Sitting ACCA Exams in the UAE

ACCA publishes a country-by-country table of how its exams may be taken, and the United Arab Emirates appears in it twice — once for on-demand exams and once for session exams — with the same entry against both: exams are taken in centres. There is no UAE row offering remote invigilation, and ACCA states on the same page that it has withdrawn remote exams in countries where it has exam centre provision. Read 21 August 2026.

That sentence answers more searches than it looks. "ACCA exam in UAE" resolves to a physical booking at a centre, so the practical questions are which centre, what it charges and when it has seats — not whether you can sit the paper at home. It is also why exam-centre listings, rather than ACCA fee pages, are where the first three papers get priced.

ACCA maintains its own directory of on-demand computer-based exam centres, which is the only list worth using. A tuition provider that also happens to be a centre is not the same thing as an approved centre, and the directory is the check.

ACCA publishes a global fees and charges schedule in pounds sterling. The 2026 schedule was read on 21 August 2026 and the figures below are taken from it verbatim. Two things about it matter more than the individual numbers.

First, Applied Knowledge exams are not priced by ACCA at all. The schedule states that those fees are set by individual computer-based exam centres. That is the real reason no ACCA-published UAE fee exists for the first three papers, and it is why any page quoting you a single all-in dirham figure for "the ACCA exam fee in UAE" is quoting a provider's price list, not the awarding body's.

Second, the fees are published in sterling and paid to ACCA in sterling. A dirham total therefore depends on the rate on the day you pay, and this page prints no conversion for the same reason it prints no salary conversion: it would be wrong within a week.

If a prior degree earns you exemptions, you still pay for them: £86 for each Applied Knowledge exam exempted and £114 for each Applied Skills exam exempted, per the 2026 schedule. Exemptions from papers FA1, FA2, MA1 and MA2 are free. Exemptions are never granted at Strategic Professional level.

Whether your degree qualifies is not a judgement call and not something a tuition provider should be answering for you. ACCA runs a public exemptions calculator, and its institution list returns 49 United Arab Emirates institutions, from federal universities to private colleges, read on 17 August 2026. The question to ask a college is not whether it "teaches ACCA" but which of its programmes carried accreditation in your graduation year — the calculator answers that directly, and a bad answer costs you either an unnecessary fee or an unnecessary exam.

One of the searches this page owns is whether ACCA exams have been cancelled in the UAE. We can state what is verifiable and will not guess at the rest.

What is verifiable, read on 21 August 2026, is that ACCA's exam availability table lists the United Arab Emirates as a live centre-exam country for both on-demand and session exams. Nothing on that page announces a country-level suspension.

What is not verifiable from this desk is the status of any individual centre on any given date. Centres close, relocate, lose seats to demand and are affected by local conditions, and ACCA does not publish a historical log of those events. A cancellation you have heard about is far more likely to have been one centre on one date than the country. The only reliable check is your own MyACCA account and the centre you booked with, in that order — and if a sitting is affected, ACCA's own exam administration pages, not a forum post, are where any rebooking or refund position will be stated.

This page will not publish a claim that exams were or were not cancelled on a particular date, because no primary source we could open records it.

"ACCA UAE fellowship exam" is a real search and it conflates two things. ACCA's own fellowship — FCCA — has no exam at all: ACCA awards it after five consecutive years of membership with CPD compliance, automatically, without an application.

The exam people are usually thinking of belongs to the UAE state system. Ministerial Resolution No. (111-2) of 2022 approved the Emirates Fellowship programme run by the Emirates Association for Accountants and Auditors, and its Programme Guidelines set three exams of 70 questions each with a 60 per cent pass mark, held in six sessions a year, one every two months. Holders of an ACCA professional certificate are exempt from the first and second exams only — reporting and auditing — and never from the third, UAE Tax and Regulation.

That structure is the practical reason the two get confused: the Fellowship exams are delivered on ACCA's own platform, so an ACCA member ends up registering with ACCA and paying ACCA to sit a UAE state-mandated paper. It is still not an ACCA qualification, and passing it is a step towards registration in the Ministry of Economy and Tourism's practising auditors register rather than towards anything ACCA awards.

One correction is worth carrying here, because it is still repeated across this market: Ministerial Resolution No. 805 of 2018 is repealed. Article 2 of Ministerial Resolution No. (111-2) of 2022 repeals it by name. Any page still citing 805 as the live authority for accredited bodies is citing a dead instrument.

No centre is named, ranked or recommended here, and no dirham exam price is published. Centres set their own Applied Knowledge fees, those fees change, and this site holds no verified list of them. Ask the centre directly and get the figure in writing before you pay.

No pass rate is published here for any UAE centre or provider, because ACCA publishes pass rates by exam globally rather than by country or by tuition provider, and a provider-level figure would be a marketing claim rather than data.

Every ACCA figure on this page was read from ACCA's own 2026 fees schedule and exam availability table on 21 August 2026. The Fellowship figures were read in the primary text of Ministerial Resolution No. (111-2) of 2022 on 17 August 2026. Fees change annually; check the schedule for the year you are entering before you budget.