The CPA Exam in the UAE

The search "cpa board exam in uae" carries an assumption worth correcting immediately: the UAE does not set, administer or award a CPA qualification. The Uniform CPA Examination is a United States examination, developed by the AICPA and administered internationally through NASBA. The UAE is a place where it can be sat, not a jurisdiction that grants it.

What the UAE does set is a different examination entirely. Under Ministerial Resolution No. (111-2) of 2022, the Emirates Fellowship programme runs three papers of 70 questions each, with a 60% pass mark, in six sessions a year. Passing that programme leads to the Accredited Chartered Auditor Certificate and Fellow Member status - the UAE-recognised route toward the practising auditors register. It is not a CPA, and a CPA is not it.

The two intersect at exactly one point. Ministerial Resolution No. (111-2) of 2022 names the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants among six foreign bodies whose members are exempted from the first and second Fellowship papers. The third paper, covering UAE tax and regulation, is never exempted for anybody.

The exam has been in its current shape since the 2024 core-plus-discipline restructure. Read at aicpa-cima.com on 21 August 2026, it comprises three four-hour core sections and one four-hour discipline section of your choice. You must score a minimum of 75 on each section.

The core sections are Auditing and Attestation (AUD), Financial Accounting and Reporting (FAR), and Taxation and Regulation (REG). The discipline is one of Business Analysis and Reporting (BAR), Information Systems and Control (ISC), or Tax Compliance and Planning (TCP). The discipline you pick does not restrict what you may later practise; it is a depth choice, not a specialism licence.

NASBA names the United Arab Emirates as an approved international testing location, and appointments are booked through Prometric, the test-delivery provider, once your registration is complete. That much is sourced from NASBA's own page.

We publish no list of UAE test-centre addresses. Checked on 21 August 2026, prometric.com returned HTTP 403 to us on every path we tried, including the test-taker search, so the current centre list could not be read at source. Centre availability also changes without notice and a published address that closes becomes an actively harmful instruction. Use the Prometric scheduler with your Notice to Schedule in hand, which shows live availability rather than a snapshot.

The one thing worth planning around is that international seat availability is thinner than domestic US availability, particularly near quarter ends. Schedule as soon as your registration clears the 24-hour wait rather than close to the date you want.

There is no single CPA exam price for the UAE, and any page that prints one is guessing at the largest component. The cost separates into three layers, and only one of them is published centrally.

The international administration fee is published and fixed: USD 390.00 per exam section for candidates testing in the UAE, read at nasba.org on 21 August 2026. If you sat the same section in India it would be USD 460.00 - a difference worth knowing if you are choosing between testing here and testing on a trip home.

The application and per-section examination fees are set by your chosen US state board. More than fifty boards each publish their own schedule, and neither NASBA nor the AICPA publishes a consolidated table. That is not an omission we can work around: the number genuinely depends on a jurisdiction you have not chosen yet.

Everything after the exam is separate again - licensure application fees, an ethics examination in most jurisdictions, and annual renewal. Those are board-set too.

The sequence trips people up because the US board, NASBA and Prometric each own a different stage, and you cannot skip forward.

Passing all four sections, and even holding the resulting US licence, changes nothing about what you may sign in the Emirates.

No audit signature. Under Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2023 the audit of financial statements is reserved to a Chartered Accountant licensed by the Ministry of Economy and Tourism. The route to that licence runs through the practising auditors register, with five years of post-qualification experience, one to three of them inside the UAE for non-nationals, and a registration cost of AED 100 plus AED 4,500 for three years.

No tax agent listing. Acting before the Federal Tax Authority on a taxpayer's behalf requires listing on the FTA's tax agent register, which has its own qualification, fee and continuing-development conditions.

Two of three Fellowship exams, and no more. The AICPA listing in Ministerial Resolution No. (111-2) of 2022 exempts holders from the first and second Emirates Fellowship papers only. Where the exam genuinely pays is in the labour market rather than the register: it is the cleanest available evidence of US GAAP fluency, which is what US-reporting groups in the UAE are actually buying.