Dubai Business Setup Cost Calculator

This tool does not predict what your setup will cost. It adds up the figures you have been quoted. Every money field below opens at zero, because there is no published Dubai tariff to prefill it from — and a calculator that greets you with a confident total is showing you somebody's price list, not the government's. If a site quotes you a firm figure for setting up in Dubai, that figure is its own commercial pricing, or an intermediary's, however it is labelled.

So take the quote in front of you, put each line in the field it belongs to, and the ledger will separate what you pay once from what you pay every year, extend the recurring part across the horizon you choose, and count how many cost lines you have left at zero. That last row is usually the most useful one on the page: a zero means the quote never mentioned the item, not that the item is free.

Exactly one amount here is prefilled, and only as an option you switch on rather than a default: the AED 10,000 a year and AED 5,000 fees set by Article 12 of Dubai's Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025, which the Department of Economy and Tourism collects from a free zone establishment that wants to operate in the mainland. We read both in the resolution itself on 17 August 2026. Nothing else on this page is our number.

Three facts make a predicted figure unsourceable, and they are worth stating before you weigh anyone's quote.

Dubai's Department of Economy and Tourism publishes no tariff. It prices per activity inside its own e-services, so there is no current issuance figure, no renewal figure and no late-renewal schedule to quote. The last gazetted Dubai schedule is Executive Council Resolution No. 13 of 2011, and it has been amended since — Executive Council Resolution No. 19 of 2021 reduced or cancelled several items. Treat it as legislative history, not as a price list. Dubai's own investment portal refused automated access when we tried to read its cost page on 17 August 2026, which we would rather say than paper over with a number.

Free zone pricing is commercial. Each zone authority sets its own, and while some publish a schedule, others publish nothing at all. Dubai Silicon Oasis is a clean example: its site sets out licence types and entity types, and no amounts, read on 17 August 2026. Every DSO price circulating online therefore came from an intermediary, not from the body that issues the licence.

Commercial pricing moves without notice. A package can be repriced, promoted or bundled at any time, and a figure published on a third-party page in 2025 tells you what somebody was selling then.

There is a fourth reason, and it is ours. Fee figures for a free zone termination were once published on this site, attributed to that zone's own guideline document. The document contains no amounts at all. Both figures were removed. That is how quickly a plausible number acquires a citation it never had — and it is exactly why the arithmetic on this page runs on your inputs and stops there.

A UAE trade licence is an annual instrument, so the cost of a company is a recurring cost with a spike at the start. Most quotes are written the other way round: they lead with the first-year total, where the one-off items sit, and go quiet about year two.

Sort every line into one of three buckets before you compare anything. One-off items — initial approval, trade name reservation, notarisation, translation, attestation, the adviser's fee — you pay once. Annual items — the licence itself, premises, the labour and immigration establishment cards, chamber membership — you pay again, and again. Deposits are neither: share capital, where the authority requires it to be paid in or evidenced, is your money in your company rather than a fee, although it is cash you still have to produce.

Dubai's mainland-access fees show how the distinction plays out in a published number. Article 12(1) of Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025 charges AED 10,000 for issuing or renewing a licence to run a branch out of a free zone — annual, both ways. Article 12(2) charges AED 5,000 for a temporary permit, and Article 7 caps that permit at six months. So continuous mainland activity on permits means paying twice in a year, and the branch licence is the cheaper route only once you have compared them on a full-year basis rather than a per-transaction one.

On renewal pricing itself, we will not model an increase and we cannot model a schedule: DET publishes neither. Ask for the year-two figure in writing at the same time as the year-one figure, and if it is refused, treat that refusal as information.

These are the items the blank-line counter in the tool is looking for. None of them is exotic; each is simply easy to omit from a headline package.

Both establishment cards. A mainland company opens a labour file with its own establishment card and, separately, a residency file with an immigration establishment card. Two cards, two authorities, two annual items — and one of the most common single-count errors in a budget.

