VAT Calculator UAE

Enter one amount and say which side of the tax it is on. The ledger prints the net, the tax and the gross — and next to them the figure most people reach for by mistake, 5% of whatever was typed, so the size of the error is visible rather than assumed.

Both directions come from two provisions of the same Decree-Law. Article 3 of Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 imposes tax at a standard rate of 5% on the value of a supply or import. Article 34(1) then defines that value, where the consideration is monetary, as the consideration less the tax. Those two sentences are the whole of the arithmetic: forwards it is a multiplication, backwards it is a division, and the two are not each other's mirror image.

The calculator assumes a single standard-rated supply made by a business that is registered for VAT — VAT in the UAE, from registration to filing covers how you get there. If the supply is zero-rated, exempt, subject to the reverse charge or accounted for on the profit margin, the answer is not 5% of anything, and the section further down on when the standard rate stops applying says which rule takes over instead. It also assumes you are entitled to charge tax at all: only a registrant may issue a tax invoice, and Article 65(4) makes anyone who receives an amount as tax liable to pay that amount to the Federal Tax Authority whether or not they were entitled to charge it.

This is the one calculation on the page worth checking by hand, because it is where invoices, credit notes and quarterly returns actually go wrong.

If a bill is AED 1,050 including VAT, the tax inside it is AED 50. Take 5% of 1,050 instead and you get AED 52.50, which implies a net of AED 997.50 — a supply nobody made at a price nobody agreed. The overstatement is always 5% of the tax itself, so it looks trivial on one invoice and stops looking trivial once a quarter of sales has been booked the wrong way round.

The reason is that a percentage added to a smaller number is a smaller percentage of the larger one. Adding 5% takes you from 100 to 105; coming back the other way, 5 out of 105 is 4.76%. The reverse calculation is therefore its own formula — divide by 1.05, or multiply by 5 and divide by 105 — and not the forward one run in reverse. The section below on writing the formula into a spreadsheet has the method written out, if you would rather copy it than use the tool.

Which direction you need is a legal question before it is an arithmetic one, and the UAE answers it more firmly than many markets.

Article 38 of Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 requires the advertised price of a taxable supply to include the tax, and Article 27(1) of the Executive Regulation repeats it: published prices shall be inclusive of tax. A shelf price, a menu price or a quoted retail price is therefore normally the gross figure, and extraction — not addition — is the calculation you actually need.

Article 27 then sets out the exceptions. A price may be shown exclusive of tax on an export, or where the customer is a registrant, provided it is clearly identified as excluding tax. A price must be shown exclusive of tax where the recipient accounts for the tax himself under Article 48. That is why a business-to-business quotation usually needs 5% added and a consumer receipt usually needs 5% taken out.

A calculator that prints six decimal places is telling you about floating point, not about tax. Two provisions govern how far the arithmetic is allowed to go.

Article 68 of the Decree-Law delegates the treatment of amounts below one fils to the Executive Regulation, and Article 61 of that Regulation permits the taxable person to round the tax to the nearest fils on a mathematical rounding where it is calculated to a fraction of a fils. That is why the ledger above rounds the tax to two decimal places and then derives the gross from the rounded figure, rather than showing a total that cannot be paid.

Currency is the more expensive detail. Article 69 requires that where a supply is in a currency other than the dirham, the amount stated on the tax invoice is converted into dirhams at the exchange rate approved by the Central Bank at the date of supply — not the rate on the day you invoice, and not the rate your bank gave you. Article 59(1)(k) of the Executive Regulation then requires that rate to appear on the invoice next to the tax. No calculator can supply either, so convert to dirhams first and enter the dirham figure. The full list of particulars is set out in what a compliant UAE tax invoice must show.

The commonest reason an import figure comes out wrong is that the 5% was applied to the supplier's invoice rather than to the value the law actually taxes.

Article 35(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 sets the import value as the customs value under the Customs Legislation, including the value of insurance, freight and any customs fees and excise tax paid on the import — and excluding the VAT itself. So freight, insurance and duty are inside the base, and 5% of the goods value alone is an understatement every time any of them is non-zero.

