EmaraTax & FTA Portal
Is EmaraTax Down? How to Check, and What It Does to Your Deadline
The FTA runs no EmaraTax status page. How to tell a real outage from a session or address problem, and what an outage does not do to your filing deadline.
emaratax down
The Federal Tax Authority publishes no EmaraTax status page. Its Emergency Notifications page, the closest thing to one, read "No information available" and was stamped last updated 6 December 2021 when we checked it on 21 August 2026. So before assuming an outage, confirm you are on eservices.tax.gov.ae, clear the session, and try a second network. An outage does not, by itself, extend a filing deadline.
Basis: Federal Tax Authority
- Official EmaraTax address
- eservices.tax.gov.ae — the only one
- FTA status page
- None published; Emergency Notifications was empty and stamped 6 December 2021 when read on 21 August 2026
- If the last day of a deadline is not a Business Day
- The period runs to the next Business Day — a calendar rule, not an outage rule
- FTA call centre
- 800 82923, Monday to Saturday 07:30-22:00, published 8-minute answer standard
Federal Tax Authority, EmaraTax microsite
Federal Tax Authority, Emergency notifications and service interruptions
Article 49(2), Federal Decree-Law No. 28 of 2022 on Tax Procedures
Federal Tax Authority, Contact Us, read 21 August 2026
#First, check you are at the right address
Most reports that begin "the site is down" turn out to be a person at the wrong address, and the FTA's own estate makes that easy to do. There are three live surfaces with similar names, and only one of them is the tax portal.
eservices.tax.gov.ae is EmaraTax. It is the only sign-in address the FTA publishes for registrations, returns and payments, and the Authority states it has not changed. tax.gov.ae is the FTA's public website — legislation, guides, service cards, news. It is a different system, and it can be perfectly healthy while the portal is not, or the reverse.
The third one causes real damage. tax.gov.ae/en/user/login.aspx is a genuine, live FTA login page with a UAE Pass button and an OTP box, and it is not EmaraTax — it signs you into a website account. A reader can log in there successfully, see no tax account at all, and conclude the portal has lost their registrations.
Guessing an FTA URL is worse than useless
Pages that do not exist on tax.gov.ae do not always return a clean 404. Several return a full HTML page with a normal status code — a soft 404 — so a mistyped address looks like a working page with nothing on it. If you arrived from a bookmark, a search result or an email, retype eservices.tax.gov.ae by hand before drawing any conclusion.
Be equally careful with lookalike domains. There is no emaratax.ae, no app store listing outside the FTA's own, and nobody legitimate will offer to log in on your behalf.
#The FTA does not publish a status page, and the page that looks like one is stale
There is no official uptime dashboard for EmaraTax. The nearest thing the Authority operates is its Emergency notifications and service interruptions page. Read on 21 August 2026, it displayed "No information available" in the notifications area and carried a page-last-updated stamp of Monday, 6 December 2021.
That matters in both directions. An empty notifications page is not evidence that the portal is healthy — nothing has been posted there for years. And its silence during a real interruption is not a contradiction; the channel simply is not being used as a live feed.
In practice, the FTA's time-critical notices appear in the Announcements panel on its homepage and on the social accounts it links from its own footer — Instagram and X as @uaetax, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. Those are the Authority's own published accounts, so they are safe to watch. What we will not tell you is that planned maintenance is reliably announced there in advance, because the FTA publishes no service-notification commitment we could read.
| Channel | What it is | What it will not do |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency notifications page | The FTA's designated interruption notice board | Showed "No information available", stamped 6 December 2021 |
| Announcements panel, tax.gov.ae homepage | Where deadline and service notices actually appear | Not a real-time status feed |
| FTA social accounts (@uaetax and the others in its footer) | The Authority's own published channels | No published commitment to post outages |
| Third-party outage-report sites | Crowd-sourced clicks on the word "down" | No connection to the FTA; a spike is a signal, never a source |
| FTA call centre, 800 82923 | A human who can see whether the incident is known | Not open 24 hours |
#Telling a genuine outage apart from a session, browser or account problem
EmaraTax is a single-page application, which is why it fails in ways that look dramatic and are not. A half-loaded screen, a spinner that never resolves, a button that does nothing and a silent logout are all far more often local than national. Work through this before you escalate — it takes about five minutes and it is what the call centre will ask you anyway.
