Financial Statements in the UAE: What a Set Contains, Who Signs It, and Where It Is Published

Two instruments answer this, and they answer it at different levels of detail.

The Commercial Companies Law sets the floor. Article 27(2) of Federal Decree-Law No. 32 of 2021 requires every company to prepare annual financial accounts including the balance sheet and the profit and loss account. For a public joint stock company Article 237(1) repeats it in the board's name: accounts for every fiscal year, including the balance sheet as at the last day of the fiscal year and a statement of the profits and losses account.

The corporate tax rules go further, and they are where the modern list lives. Article 1 of Ministerial Decision No. 114 of 2023 defines Financial Statements as a complete set of statements as specified under the accounting standards the taxable person applies, which includes, but is not limited to, the statement of income, the statement of other comprehensive income, the balance sheet, the statement of changes in equity and the cash flow statement.

That closing phrase matters more than the list. "Includes, but is not limited to" means the definition does not cap what a set contains — the accounting standard does. Notes, accounting policies and comparatives are part of a set under IFRS even though no UAE instrument enumerates them.

The reason no UAE format exists is structural: the country adopted an international standard instead of writing one. Article 27(3) of the Commercial Companies Law requires companies to apply International Accounting Standards and Practices when preparing periodical and annual accounts, and Article 239 repeats the same rule for joint stock companies. Article 4(1) of Ministerial Decision No. 114 of 2023 then names the standard for corporate tax purposes: IFRS. Article 4(2) permits IFRS for SMEs where revenue does not exceed AED 50,000,000, and Article 2 permits the cash basis where revenue does not exceed AED 3,000,000, or on application to the Federal Tax Authority in exceptional circumstances.

There is no UAE GAAP. Ministerial Decision No. 114 of 2023 names IFRS and IFRS for SMEs and nothing else.

This is the part of the question "when is an annual financial statement required in the UAE?" that actually has dates attached, and the Commercial Companies Law gives them.

The clock starts with the fiscal year itself. Under Article 28, a company's first fiscal year may not exceed 18 months and may not be less than 6 months, running from the date of entry in the Commercial Register; every subsequent fiscal year is a consecutive 12-month period. So a company incorporated in September may legitimately have a first set of statements covering 16 months — and that period, not the calendar year, is what everything downstream keys off.

From there the two common company forms run on parallel tracks.

The phrase consolidated financial statements is used in the UAE for two exercises that produce different documents under different rules.

Group accounts in the ordinary sense. A parent preparing accounts under IFRS consolidates its subsidiaries in the way the standard requires. The Commercial Companies Law assumes this exists: Article 27(4) entitles a partner or shareholder to a copy of the group's accounts where the company is a holding company, and Article 338 requires a foreign company's UAE branch to hand the authorities a copy of the final accounts of its holding company where there is one.

A corporate tax group. Article 42(11) of Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 requires a tax group to prepare consolidated financial statements in accordance with accounting standards applied in the State. Article 3 of Ministerial Decision No. 114 of 2023 then defines what that reference means: preparing standalone financial statements on the basis of aggregating the standalone statements of the parent company and each subsidiary in the group, eliminating the transactions between them as Article 42(1) requires.

Aggregation with elimination is not IFRS consolidation. There is no acquisition accounting in it, no goodwill arising on the aggregation, and no non-controlling interest presentation — it is a sum of standalone statements with intra-group transactions removed. A group that files its ordinary IFRS consolidated accounts as if they were the tax group's statements has filed the wrong document.

A large share of the searches that land on this phrase name a specific business: a bank, a listed developer, a telecoms operator, a supermarket chain. The honest answer is that the UAE has no public register of company accounts. There is no federal equivalent of a filing portal where anyone can download any company's statements. What exists is a narrow set of routes, and which one applies depends entirely on the legal form of the entity.

Public joint stock companies publish. Article 240 requires the annual financial statements of a joint stock company to be published in accordance with the controls set by the Securities and Commodities Authority, with a copy deposited with the Authority and the local competent authority. That is why the accounts of a listed UAE company are on its investor relations pages and on the market's disclosure feed, and why a private company's are not. The controls themselves are the Authority's to set; we are not going to summarise a timetable for interim or quarterly reporting that we have not read in the Authority's own text.

Limited liability companies do not publish. No provision of the Commercial Companies Law requires an LLC to publish or deposit its statements. Article 27(4) is the route instead: any partner or shareholder may, on a written request, obtain a free copy of the last audited accounts and of the last auditor's report — plus the group accounts if the company is a holding company — and the company must respond within 10 days. That right belongs to owners, not to customers, journalists or competitors.

A branch of a foreign company files, but does not publish. Under Article 338, a foreign company or its branch — other than a representative office — must have an independent balance sheet and an independent profit and loss account, must have an auditor registered in the UAE roll of practising auditors, and must supply the local competent authority and the Ministry annually with the balance sheet, the final accounts, the auditor's report and the final accounts of its holding company. So a UAE branch of an overseas bank does produce UAE-specific accounts; they go to the regulators, not to the public.

Corporate tax did not introduce a new set of accounts. It attached consequences to the existing one.

Article 20(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 determines taxable income on the basis of adequate standalone financial statements prepared for financial reporting purposes under accounting standards accepted in the State. Article 20(2) makes taxable income the accounting income for the period, adjusted for exempt income, reliefs, deductions, related-party transactions, tax loss relief and the rest. Article 20(7) settles what happens when the two disagree: where the Decree-Law and the applicable accounting standards conflict, the Decree-Law prevails to that extent. The accounts stay as the standard requires; the adjustment is made on top of them.

Three further obligations attach to the same document. Article 43 requires all amounts to be quantified in UAE dirhams, converting other currencies at the rate set by the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates. Article 54(1) lets the Federal Tax Authority request, by notice or decision, the financial statements used to determine taxable income, in the form, manner and timeline it prescribes — whether or not an audit was ever required. Article 56 requires records supporting the return to be kept for 7 years after the end of the tax period.

When those statements must be audited is a separate question, governed by Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025 for tax periods commencing on or after 1 January 2025: revenue above AED 50,000,000, every qualifying free zone person at any revenue, and a special purpose set for a tax group. Ministerial Decision No. 82 of 2023 continues to apply to tax periods that commenced before that date.

Some of the demand behind this phrase cannot be met honestly, and saying so is more useful than a plausible answer.

A named company's numbers. We do not reproduce, summarise or confirm any specific business's revenue, profit or balance sheet, whether it is a bank, a retailer or a developer. Where the entity publishes, read its own statements; where it does not, no figure we could give you would be sourced.

A downloadable template. Explained above: presentation follows the standard, and no UAE authority issues a specimen commercial set.

What preparing or auditing a set costs. No UAE authority publishes a fee scale for preparing financial statements or for auditing them, and we do not publish a price range dressed up as one.

"Financial capital of the UAE." This one is a keyword collision — people typing it are asking which emirate is the country's financial centre, not about company accounts, and this page has nothing to tell them.

"UAE financial statements 2024" without a company name. The phrase is ambiguous between a specific company's 2024 accounts and the federal government's own reporting for that year. If it is the latter, the Ministry of Finance material is the federal entities circular described above — public-sector accounting, published in Arabic — and not a commercial reporting standard.