Who pays it, and when, depends on registration. A taxable person importing concerned goods or services for the purposes of his business is treated by Article 48(1) as making a taxable supply to himself and accounts for the tax in his own return, where it is normally recoverable as input tax on the ordinary conditions. A person who is not registered settles the tax on the date of import, under the mechanism in the Executive Regulation — Article 49 of the Decree-Law, with the special rules of import in Article 50 of the Regulation. The mechanics of self-accounting are set out under reverse charge on imports and concerned services.

We do not model a rate of customs duty anywhere on this page. Duty depends on the tariff classification of the goods and on the regime they enter under, and the excise tax that may also sit in the base has rates we do not publish. Both are inputs you supply from the customs declaration.

A calculator can only apply the rate you tell it applies. Four categories of supply take the arithmetic away from the standard rate altogether, and one takes it away from the price.

Zero-rated supplies under Article 45 carry tax at 0% and still allow input tax recovery. Exempt supplies under Article 46 carry no tax and do not — which is why exports and residential leases, both nil on the invoice, behave completely differently in the return. Reverse-charge supplies under Article 48 are still taxed at 5%, but the recipient rather than the supplier declares it. The profit margin scheme in Article 43 keeps the 5% and changes the base to the margin. And a designated zone under Article 50, on the published list in Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017, is treated as outside the State for the purposes of the Decree-Law. The UAE VAT rate and what it applies to sets out which supplies sit in which category.

One dating caveat, checked on 17 August 2026. The consolidated English text of the VAT Law published through the Federal Tax Authority incorporates amendments up to Federal Decree-Law No. 16 of 2025, in force from 1 January 2026 — verified on the cover page of the consolidation cited here. Every source we could read still states the standard rate as 5%, including the Ministry's own VAT page, and nothing on this page depends on a provision we could not read in the primary text. Where you are relying on a specific article rather than the rate, check the current consolidated version before you file.

The formula is short enough to keep in a spreadsheet, and the only decision is which side of the tax your source column holds. Put the rate in its own cell rather than typing 1.05 into fifty formulas — when a rate is hard-coded across a workbook, nobody can find every instance of it later.

With the net amount in A2 and the rate 5% in $B$1:

• VAT to add: =ROUND(A2*$B$1,2)
• Gross: =A2+ROUND(A2*$B$1,2)

With a tax-inclusive total in A2 instead:

• Net: =ROUND(A2/(1+$B$1),2)
• VAT inside it: =A2-ROUND(A2/(1+$B$1),2), which is the same as =ROUND(A2*5/105,2)

Three things go wrong in spreadsheets specifically. Rounding: ROUND(x,2) takes the figure to the nearest fils, which is what Article 61 of the Executive Regulation permits where the tax runs to a fraction of a fils; without it, a column of unrounded values will not agree to the invoices it summarises. Order of operations: round the tax once, then derive the gross from the rounded tax, rather than rounding the gross separately, or the three columns will not add up. Currency: Article 59(1)(k) of the Executive Regulation requires a full tax invoice to show the amount in AED and the exchange rate used, so convert before the VAT column, never after it.

The same arithmetic in prose, for one invoice: multiply by 0.05 to add the tax, divide by 1.05 to take it out, and never take 5% off a tax-inclusive total.

There is nothing to pay, nothing to install and nothing to sign up for. The arithmetic runs in your browser, no figure you type is sent anywhere, and there is no app: a percentage does not need one, and any download that offers to compute a 5% tax for you is asking for more trust than the calculation deserves.

The Federal Tax Authority publishes its own VAT calculator, and it is worth knowing about. On tax.gov.ae it opens as a side panel with two boxes — amount before tax and total amount after tax — and a read-only VAT field fixed at 5%, so it also works in both directions. Checked 17 August 2026, it lives in a dialog on the authority's own pages rather than at a URL of its own. Where our figures and the authority's disagree, theirs governs.

What neither tool can do is decide the inputs. It cannot tell you whether your supply is standard-rated, whether you are registered, whether the price you were quoted included the tax, what the customs value of your consignment was, or which exchange rate applied on the date of supply. Those are the decisions that make a return right or wrong; the multiplication never was. The rate is federal, so nothing here changes between Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the other emirates.

Three neighbouring tools answer the questions this one does not: penalties for a late or incorrect VAT return, the UAE VAT refund schemes, and what actually happens when you get to filing through EmaraTax.

If you arrived looking for a wages calculator rather than a tax one, the Wages Protection System is a payroll obligation with nothing to do with VAT — UAE payroll is the section for it.