What UAE business setup actually costs

The advertised price and the payable price are two different numbers, and the gap is predictable. Meydan Free Zone publishes a headline of AED 12,500. Add the immigration card, the visa allocation, the investor visa, the in-country status change, the medical test and the Emirates ID from Meydan’s own price list, and the same company with one shareholder on one visa comes to AED 24,120. Nothing has been added that Meydan does not publish. The figure simply doubles once the company can sponsor the person who owns it.

That is the whole pattern of this market. The teaser number prices a licence and a desk. It does not price a business you can actually live and work in.

Why the headline price is not the price

The AED 5,750 figure circulating everywhere is real, and it is SHAMS’s. SHAMS publishes a Media Package from AED 5,750 and a Standard Package from AED 6,875. Both are marked “starting from”. The versions that carry visas are listed on the same page as “Media Package with Visas” and “Standard Package with Visas” with no price against either, behind a contact form. So the number you can see is, by construction, the version that sponsors nobody.

Meydan is more transparent than most and still shows the same shape. Its AED 12,500 headline is exactly AED 12,125 for the corporate licence plus AED 375 for a four-hour co-working desk. Corporate formation is genuinely AED 0 on Meydan’s published list, which is worth saying because agent blogs quote AED 9,000 for the same line. Everything that turns that registration into a residency is priced separately: visa allocation AED 1,850, immigration establishment card AED 2,000, investor or partner visa AED 4,000, change of status AED 1,500 if you are already in the country, and medical plus Emirates ID AED 2,250.

What a headline package price usually excludes

• The immigration establishment card, without which the company cannot sponsor anyone
• The visa allocation, which is separate from the visa itself
• The in-country change of status, if you are already in the UAE on another permit
• The medical fitness test and the Emirates ID
• Medical insurance, which is mandatory by law and priced by insurers, not authorities
• Refundable deposits, such as Meydan's AED 3,000 dependent-visa deposit for investor sponsors
• Attestation of any corporate shareholder's documents
• Arabic legal translation, which mainland filings effectively require

The “office” in a package is a visa quota, not a workplace

DMCC’s own Basic Biz terms define the included Special Flexi Desk as space “including one visa only, which the applicant is allowed to use for one hour per month.” The Standard Flexi Desk is limited to three visas and four hours per week. That single definition explains the entire “includes office space” convention: the desk exists to satisfy the premises rule and to carry a visa quota. If you need somewhere to sit every day, that is a separate purchase.

What one visa actually adds

RAKEZ publishes the cleanest answer available anywhere: AED 8,000. Its Instant Licence Basic is AED 6,000 a year with zero visas. Its All-Inclusive package, which bundles the licence, registration, the immigration file, one visa and medical and Emirates ID assistance, is AED 14,000. The step between them is the honest price of being able to live in the country you just registered a company in. What that permit actually is, and why the “two-year investor visa” everyone quotes is not a current federal product, is covered on the UAE investor visa page.

At AED 14,000, RAKEZ is the cheapest single-visa setup in this comparison that can be verified end to end from the authority’s own published prices. At DMCC, the same one-shareholder, one-visa company comes to about AED 40,955 on the package route and about AED 55,656 à la carte, against advertised entry points of AED 1,925 and AED 10,345.

Dubai mainland: small statutory fees, large everything else

Two mainland traps are worth pricing before you commit. A foreign or numeric trade name, which is exactly what a founder naming the company after themselves in Latin script produces, carries a AED 2,000 surcharge. And MOA notarisation is AED 300 per party only while the instrument value is at or below AED 100,000. Above that it becomes 0.5% of value capped at AED 15,000, so declaring AED 1,000,000 of share capital to look credible costs AED 5,000 in notary fees instead of AED 300.

The activity fee is where mainland budgets actually move. General trading is AED 15,000 a year at issuance and contracting AED 10,000. Most other activities are computed per activity at application, and Dubai DET publishes no consolidated schedule, so the honest instruction is to get the figure for your own licence number rather than trust a range. See mainland company formation for the sequence, and free zone company setup for what a zone licence stops you selling.

