Trade Licence Renewal and Amendment in the UAE

A renewal application is not the work. The work is the five prerequisites sitting behind it, each held by a different authority, each capable of stopping the licence on its own, and none of them visible from inside the licensing portal you submit through.

That is why renewals stall in the last week rather than the first. A company discovers in the last few days before expiry that its lease was registered for eleven months rather than twelve, or that a municipality fine from eight months ago was never paid, or that the establishment card lapsed when a signatory's Emirates ID did. Each of those is a separate authority, a separate queue and a separate clock, and none of them can be compressed by paying the licensing fee faster.

The honest order of work is therefore backwards from what most renewal checklists imply. Establish the expiry date and which authority holds the file, then clear the five items below, then submit. Submitting first and clearing afterwards is how a licence expires while an application sits open.

The steps below are jurisdiction-neutral: they hold for a mainland company in any emirate and for a free zone licensee, because they follow the dependencies rather than one registrar's screens. What changes between jurisdictions is who you file with, not the order.

Renewal and amendment are usually sold together, and they are legally different acts with different deadlines. A renewal extends an existing registration. An amendment changes what is registered — and the moment something changes, two independent clocks start running, held by two different authorities that do not talk to each other on your behalf.

The first is company law. Article 15(3) of Federal Decree-Law No. 32 of 2021 requires companies to notify the Competent Authority and the Registrar in writing within 15 working days of any amendment or change to the registered particulars, and it names them: the company's name, address, share capital, number of shareholders or legal form. Read in the primary English text on 17 August 2026, that clause is expressed as a positive duty on a fixed clock, not as something you attend to at renewal. Article 15(2) supplies the consequence: an unregistered particular is not enforceable against third parties, and if only some details are unregistered, only those details fail. Article 15(4) then makes managers and board members jointly liable to indemnify damage suffered by the company, the shareholders or third parties as a result of non-registration. That is personal exposure attached to an administrative omission.

The second clock is tax. Article 6(2)(b) of Federal Decree-Law No. 28 of 2022 requires a registrant to inform the Federal Tax Authority of any event that might require amendment of the information on its tax record within 20 business days of the event. A new manager, a changed registered address, a new authorised signatory, a change of legal form: each is that kind of event. The penalty is AED 1,000, rising to AED 5,000 for a repeat within 24 months, and unusually the corporate tax and the VAT and excise schedules agree — item 4 of Cabinet Decision No. 75 of 2023 and Table 1 item 5 of Cabinet Decision No. 40 of 2017 as amended by Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025 impose the same amounts.

So one change generates two filings on two different calendars, one measured in working days and one in business days, and neither is satisfied by amending the licence.

The federal instruments above apply either way. What differs is who holds each input, and in a free zone the concentration is the thing to plan around: the authority that licenses you is generally also your landlord and the channel through which your immigration file moves. That is faster when everything is current and considerably harder when one item is in dispute, because there is no second authority to work in parallel with.

Dubai is the one emirate with a recent published instrument on the free-zone-to-mainland question, and it is worth naming precisely because the figures in it are recurring rather than one-off. Article 12(1) of Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025 sets AED 10,000 per year for issuing or renewing a licence for a branch of a free zone establishment operating out of the zone, and Article 12(2) sets AED 5,000 for a temporary permit, which Article 7 caps at six months — so continuous mainland access on permits is two payments a year, not one. Article 13 gave establishments already operating outside their zone one year from the Resolution's entry into force to comply, extendable once by the Director General; that window has run. Note the limit of what Article 12 prices: it does not cover a branch established within the Emirate under Article 4(a)(1), which is left to the fees prescribed by the Department of Economy and Tourism under applicable legislation. Quoting AED 10,000 for any mainland branch attributes the figure to the wrong route.

This is the most expensive misunderstanding in the whole subject, and it is a tax misunderstanding rather than a licensing one. A licence is the permission to trade. It is not the company, and it is not your tax registration.

