When Your UAE VAT Return Is Due

Article 64(1) of the VAT Executive Regulation, Cabinet Decision No. 52 of 2017, requires a tax return to be received by the Authority no later than the 28th day following the end of the tax period concerned, or by such other date as directed by the Authority. Article 64(3) puts the payable tax on the same clock: the money must also be received by that date, using the means the Authority specifies.

Two things follow that people routinely get wrong.

The first is that filing and paying are one date, not two. A return submitted on the 28th with the transfer initiated on the 29th is a late payment, and late payment now runs at 14% per annum applied monthly on the unsettled payable tax under Table 1 item 9 of Cabinet Decision No. 40 of 2017 as rewritten by Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025. Bank transfers to the FTA are not instant, so the practical deadline for the money is earlier than the legal one.

The second is the closing phrase of Article 64(1). "Or by such other date as directed by the Authority" means the 28th day is a default, not an absolute. If the FTA has directed a different date for you, that direction is your deadline, and the late-filing penalty in Table 1 item 8 attaches to the timeframe actually specified for you — not to a date read off a generic calendar.

Article 62(1) makes the standard tax period three calendar months, ending on the date the Authority determines. That last clause matters: quarterly does not mean calendar quarters. Registrants are staggered across three quarterly cycles, so one business files for periods ending January, April, July and October while another files for periods ending March, June, September and December.

Article 62(2) lets the FTA assign a person, or a class of persons, a shorter or longer tax period where it considers a non-standard length necessary or beneficial for one of three stated reasons: to reduce the risk of tax evasion, to improve its monitoring of compliance or collection of tax revenues, or to reduce the administrative burden on the Authority or the compliance burden on the person. Article 62(3) works the other way — a taxable person on the standard period may request that the period end with a month of their choosing, and the Authority may accept that at its discretion.

Notice what is absent. Nothing in Article 62 ties the length of the tax period to turnover. The widely republished rule that annual supplies above AED 150 million force monthly filing does not appear in the Regulation, and this page does not state it. The criterion in the text is the Authority's judgement against three qualitative grounds. The period you were actually assigned is recorded against your registration in EmaraTax, and that record is the only reliable source for it.

The rule has not changed across those three years. Article 64(1) has read the same way since the Regulation came into force, and the amendment made by Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2024 did not alter the 28-day period. So a page listing "the 2026 filing date" is listing arithmetic, not news.

What does change year to year is which of those dates falls on a weekend. The table below applies the 28-day rule to the calendar-quarter cycle. If your periods end in a different month, shift the whole pattern — the arithmetic is identical.

There is a primary source for this, and it is not in the VAT Regulation — which is why writers who look only at Article 64 conclude, wrongly, that no extension exists.

Article 49(2) of Federal Decree-Law No. 28 of 2022 on Tax Procedures: if the last day of a time period is not a business day, the time period is extended to the next business day. Article 1 of the same law defines a business day as any day of the week except weekends and official holidays of the State. Article 49(1) excludes the day of the event itself from the count, and Article 49(3) requires the Gregorian calendar throughout. Those four provisions, not the VAT Regulation, are what move a VAT deadline off a Saturday.

The extension therefore depends on the official federal holiday schedule for the year, which is announced by the Cabinet and is not something this page reproduces — the UAE Government portal path that used to carry it does not resolve, and we will not restate a holiday list from a secondary source on a page someone files a return against.

Several situations produce a deadline you cannot derive from a calendar.

Your first return. A first tax period runs from the effective date of registration to the end of the period the FTA assigned, so it is frequently not three months long. The 28-day rule then runs from the end of that stub period.

Your final return. Article 64(2) requires a person whose registration has been cancelled to provide a final tax return for the last tax period for which they were registered. That obligation survives deregistration, and it is the one people forget. Filing it late is an ordinary Table 1 item 8 penalty, so a single mishandled deregistration can generate the late-deregistration penalty, item 8 penalties for the periods in the gap, and a further item 8 on the final return.

Loss of capacity. Article 63 ends the current tax period on the day before a registrant dies, goes into liquidation or receivership, or becomes bankrupt or incapacitated, and starts a new period that day in the name of the legal representative. Two returns are then due where one was expected.

A direction from the Authority. Under the closing words of Article 64(1) the FTA may set another date. If you hold one, it displaces everything above.

Filing late and paying late are charged separately, and both can run at the same time on the same return.

Late filing is Table 1 item 8 of Cabinet Decision No. 40 of 2017: AED 1,000, rising to AED 2,000 where the violation is repeated within 24 months. Late payment was rewritten by Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025 with effect from 14 April 2026 and now runs at 14% per annum, applied monthly on the unsettled payable tax — the old 2% plus 4% monthly structure capped at 300% is gone, and any source still quoting it is describing a superseded schedule.

The larger exposure is not the fixed fine. Article 23(1)(b) of the Tax Procedures Law says the Authority shall issue a tax assessment where a person fails to submit a return, and Article 23(2) lets it issue an estimated assessment where the tax actually due cannot be determined. An estimate raised against a business that never filed is a far worse outcome than AED 1,000, and unwinding it means engaging with the assessment review and reconsideration route rather than simply filing.

Do not take your deadline from a blog, and do not take it from this page either. Take it from your own registration.