UAE Tax Law Changes

Every entry below was read in the primary text and is dated. That matters more here than on any other page of this site, because a "recent changes" page is the easiest kind of page to leave quietly wrong: the instrument moves, the article is renumbered, and the summary stays online for years.

Nothing appears here unless the amending instrument itself has been opened and its number confirmed. Where a change is announced but the text is not yet published, it is not listed. Where a widely republished date turns out to be superseded, the superseding decision is named.

Checked against the Federal Tax Authority and Ministry of Finance legislation libraries on 21 August 2026. Anything issued after that date is not on this page.

This is the single largest change of the cycle, and most of it is invisible to a business that only looks at the rate. The 5% standard rate in Article 3 was not touched, and the registration thresholds were not touched. What changed is the mechanics.

The amendment is carried in the consolidation of the VAT Law published on 28 November 2025, and the Ministry of Finance announced it publicly in December 2025.

The Tax Procedures Law amendment is procedural and therefore easy to ignore until it decides a case. The consolidated text incorporating it runs to 33 pages and was published on 3 December 2025; the pre-amendment 2022 text, 30 pages, is still widely linked and still widely quoted.

Article 46 was renumbered. A new clause 4 was inserted covering a refund application made in the fifth year, which is then subject to a two-year period. The five-year bar on voluntary disclosure moved from 46(5) to 46(6); tax evasion is now 46(7) and failure to register 46(8). If a page or a letter cites Article 46(5) for the voluntary-disclosure bar, it is citing the old numbering.

Article 46 is the statute of limitation. The power to waive or instalment a penalty is Article 50 — the two are confused constantly, including in correspondence.

Article 38, the application to refund a credit balance, was restated: apply within five years from the end of the relevant tax period, with the right lapsing under 38(6) if you are late, and one year or 90 days under 38(3) and 38(4) where the balance arises late. Article 3(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 17 of 2025 is a transitional: balances that had already lapsed could be claimed or set against liabilities within one year of 1 January 2026 — a window that has now closed for anyone who did not use it.

Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025 replaced the VAT and excise administrative penalty table annexed to Cabinet Decision No. 40 of 2017, with effect from 14 April 2026.

The headline change is the late-payment charge. The old formula was 2% of the unpaid tax immediately, then 4% monthly, capped at 300%. The new charge is 14% per annum — the same basis corporate tax has used since Cabinet Decision No. 75 of 2023 came into force on 1 August 2023. The 2025 Decision did not invent a regime; it brought VAT and excise into line with corporate tax.

So a page still quoting 2%, 4% or a 300% cap for VAT is quoting a rule that no longer exists, and a page quoting those figures for corporate tax has imported a VAT rule that corporate tax never had.

The two schedules remain separate. Cabinet Decision No. 75 of 2023 prices violations of the Corporate Tax Law; Cabinet Decision No. 40 of 2017, as amended, prices violations of the VAT Law, the Excise Tax Law and the Tax Procedures Law generally. Amounts differ item by item.

The UAE Electronic Invoicing System was created by Ministerial Decision No. 243 of 2025, with the implementation timeline in Ministerial Decision No. 244 of 2025. Both were announced by the Ministry of Finance on 29 September 2025.

The deadline to appoint an accredited service provider was then changed. Ministerial Decision No. 66 of 2026 replaced Article 5(1)(a) of MD 244 of 2025, moving that appointment deadline to 30 October 2026. This is the trap on the whole topic: the Ministry's own Electronic Invoicing Guidelines v1.1, dated 1 June 2026, still prints the earlier date. The Decision governs and the guidance is stale.

Two scope points that change what a business has to build.

Business-to-consumer transactions are outside the system. Article 5(2) of MD 244 of 2025 puts B2C outside scope. A retailer is not required to push consumer sales through the e-invoicing exchange on that provision.

Under e-invoicing there is no simplified tax invoice. Article 59(16) of the VAT Executive Regulation, added by Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2025, switches off clauses 2, 3, 5, 7 and 15 of Article 59 where a registrant must issue an electronic invoice under Article 65(5) of the VAT Law, or issues one voluntarily. That removes the simplified invoice, the permission to use one, the no-invoice-needed rule for wholly zero-rated supplies and the Authority's power to dispense with particulars. Any retail plan built on "our till receipts stay simplified" is built on a clause that no longer applies to electronic invoices.

The Corporate Tax Law itself — Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 — was not replaced. The changes are in the ministerial decisions underneath it, and two of them are easy to miss because the headline numbers did not move.

A great deal of what circulates as a "2026 UAE tax change" is not a change at all.

The corporate tax rate is unchanged: Article 3 of Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 still sets 0% up to the threshold set by Cabinet decision and 9% above it. The standard VAT rate is unchanged at 5%, as it has been since 1 January 2018, and the VAT registration thresholds are unchanged at AED 375,000 mandatory and AED 187,500 voluntary.

There is still no federal personal income tax on employment income in the UAE, and none of the 2025 or 2026 instruments introduced one.

What changed is procedure, evidence and penalties — which is to say, the cost of getting it wrong, not the amount you owe when you get it right.

The method below is the one used to build this page. It takes roughly ten minutes per instrument and it is the only way to know that an entry above has not been superseded since 21 August 2026.