Corporate tax registration does not end when a licence expires. Article 52(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 makes the trigger for a deregistration application the cessation of the business or business activity, whether by dissolution, liquidation or otherwise — an event you have to bring about and then file for, within three months under Article 2 of FTA Decision No. 6 of 2023. Article 52(2) then blocks the exit until you have paid all corporate tax and administrative penalties due and filed every return, including the return for the period up to and including the date of cessation. Article 52(4) lets the Authority deregister you on its own information if you do not comply, effective from the later of the end of the period in which those conditions became apparent to it or the date the person ceased to exist. None of that is triggered by an expiry date on a licence.

VAT works the same way and on a shorter clock: Article 14(1) of the VAT Executive Regulation gives 20 business days from the occurrence, and Article 14(7) requires all tax and all administrative penalties to be paid and the final return filed before deregistration is granted — which means a late-deregistration penalty can block the very exit it was imposed for missing. Article 14 bis, added by Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2024, lets the Authority deregister a person unilaterally to protect the integrity of the tax system, and its clause 3 says expressly that this does not absolve that person of the law, including re-registering if the conditions are met again. Being struck off is not an escape.

And a lapsed licence does not close the company. Dissolution, liquidation, tax deregistration and licence cancellation are four separate acts in a fixed order, with a liquidator, creditor notice periods and clearances. Not renewing simply leaves a live registration accruing obligations while nobody is filing for it.

A large share of the searches that reach this page ask for a renewal cost, a fee schedule, a discount or a payment method. We will not answer any of them with a number, and the reason is not caution — it is that the numbers in circulation are not sourced.

Dubai's Department of Economy and Tourism, the body most of these searches mean when they say DED, publishes no renewal fee schedule and no late-renewal fine schedule. It prices per activity inside its own e-services, which means the only correct answer to the cost question is the one the calculator gives for your specific activity list, legal form and premises. Every fixed renewal figure and every fee table you will find attributed to DET came from an intermediary, not from the authority. The widely repeated AED 200 a month late fine is item 6 of Schedule 2 to Executive Council Resolution No. 13 of 2011, read at source - a 2011 basis and not a current DET fine.

Discounts are worse. Emirates and free zones do periodically run promotional or waiver initiatives, and they announce them themselves, dated, through their own channels. We will not state that any specific renewal discount exists, applies to your licence, or is still open, because there is no published standing scheme to point at and a stale promotion repeated as fact costs a business real money in a budget. Ask the licensing authority directly, and ask for it in writing.

On the mechanics, one honest observation about the sources. As at 17 August 2026 the UAE Government Portal's business section has pages on starting a business, running one, accessing services, recruiting and closing a business, on both the mainland and free zone sides — and no renewal page at all. There is no federal renewal procedure to describe, because renewal is administered entirely at emirate and zone level. Online renewal, and the payment channels available for it, are therefore features of your own registrar's portal, and the Dubai procedure specifically belongs on the Dubai page rather than here.

The useful work on a renewal is preparation and sequencing, not submission. That means establishing which authority holds each prerequisite, getting the tenancy and the fines cleared in the right order, reconciling the register entry against the current ownership and management, filing the amendments that reconciliation exposes on their own statutory clocks, and then making sure the renewed licence reaches the tax record, the bank and the establishment card file. Where an amendment is involved, it also means treating the 15 working days under the Commercial Companies Law and the 20 business days under the Tax Procedures Law as two separate deliverables with two separate owners.

What we will not claim is standing we cannot evidence. As at 17 August 2026 this site publishes no trade licence number, no Federal Tax Authority tax agent registration, no audit licence, no office address and no telephone number, because none of those has been verified for publication. We are not a licensing agent or a registered service provider for any emirate or free zone, we cannot renew or amend a licence on your behalf, and we cannot be dealt with by the Federal Tax Authority in your name — only a person listed in the Register of Tax Agents can, and Article 12(2) of Federal Decree-Law No. 28 of 2022 requires that person to hold a licence from the competent local authority as well.

So the test to apply to anyone offering to handle a renewal, including us, is a documentary one. Ask which authority they are registered with to act for you, ask for the number, and check it. Ask what happens to the fee if the licence is blocked by a fine at an authority they did not check. A firm that quotes a fixed all-in renewal price before it has seen your licence, your tenancy status, your fine position across five authorities and your establishment card expiry has priced a form, not the work.