Per-person immigration cost. Entry permit or status change, medical fitness test, Emirates ID and stamping are charged per head, and a package's visa allocation is a ceiling rather than an inclusion. Paying for three people is three times the cost of paying for one.

Tenancy registration and attestation. Premises are compulsory, and in Dubai the tenancy has to be registered before the licence issues. Where the quote says "office included", ask whether registration is included with it.

Documents from abroad. Legalisation in the country of origin, attestation in the UAE, and Arabic translation are real costs on a foreign shareholder or a foreign parent company, and they arrive as invoices from third parties.

The compliance year that starts the day you are licensed. Corporate tax registration is free of charge at the Federal Tax Authority — so any registration fee in a quote is somebody's professional fee, which is fine as long as it is labelled as one. What is not free is the work: accounting records to a standard the tax law accepts, audited financial statements where your free zone authority or the qualifying free zone regime requires them, VAT registration once taxable supplies and imports pass AED 375,000 in twelve months, and an Accredited Service Provider for electronic invoicing.

Renewal. The single most consequential omission, and the reason this tool asks for a horizon rather than a launch figure.

"Low cost business setup Dubai" has no official answer, because no authority publishes a cheapest option and each sets its own fees independently. What a low headline price usually reflects is knowable, though: a shared desk rather than an office, a small visa allocation, visa-related costs excluded, and a promotional first-year rate quoted against an unstated renewal. None of those is dishonest in itself. All of them mean the comparable number is the multi-year total, which is what the ledger above builds.

A small business setup costs less mainly because it needs less premises and fewer visas — the two largest variables — not because a cheaper licence exists for being small. Where being small does matter is afterwards: Small Business Relief lets a taxable person with revenue at or below AED 3,000,000 elect to be treated as having no taxable income, now available for tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2029 after Ministerial Decision No. 131 of 2026 extended it. It is elective, it is lost permanently once the threshold is exceeded, and it is closed to a qualifying free zone person.

Dubai mainland versus a free zone on cost comes down to the same two variables plus one structural difference: a mainland licence requires premises with a registered tenancy, while a free zone will sell you a facility from a shared desk upwards. That is why free zone headline prices start lower, and why the comparison only becomes real once mainland market access is priced in — for a free zone establishment that is the AED 10,000 branch licence or the AED 5,000 six-month permit in Article 12.

Dubai Silicon Oasis is a free zone, and its authority publishes licence types and entity types without amounts, read on 17 August 2026. We will not publish a DSO setup figure, because there is no DSO-published figure to cite. Request its current schedule from the authority in writing, and treat any number you already hold as an intermediary's.

Stated plainly, because a refusal you can see is worth more than a figure you cannot check:

• DET's current licence issuance fee, renewal fee and late-renewal fine. No published schedule exists; DET prices per activity inside its e-services. The widely repeated "AED 200 per month" late fine is item 6 of Schedule 2 to Executive Council Resolution No. 13 of 2011, read at source: a 2011 basis and no current one, which is why this tool does not model it.
• Any free zone package price, including Dubai Silicon Oasis, unless that zone publishes it. We do not repeat intermediaries' figures.
• A "typical" or "average" Dubai setup cost. We hold no survey of quoted prices, and inventing a range would be inventing a tariff.
• Notarisation, translation, attestation and legalisation amounts, which are charged by notaries, translators, embassies and courier services rather than by the licensing authority.
• Federal branch and foreign-company registration amounts. Cabinet Decision No. 20 of 2020 on Ministry of Economy service fees does set them, and the Ministry publishes the resolution — but the fee table is inside the attached document rather than on the page, so we cite the instrument and leave you to read the figures in it.
• Our own professional fees. No rates are published anywhere on this site.

What we will do instead is tell you where the schedule lives. Ask the licensing authority for its own current fees in writing, insist that a quote separates government charges from professional ones line by line, and ask for the renewal figure in the same document as the launch figure. A quote that survives those three questions is one you can actually compare.