The line almost no formation quote contains: attestation

If every shareholder is a natural person, this section costs you nothing. If any shareholder is a company, it can cost more than the licence.

MoFAIC charges AED 150 per Individual Affairs document and AED 2,000 per commercial document. A corporate-shareholder incorporation typically needs four to six commercial documents legalised: the certificate of incorporation, the memorandum and articles, a board resolution approving the setup, a certificate of good standing, a certificate of incumbency or registry extract, and often a power of attorney. At AED 2,000 each that is AED 8,000 to AED 12,000 at the MoFAIC step alone, before the UAE embassy’s fees in the country of issue, before the home-country notary and apostille, before courier, and before Arabic legal translation.

Set that against a free zone licence at AED 6,000 to AED 14,000 and the arithmetic is plain: for a corporate-owned company, attestation is frequently the largest single line in the formation budget, and it appears in none of the headline figures. Commercial document attestation sets out that chain, and documents required for UAE business setup lists which of your papers fall into which fee band.

Which authorities publish real prices

Year two, and the bills that arrive after it

Renewal is not a smaller version of year one, and it moves in opposite directions depending on where you registered.

Then there is the compliance layer, which arrives whether you budgeted for it or not. Corporate tax registration is due within three months of incorporation for a company incorporated in the UAE on or after 1 March 2024, free zone companies included, under FTA Decision No. 3 of 2024. That is not three months from your financial year end, which is the version most guides print and which applies only to foreign-incorporated companies managed from the UAE. Late registration is an AED 10,000 penalty, waived automatically if you file your first return within seven months of the end of your first tax period instead of nine.

Corporate tax itself is 0% up to AED 375,000 of taxable income and 9% above it, and every taxable person files regardless of income. Small Business Relief remains available up to AED 3,000,000 of revenue and, following Ministerial Decision No. 131 of 2026, issued 29 July 2026, now runs to tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2029 rather than 2026. Expect to see the old date for a while yet: the Federal Tax Authority’s own Small Business Relief guide still says 31 December 2026 in nine separate places, because it predates the amendment. The Ministerial Decision governs. Relief must be elected in the return itself; miss the election and it cannot be claimed later. A Qualifying Free Zone Person cannot claim it at all.

VAT registration is mandatory once taxable supplies exceed AED 375,000 in the previous twelve months, or are expected to exceed it in the next thirty days, with voluntary registration from AED 187,500. Late registration is an AED 10,000 penalty, but the larger cost is that the tax authority registers you retroactively from the date you first became liable, leaving you to account for output VAT on sales you can no longer collect it on.

Audit is the last line people forget. Every mainland LLC has a statutory annual audit under Article 27(1) of the Commercial Companies Law, with no small-company exemption. Every Qualifying Free Zone Person needs audited financial statements to hold the 0% rate, regardless of revenue. “My free zone does not require an audit” is not the same statement as “I do not need an audit”.

One obligation you can strike out: Economic Substance Regulations ended for financial years ending after 31 December 2022, so a company formed today has no ESR registration, notification or report to file, ever. Any budget still carrying an annual ESR line is out of date.

Figures we will not publish

Some numbers in this market are quoted confidently and cannot be sourced, so they are not on this page. UAE embassy attestation fees are set per mission and vary by country — check your own UAE mission rather than trusting a figure. IFZA and DAFZ publish no standard package prices, so we publish none. JAFZA requires a leased facility and publishes no lease rates, which means a true JAFZA first-year total cannot be constructed from primary sources at all; the published portion comes to roughly AED 8,514 to AED 8,739 and is deliberately incomplete. Medical insurance premiums, power of attorney drafting, Dubai Chamber membership, the Dubai market fee rate, and the JAFZA per-visa bank guarantee amount are all unpublished by the bodies that set them.

For your own trade licence renewal figure, the reliable route is to look it up against your licence number on Invest in Dubai rather than accept anyone’s range, including ours.