Documents required for UAE business setup

Setting up a UAE company produces two separate piles of paper. The first is routine: passport copies, a photograph, a trade name reservation, proof of premises. The second is the one that breaks budgets. Any document issued outside the UAE that the licensing authority will rely on has to be legalised before it is accepted, and if one of your shareholders is a foreign company, that means four to six corporate documents, each carrying an AED 2,000 fee at the UAE end alone.

That second pile is the reason this page exists. Most business-setup guides list the documents. Very few price the legalisation, even though on a corporate-shareholder incorporation it is often the largest line item after the licence itself.

Which documents you need depends on the jurisdiction

Mainland, free zone and offshore registration ask for different things, so decide where you are registering before you order a single certificate. The table below is the consolidated position: what each jurisdiction asks for, and whether that document needs the full legalisation chain when it was issued abroad.

One point of vocabulary saves a lot of money here. On the mainland, u.ae asks for a “duly attested” memorandum of association and a “duly attested” service agent contract. That means domestic notarisation by a UAE notary public or the court, not foreign legalisation. DMCC puts the distinction plainly: notarisation confirms that a copy is a true and complete reproduction, while legalisation authenticates a document so a foreign legal system recognises it. Only the second one involves an embassy.

Which documents must be attested, and by whom

Only documents issued outside the UAE go through the legalisation chain. Everything produced inside the UAE is handled by a UAE notary public or the court, which is a different and far cheaper process.

For a foreign document, MoFAIC sets out three stages. The original is attested by the ministry of foreign affairs of the issuing country. It is then attested by the UAE embassy or consulate in that country. Finally, and this is the one people forget, it must be attested again inside the UAE through the MoFAIC website or the MoFAIC smart application. Embassy attestation abroad does not finish the job. In practice a local notary comes before all of this, and in apostille countries the apostille authority sits in the first stage.

An apostille is not the finish line

The UAE is not a party to the Hague Apostille Convention. It does not appear on the HCCH status table for the 1961 Convention, checked on 23 August 2026, while Oman, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia do. So an apostille alone is never enough for a document used in the UAE.

That does not make the apostille useless. In apostille countries it is usually the home-country authentication step, after which the UAE embassy attests. DMCC describes exactly this for the UK: an apostille stamp from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, then consular attestation by the UAE Embassy in London. The apostille is the beginning of the chain, not the end of it.

How much does the legalisation actually cost?

MoFAIC charges AED 150 per individual affairs document and AED 2,000 per commercial document. That single price gap is the whole story of this page.

A degree certificate, a birth certificate, a marriage certificate and a police clearance certificate are individual affairs documents at AED 150. A certificate of incorporation, a memorandum of association, a board resolution, a certificate of good standing and a certificate of incumbency are company documents, and they sit in the AED 2,000 band.

Now do the arithmetic. RAK ICC’s published incorporation checklist for corporate shareholders asks for a certified certificate of incorporation, the memorandum and articles, 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. Strip out the passport copy and the UBO declaration and you are left with five documents needing full legalisation, plus a power of attorney if the founder cannot attend.

Four documents at AED 2,000 is AED 8,000. Six is AED 12,000. That is the MoFAIC step alone. It is before the UAE embassy’s own fee abroad, before the home-country notary and apostille or foreign-ministry fee, before courier, and before Arabic legal translation. Put that number next to the licence package price you were quoted and against the rest of what a UAE setup costs; on cheap free zone packages the legalisation bill can be the larger of the two, and no package price includes it.

MoFAIC’s own courier inside the UAE is cheap by comparison: AED 40 on the 3-working-day service for up to 25 documents per transaction, or AED 150 excluding VAT for 1-working-day express, up to 10 documents. Prepaid corporate packages are available on request.

If you are legalising a corporate set, read commercial document attestation next. It is the companion to this page and covers the corporate chain document by document, including what to do when the parent company sits in a third country. MoFAIC attestation covers the UAE-side submission itself.

Which documents count as “commercial”?

MoFAIC does not publish a definitive line-by-line list. Its FAQ gives examples of commercial documents — contracts, agreements, minutes of meeting, trademark registrations, company closure documents — and examples of individual affairs documents, and leaves the rest to be classified at submission. A company document is commercial and a personal certificate is individual affairs, but where a document sits on the border, the classification is made by MoFAIC when you file it, not by you or your agent in advance. Anyone who tells you with certainty which band an unusual document will land in is guessing.