Retype the address by hand
Go to eservices.tax.gov.ae directly rather than through a bookmark or a search result, so you are not testing a stale redirect or a lookalike domain.
Kill the session, not just the tab
Sign out if you can, close every EmaraTax tab, then clear cookies and site data for the domain. A stale session token is the single most common cause of a screen that loads but refuses to do anything.
Change one variable at a time
Try a private window, then a different browser, then a different device. If it works anywhere, it is not an outage.
Change network
Switch from office wi-fi to mobile data or the reverse. Corporate proxies, VPNs and content filters break the portal's scripted calls while leaving the homepage looking fine.
Separate the login from the portal
If UAE Pass itself is failing, that is a different national service and the fix is not with the FTA. Try signing in with your registered email and password instead, if that account has one set.
Ask whether the incident is known
Call 800 82923 during published hours, or use the online contact form. Note the date, time and any Service Request Number you are given.
The failures that look like an outage but are documented behaviour
Some of the most alarming symptoms are things the FTA has written down. Linking UAE Pass to an EmaraTax account whose registered email does not match logs you straight out and returns you to the sign-in screen — by design, not because the portal fell over. A one-time password lasts five minutes and allows only two resends before the whole process restarts, so a slow inbox reads as a broken system. And the FTA publishes no session-timeout value, no lockout threshold and no self-service unlock, so a sudden refusal to accept correct credentials is not something you can diagnose from the outside.
We are not going to tell you what the timeout is. No number for it is published anywhere primary, and inventing one would be worse than saying so.
#What an outage does, and does not do, to a filing deadline
This is the question behind most panicked searches, and the honest answer is uncomfortable: we could find no provision that extends a tax deadline because the portal was unavailable.
The Tax Procedures Law does contain calendar rules. Article 49(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 28 of 2022 excludes the day of the triggering event from the count; Article 49(2) provides that where the last day of a period is not a Business Day, the period runs to the next Business Day; Article 49(3) fixes the Gregorian calendar. Article 1 defines a Business Day as any day except weekends and official Federal Government holidays. Those are holiday and weekend rules. None of them is triggered by a system failure, and a day on which EmaraTax is unreachable is still a Business Day.
The statutory power to extend a deadline that we have read sits in the objections and appeals chapter, at Article 35, and governs the deadlines in that process rather than a return due date. Separately, the VAT Executive Regulation's filing article ends "or by such other date as directed by the Authority", and the FTA has in fact announced filing dates that differ from the default — but it announces them, and it does not say why. So the operative deadline is whatever the FTA has announced, not whatever you or we calculate.
#If an interruption has already cost you a filing or a payment
Act as though the penalty will be charged, and build the record that might get it removed. Penalties under the tax laws are automatic; they are not suspended while you explain.
Evidence first. Take screenshots that show the error, the full address bar and the system clock. Keep the confirmation email or reference for anything that did submit. If you speak to the call centre, write down the date, the time and the Service Request Number — an SRN is the only thing that ties your account to a logged contact.
Then use the routes that do exist. A return filed with an error is corrected through a voluntary disclosure. An administrative penalty can be challenged, or a waiver or instalment requested through EmaraTax: the FTA's service card for that request is free of charge, takes about ten minutes to submit, and states a response window of up to 110 business days, with Cabinet Decision No. 105 of 2021 as the relevant publication. The penalty-waiver power itself is Article 50 of the Tax Procedures Law — not Article 46, which is the limitation period and is widely miscited.
What nobody publishes about your chances
The FTA publishes no approval rate for waiver requests, no list of accepted excuses and no statement that a system outage is one of them. Any page that tells you an outage is an accepted ground for waiver is telling you something the Authority has not said. Submit the evidence, make the argument, and do not treat the outcome as predictable.
