Accounting Services in the UAE: What They Cover, Who May Provide Them, and What Sets the Price

"Accounting services" is a marketing phrase, not a legal category. Behind it sit six distinct pieces of work, governed by different instruments, carrying different licensing consequences and priced on entirely different bases. Buying the wrong one is the most common and most expensive mistake in this market.

The useful question is never "do you do accounting?" It is "which of these six do you do, and under what licence?"

This changed recently and most published guidance has not caught up. Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2023 concerning the Regulation of the Accounting and Auditing Profession was issued on 28 September 2023, published in Official Gazette issue 760 on 29 September 2023, and came into force six months later under Article 40. Article 39(1) repeals Federal Law No. 12 of 2014 outright, while Article 39(2) keeps the older regulations and decisions alive until replacements are issued — which is why the Ministry's own legislation page still carries the 2022 implementing regulation for the repealed law.

Article 3 applies the Decree-Law to chartered accountants and accounting firms practising in the State, and to those in free zones wishing to practise outside the free zone. Article 4 defines the scope of the profession narrowly: auditing and reviewing financial information and statements, plus other assurance and related services within the professional standards adopted by the Ministry. Article 6(1) then forbids any natural or juristic person from practising the profession, or rendering any of its services, without the licence.

Read together, those articles draw the line this page keeps returning to. Assurance work is licensed. Keeping books, preparing statements and filing returns is not — those need a trade licence for the activity and nothing else from the Ministry of Economy.

We do not publish a monthly price, an hourly rate or a price range for accounting or bookkeeping work, and we will not reproduce one from elsewhere. No UAE authority sets, publishes or regulates a fee scale for these services. The Ministry of Economy and Tourism publishes fees for its own registrations; the Federal Tax Authority publishes fees for its own services; neither publishes a tariff for what a firm may charge you. Every "AED X per month" figure in circulation is one firm's own price list or a lead-generation page's estimate, and repeating it here would give a commercial number the appearance of a regulated one.

The same refusal answers the mirror-image search. If you are the one quoting, there is no published UAE benchmark rate to anchor to, and we are not going to invent a recommended rate card. What can be stated honestly is which variables move the fee, because those are structural.

Outsourced accounting, offshored accounting and finance BPO describe the same commercial arrangement at different scales: an external team runs some or all of the finance function instead of employees. Nothing in UAE law recognises it as a status. There is no "outsourced accounting licence", no registration for it, and no reduction in what the company owes.

That is the whole point of the checks below. Under Article 26 of the Commercial Companies Law the accounting registers are the company's and must sit at its head office for at least five years. Under Article 56 of the Corporate Tax Law the seven-year retention duty is the taxable person's. A provider's failure is your default.

One obligation does sit on the provider, and it is longer than most clients expect: Article 19(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2023 requires an accounting firm to keep the data and documents of contracted work — collected, created, processed or maintained — for at least ten years from the date the report was issued to the client, running instead from the date of final judgment where the matter is in litigation. Article 19(2) puts that duty on the partners personally if the firm's licence is cancelled or struck off.

Two searches deserve a direct answer here rather than a redirect.

Does Dubai have separate accounting standards? No. Accounting standards in the UAE are federal. No emirate, including Dubai, issues its own general accounting framework for commercial companies, and there is no "UAE GAAP" — Ministerial Decision No. 114 of 2023 names IFRS and IFRS for SMEs and nothing else. What differs between emirates and free zones is licensing and the authority you file the licence with, not the basis of preparation.

What about IAS? The Commercial Companies Law uses the older phrasing. Article 27(3) requires every company to apply "the International Accounting Standards and Practices" when preparing its periodical and annual accounts so as to give a clear and accurate idea of its profits and losses, and Article 239 repeats it for public joint stock companies. For corporate tax the naming is current and specific: Article 4(1) of Ministerial Decision No. 114 of 2023 requires IFRS, and Article 4(2) permits IFRS for SMEs where revenue does not exceed AED 50,000,000. A provider that cannot tell you which of the two it applies to your accounts, and on what revenue figure it concluded that, is inheriting the answer from a software template.

Sector-specific accounting demand in the UAE is real but it is rarely about a different standard. It is about which records the ledger has to capture, and that is set by the tax legislation rather than by the industry.

Searches for accounting courses in Dubai and the UAE return a market of commercial training that is almost entirely unregulated, mixed with a small number of programmes that actually change what you are permitted to do. The distinction is worth knowing before paying for either.

Academic programmes are accredited, and you can check. The Commission for Academic Accreditation, part of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, publishes a free searchable directory of accredited programmes by institution. A degree from a UAE institution that is not in that directory is not an accredited UAE qualification, whatever the prospectus says.

Some course hours have a direct licensing effect. The Ministry of Economy and Tourism's auditor registration route requires a bachelor's degree in accounting, or a degree in another specialisation plus at least fifteen credit hours in accounting courses approved by the Ministry, alongside a valid fellowship certificate from the Emirates Association of Accountants and Auditors. Those are the accounting course hours with a defined consequence attached.

Tax agents have a continuing obligation rather than an entry course. Under FTA Decision No. 15 of 2023, a natural person tax agent must complete 20 hours of structured continuing professional development each year, rising to 30 hours where the agent is listed for both corporate tax and indirect taxes.

A large share of searches in this space are attempts to find one specific company, look at its premises, read its reviews or find out whether it is open now. Being straight about those is more useful than pretending.

Searches naming a particular Dubai firm — and there are many, in the form of a brand name followed by "accounting services" or "accounting services LLC" — are brand searches for businesses we have no verified basis to describe, endorse, compare or rank. We publish no photographs of any firm's premises, no star ratings, no review counts, no client list and no opening hours, and this site publishes no office address or telephone number of its own, so "open now", "near me" and appointment-booking queries cannot be answered here honestly. Online appointment booking, where it exists, is a feature of an individual firm's own website; there is no central UAE portal for booking an accountant. For dealings with the Federal Tax Authority itself the channels are EmaraTax and the Authority's own published contact details.

Rankings are the same problem in a different costume. "Best", "top 10" and "top rated" lists are published without a disclosed methodology and change with the publisher, so we do not publish another one. What we can do is point at the four registers that answer the underlying question for free.