What the UAE embassy charges

We do not publish that number, because there is no single number to publish. UAE embassy and consulate attestation fees are set by each mission and vary by country. Check yours on the relevant mission page in the UAE missions abroad directory before you build a budget. If a provider quotes you one flat global embassy fee for any country, ask them which mission’s published tariff it comes from.

Power of attorney, and how to avoid needing one

You need a power of attorney if you cannot be in the UAE to sign. It is what lets a UAE-based agent sign the MOA at the notary, sign the lease, collect the licence or sign free zone incorporation documents for you.

A POA executed abroad runs the same chain as any foreign document: draft it, usually bilingual English and Arabic, notarise it in the home country, obtain the home-country authentication or apostille, get UAE embassy attestation, then MoFAIC attestation in the UAE, then an Arabic legal translation, and register it with a UAE notary public where the receiving authority asks for that. No single government page sets out that whole sequence for POAs; each link in it is separately sourced, so treat it as a synthesis and confirm the last step with your licensing authority.

Three ways to avoid the chain entirely are worth knowing, because none of them is in an agent’s interest to mention:

Cheaper alternatives to a legalised POA

• If you are in the UAE, execute the POA directly before a UAE notary public. There is no legalisation chain at all, which removes both the embassy fee and the AED 2,000-band MoFAIC fee.
• DMCC lets registration documents be signed in front of the assigned DMCC executive at DMCC, which removes the need to legalise the signature.
• DMCC also accepts signing in front of an approved DMCC international service provider in your own country, which is the practical answer for a founder who cannot travel.

One drafting point causes more rejections than any other. A power of attorney must expressly cover the acts the agent will perform. DMCC requires that a POA used for a resolution signing covers MOA amendment authorities specifically. A generic “general power of attorney” is routinely refused for company-formation acts. Details are on power of attorney attestation.

We do not publish a POA cost range. Notary fees are set by each emirate’s courts and no primary schedule was located.

Do you need an NOC from your current sponsor?

Sometimes, and it depends on the authority and your visa status rather than on a federal rule. The one clearly documented case is DMCC’s: to be a manager in more than one company, you need a no objection certificate from your current sponsor. Free zones issue NOC letters as a routine administrative service, which u.ae lists alongside PRO services.

The wider claims — that a mainland licence application from someone on an employment visa will be refused without an employer NOC, that changing status to an investor visa needs one, that banks ask for one — are repeated everywhere by consultancies but no federal instrument requiring them was found. Ask your licensing authority directly rather than paying anyone to obtain a letter you may not need.

Arabic legal translation is a mainland-only cost

Arabic is the language of mainland UAE government filings, the notary and the courts, so documents in another language have to be accompanied by a translation from a translator licensed by the UAE Ministry of Justice. That is a real, recurring cost per document and it applies after legalisation, not instead of it.

MoFAIC itself is looser. Its own requirement is that documents are in English or Arabic, or accompanied by an official translation. So MoFAIC will accept your English documents; it is the mainland licensing authority, the notary and the courts that force Arabic. Free zones generally operate in English, and RAK ICC’s regulations require a certified English translation, with the translator certifying before a notary that the translation is accurate and that they are competent to make it. If your document set is large and your activity works in either jurisdiction, this alone is a measurable mainland-versus-free-zone cost difference.

What you can do yourself, for the government fee alone

If every shareholder in your new company is an individual, and your activity does not need a regulated qualification, there may be no legalisation to do at all. Certified passport copies, a photograph, proof of address and a trade name reservation are filed as they are. Nobody needs to be paid to move paper you can upload yourself.

Even where attestation is needed, MoFAIC submission is a self-service process through its website or smart app at the published fee, and MoFAIC states that anyone can attest documents on your behalf — so a colleague or relative in the UAE can file for you. A single degree certificate is AED 150 plus AED 40 courier.

Where an agent genuinely earns a fee is a multi-country corporate set: documents that expire on different clocks, chains running in parallel in two or three countries, and a rejection at the last stage that means paying for every stamp again. That is a project-management problem, not a form-filling one. If your situation is the first kind, you do not need us for it.