#Reaching a person while you cannot reach the portal
The FTA publishes its channels on its Contact Us page, together with the response times it holds itself to. Read on 21 August 2026, that page gave a toll-free number of 800 82923, an email address of info@tax.gov.ae, call centre hours of Monday to Saturday 07:30 to 22:00, and support centre hours of Monday to Friday 07:30 to 15:30. Its published service standards were eight minutes on the call centre, five minutes on live chat and the Tara virtual assistant, fifteen minutes at a support centre and two business days by email. The page itself was stamped last updated 22 May 2024.
One caveat worth stating: the in-portal service request is the FTA's preferred channel for account problems, and it is the one channel an outage takes away from you. That is precisely when the phone number and the mailbox matter.
#What this page refuses to state
Four things, deliberately.
Live uptime. We do not tell you whether EmaraTax is working at the moment you read this. A static page cannot know, and the Authority publishes no feed a page could read.
A maintenance window. The FTA publishes no recurring maintenance schedule we could find. Third-party pages that quote one are quoting each other.
A session-timeout or lockout figure. Not published. Guessing it would tell a reader their account is fine when it may be locked.
Any promise of relief. No published provision extends a tax deadline because a portal was unavailable, and we will not soften that into "the FTA is usually understanding". The safe plan is the boring one: file days early, keep evidence, and check the announcement panel for the deadline that actually applies.
Sources and legal basis
This page relies on
- EmaraTax
- Federal Tax Authority (FTA)
- UAE Pass
- eservices.tax.gov.ae
- Emergency notifications and service interruptions (FTA)
- Service Request Number (SRN)
- Federal Decree-Law No. 28 of 2022 on Tax Procedures
- Article 49 of the Tax Procedures Law (calculation of time periods)
- Article 1 of the Tax Procedures Law (definition of Business Day)
- Article 35 of the Tax Procedures Law (extension of deadlines in objections)
- Article 50 of the Tax Procedures Law (waiver and instalment of penalties)
- Cabinet Decision No. 105 of 2021
- Tara virtual assistant
- Emergency notifications and service interruptions — empty, stamped 6 December 2021, read 21 August 2026Federal Tax Authority
- Federal Tax Authority contact details, channels and published response times, read 21 August 2026Federal Tax Authority
- EmaraTax — the FTA's digital platformFederal Tax Authority
- EmaraTax sign-inFederal Tax Authority
- FTA legislation index — the consolidated Tax Procedures Law, including Articles 35, 49 and 50Federal Tax Authority
- Requests for instalment, waiver and refund of administrative penalties — free, up to 110 business daysFederal Tax Authority
- EmaraTax FAQs — OTP validity, UAE Pass linking and account behaviourFederal Tax Authority
Rates, thresholds and deadlines change. Every figure above is linked to the authority that publishes it — if the two ever disagree, the authority is right and this page is out of date. Tell us and we will fix it.
Frequently asked questions
Is EmaraTax down?
There is no official way to check. The Federal Tax Authority publishes no EmaraTax status page, and its Emergency Notifications page showed no entries and a last-updated stamp of 6 December 2021 when read on 21 August 2026. Confirm you are on eservices.tax.gov.ae, clear the session, try another browser and another network, then call the FTA on 800 82923 to ask whether the incident is known.
Is the EmaraTax portal down, or is it my login?
Test it in one step: open a private browser window on a different network. If the sign-in screen loads and accepts your credentials there, the portal is running and the problem is local to your session, browser, proxy or account. A blank dashboard after signing in is usually a second EmaraTax account created through UAE Pass, not an outage, because registrations stay attached to the original registered email.
What is the EmaraTax website?
EmaraTax is the Federal Tax Authority's online platform for registration, returns and payments, and the FTA publishes a single sign-in address for it: eservices.tax.gov.ae. The Authority's public website, tax.gov.ae, is a separate system carrying legislation, guides and service cards. A login page at tax.gov.ae signs you into a website account and not into EmaraTax, which is a frequent source of confusion.
Is the FTA UAE website down?
The FTA website and the tax portal are two different systems and fail independently. tax.gov.ae is the public website; eservices.tax.gov.ae is EmaraTax. Check each one separately before reporting an outage. Note also that missing pages on tax.gov.ae can return a full page rather than a clean error, so a blank-looking page may mean the address is wrong rather than the site is down.