VAT Refund Calculator UAE

A refund is not a rate you apply to something. For a registered business it is the residue of one subtraction, set out in Article 53 of the VAT Law: the total output tax you charged in the tax period, less the total recoverable tax for that same period. Come out positive and you owe the Federal Tax Authority. Come out negative and you are holding excess recoverable tax, which Article 74(1)(a) lets you apply to have repaid.

The ledger below runs that subtraction line by line, because the answer almost never turns on the output tax — it turns on how much of your input tax is genuinely recoverable. Three things routinely cut it: input tax blocked outright by Article 53 of the Executive Regulation, input tax attributable to exempt supplies, and the apportioned slice of your overheads. Enter figures for one tax period only, VAT-exclusive for the supply values and VAT amounts for the input tax lines.

Two conditions sit behind every input tax figure you type and neither is modelled: Article 55(1) of the VAT Law only allows a deduction in the period in which you hold the tax invoice and have paid or intend to pay the consideration, and Article 55(1)(c) requires you to retain the invoice in the format of an electronic invoice where one is required. An input tax figure you cannot evidence is not recoverable, whatever the ledger says.

"VAT refund UAE" is four or five different things wearing one name, and a calculator that quietly models one of them while answering for all of them is worse than useless. This one covers excess recoverable tax for a VAT-registered business — the credit created by your own return under Article 74 of the VAT Law and Article 65 of the Executive Regulation. That is the only route where a refund is the arithmetic result of a subtraction.

The other routes sit in Article 75 of the VAT Law and are worked out by the Executive Regulation. None of them is a subtraction of output tax from input tax, so none of them can be estimated with this ledger. The refund service page carries their minimums, windows and evidence lists; they are deliberately not repeated here, so there is one place on this site to keep them current rather than two that can drift apart.

If you are a visitor who shopped in Dubai, a UAE national who has just finished building a house, or an overseas company that exhibited at a trade fair here, the ledger above does not apply to you at all.

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding about UAE VAT refunds, and it is written plainly in the law. Article 74(3) of the VAT Law: if no request is submitted to recover the excess after offsetting, the excess recoverable tax will be carried forward to the subsequent tax periods. Article 9(2) of Cabinet Decision No. 74 of 2023 says the same thing from the other direction — the Authority treats an overpayment as a credit against future liabilities unless the taxable person requests it back. A balance sitting in EmaraTax is not a payment in transit; it is a balance waiting for an application that may never be made.

Two consequences follow. First, the FTA offsets before it pays: Article 74(2) of the VAT Law and Article 39(1) of the Tax Procedures Law require the amount requested to be set against non-disputed payable tax and administrative penalties first, and Article 39(2) lets the Authority decline to pay the residue where there are disputed amounts, a live audit, or a court order. Article 26(4) of Cabinet Decision No. 74 of 2023 also lets it defer repayment until any outstanding returns are filed.

Second, the right expires. Article 38(2) of the Tax Procedures Law, as amended by Federal Decree-Law No. 17 of 2025 and in force from 1 January 2026, requires a refund application within five years of the end of the relevant tax period, and Article 38(6) says that if it is not submitted in time the right to claim lapses. Where the balance arises late — from an FTA decision after the five years, or in the last 90 days of it — Article 38(3) and 38(4) give one year or 90 days respectively. Statement checked against the consolidated Decree-Law on 17 August 2026.

On timing, the only figures worth quoting are the statutory ones. Article 26(2) of Cabinet Decision No. 74 of 2023 requires the Authority to decide and notify within 20 business days of submission, or within another period you are notified of; Article 26(3) then requires repayment procedures to start within five business days of that notification. We do not publish an "average" refund time for business claims, because the FTA does not publish one.

If you make any exempt supplies, the refundable figure is decided less by your sales than by a percentage most calculators either skip or compute from the wrong base.

Article 55(7)(a) of the Executive Regulation defines it as the percentage of recoverable tax to the sum of input tax for the tax period — a ratio of tax amounts, not of turnover. Article 55(7)(b) then rounds it to the nearest whole number, and 55(7)(c) applies the rounded figure to the residual input tax. That rounding is not a simplification we introduced: it is the rule, and it can move a large residual pool by a meaningful amount in either direction.

A turnover-based split feels more natural and is what many working papers use, but under Article 55(13) and 55(14) it is an alternative mechanism that has to be approved by the FTA from a list of accepted methods, and Article 55(15) then locks you in for at least two tax years. Article 55(16) separately allows a specified recovery percentage based on the previous tax year's outcome.

Businesses closing down often assume the final VAT return is where a long-carried credit finally comes back. It can just as easily be where the credit disappears.

Article 14(8) of the Executive Regulation deems any goods and services forming part of the business assets to be supplied immediately before deregistration, with the tax due included in the final tax return. Article 11(4) of the VAT Law is the source: goods and services a taxable person owns at the date of deregistration are a deemed supply. Unsold stock, fit-out, equipment and vehicles therefore generate output tax on the way out — which is exactly the term the ledger above subtracts from. Article 12 does carve out cases: there is no deemed supply where no input tax was recovered on the item, where the supply would be exempt, or where the recovered input tax has already been adjusted under the Capital Assets Scheme.

The surrounding mechanics matter too. Article 14(7) requires a deregistering registrant to pay all tax and penalties due and file the final return; Article 64(2) requires that final return for the last period of registration; and Article 55(4)(a) ends the tax year on the last day the person was a taxable person, which forces the annual apportionment wash-up into that final period rather than a future one. Run the deemed supply through the calculator before assuming a closing refund exists.

A tool that models what it cannot know produces a confident wrong number, and on a refund claim that number invites a review. The following are outside it deliberately.

It will not tell you what the FTA will actually pay. A refund request puts the underlying return in front of the Authority, and the items it tests first are the ones the ledger takes on trust: blocked input tax, the apportionment method, export evidence, and whether every purchase invoice carries a valid supplier TRN.

It will not price a penalty. The VAT penalty tariff has been amended more than once and this page does not restate rates it has not read in the current consolidated Cabinet Decision; the penalty calculator page carries them with their source.

It will not model a tax group, the profit margin scheme, designated zone movements, or the Capital Assets Scheme, each of which changes what belongs in the return before any subtraction happens.

And it will not tell a tourist, a homebuilder or a foreign visiting business anything useful, because those refunds are not computed this way at all.