 23 August 2026.

Then three rules multiply it.

The memorandum and the articles of association are two documents. UAE missions state it in the same words on every digital-attestation page: memorandum and articles of association must be attested separately. A company that keeps them as one bound booklet still pays twice. That pair alone is AED 4,000.

A long agreement can be more than one document. MoFAIC’s own wording is that commercial contracts or agreements may be considered as multiple documents based on their content. The UAE Embassy in New Delhi is blunter: the fee for commercial documents depends on the matter and the content, and applicants are told to present the documents at the counter to find out what they will pay. There is no way to price a complex agreement in advance from a published table.

A power of attorney crosses the line the moment it mentions company business. Every mission page carries the sentence: a power of attorney containing commercial content is considered a commercial document. The same sheet of paper is AED 150 or AED 2,000 depending on what it authorises, and power of attorney attestation sets out the drafting and notarisation rules that decide which.

The arithmetic on a corporate-shareholder incorporation

RAK ICC’s published incorporation checklist for corporate shareholders asks for a certified certificate of incorporation, the memorandum and articles of association, a current certificate of incumbency or registry extract, a current certificate of good standing, a certified passport copy of the authorised signatory, the names of shareholders and ultimate beneficial owners, and a corporate resolution approving the incorporation. DMCC’s rules for a free zone company are the same in substance: board resolutions from a parent company must be notarised and legalised, and so must the certificate of incumbency and the registry extract.

Strip out the passport copy and the beneficial-ownership declaration, which are not legalised documents, and a typical set is four to six commercial documents. At AED 2,000 each that is AED 8,000 to AED 12,000 at the MoFAIC step alone — before the UAE embassy’s own fee abroad, before the home-country notary, chamber of commerce and foreign ministry fees, before courier, and before Arabic legal translation.

For scale: SHAMS publishes a free zone media package starting from AED 5,750. A corporate-shareholder legalisation bill can be twice that. The licence quote you were given almost certainly excludes it.

Which documents count as commercial?

MoFAIC’s commercial fee table names articles of association, certificates of good standing, decisions of the board of directors and meeting minutes, commercial agencies, commercial licences, company set-up contracts, commercial registry extracts, financial statements, free sale certificates, ISO certificates, patent registrations, price lists, trademark and brand documents, partner entry and withdrawal documents, company closure documents and end-user certificates.

What MoFAIC does not publish is a definitive line-by-line list of every possibility. Its tables are examples, and a borderline document is classified by MoFAIC at submission, not by you and not by your agent in advance. Anyone who tells you with certainty which band an unusual document will land in is guessing, and the guess is worth AED 1,850.

Two useful boundary cases. An employment contract and a work experience certificate are individual affairs documents at AED 150, even though a company issues them. A power of attorney is whichever the content makes it.

The chain, and why an apostille is not the end of it

The UAE is not a contracting party to the Hague Apostille Convention. It does not appear on the HCCH status table for the 1961 Convention, and India’s own Ministry of External Affairs lists the UAE among the countries that are not members. So an apostille on a corporate document has no standing in the UAE on its own.

That does not make the apostille useless. In countries that are Hague members, the apostille is frequently the correct home-country output, and the UAE embassy stamps on top of it. It is insufficient, not invalid.

The four stages are set out in the timeline above. One recent change is worth knowing because most guides have not caught up with it: in India, Pakistan, Egypt and the UK, the UAE embassy step and the MoFAIC step are now a single application. The mission pages describe it as “one service, two attestations”, and publish about 2 to 3 business days for the pair. The home-country foreign ministry step is still separate and still yours to arrange.

We do not publish the UAE embassy’s own attestation fee anywhere on this site. It is set by each mission and varies by country. Check yours through the UAE missions abroad directory. The Embassy in London states that its fees are charged in dirhams, revised monthly and converted at the prevailing exchange rate, plus a transaction surcharge of AED 3 and 2 per cent — which is why a fixed figure in pounds, rupees or pesos quoted by a service provider deserves a question about where it came from.

How the home-country stage differs by country

The document facet is fixed on this page, so the variation to watch is where the document was issued. Commercial documents diverge from personal ones early: the pre-authentication is usually a chamber of commerce rather than a court or a magistrate.

A rejection is expensive in time rather than in fee. MoFAIC refunds the attestation fee automatically, normally within 14 working days, but delivery and service fees are not refunded, and a rejected application cannot be amended or reopened. You start a new one.

Arabic translation comes after attestation, not before

MoFAIC accepts documents in English or Arabic, or with an official translation, so an English corporate document travels the whole chain as it is. Arabic becomes necessary at the point of use: mainland licensing, the notary public, the courts, the land department and most government filings expect an Arabic version produced by a translator licensed by the UAE Ministry of Justice. The ministry runs that registration regime itself, so the licence attaches to a named translator.

Translate last. If you translate before the chain, none of the stamps added afterwards appear in the Arabic version, and the translation has to be redone. Free zones and offshore registrars generally work in English — RAK ICC’s own regulations require a certified English translation rather than an Arabic one — so this is largely a mainland cost.

Three ways to pay less than the full bill

None of these is in a service provider’s interest to volunteer.

Before you pay AED 2,000 six times

• Confirm the exact list with the licensing authority, registrar or bank first. Every document you legalise speculatively is AED 2,000 plus an embassy fee plus courier, spent on paper nobody asked for.
• Ask whether the registry extract can replace the certificate of incumbency. DMCC states that where the authorised signatory already appears on the registry extract, a separate certificate of incumbency is no longer required — that is one whole commercial document removed from the set.
• Sign in the UAE if you can. A power of attorney executed in front of a UAE notary public has no legalisation chain at all, which removes both the embassy fee and the AED 2,000 band. DMCC also allows registration documents to be signed in front of its own executive, or in front of an approved DMCC international service provider in your country.

And the honest limit of what an agent is for. The MoFAIC submission itself is a self-service process through the MoFAIC website or smart app with UAE PASS, at the published fee, and MoFAIC states that anyone can attest documents on your behalf — no power of attorney is needed just to file. If you have one clean document and someone in the UAE who can submit it, you do not need to pay a margin on the AED 2,000.

Where a fee is genuinely earned is the multi-country corporate set: several registries on different clocks, chains running in parallel, certificates that expire mid-process, and a rejection at the last stage that means paying for every stamp again. That is project management, not form filling. Put the number from the table above next to what UAE business setup costs and what attestation costs, and decide which of the two problems you actually have.