UAE business setup cost calculator

Setting up a UAE free-zone company has a real first-year cost that runs well beyond the license — typically AED 50,000–90,000 once you add the trade license, an investor visa, an office (even a flexi-desk) and the one-off setup fees. The parts that make up that bill are the trade license, the investor and employee visas, the office rent, and the one-off professional, legal and bank-account fees. This calculator turns your chosen free zone, office type and headcount into an itemised first-year total across five major zones — DMCC, DIFC, ADGM, RAKEZ and SPC — split into a setup-costs subtotal and a year-one operating subtotal. UAE-focused throughout, with the free-zone route as the concrete worked default.

What it costs to set up a UAE company

The trade license is the number every setup agent quotes, but it is only one line in a much larger first-year bill. Form a UAE free-zone company and the real cost is the license plus visas, an office, a set of one-off professional fees, and a year of basic operating costs. Budget for the license alone and you will be short by tens of thousands of dirhams before your first invoice goes out. An honest cost tool has to surface the whole stack, which is exactly what this calculator does — and the first thing it does is break that stack into two very different kinds of money.

It helps to split the bill into two buckets, because they behave differently over time. The first is setup costs — money you spend once to bring the company into existence: the trade license, the investor visa for the owner, any employee visas, and the one-off professional, legal, accounting and bank-account-opening fees. You pay these to get incorporated and you never pay most of them again. The second bucket is year-one operating — the running cost of actually having a business in its first twelve months: office rent, utilities and internet, and insurance. These recur every year. The calculator reports each bucket as its own subtotal and then combines them into a single grand total.

The breakdown below shows how those lines fall for a reference DMCC company — a flexi-desk office with one employee visa on top of the owner’s investor visa — so you can see the shape of a real first-year bill before you enter your own free zone, office and headcount.

Setup costs AED 68,425 + year-1 operating AED 23,000 = AED 91,425. On top of that sits a refundable office deposit of AED 1,200 (10% of the annual rent), so AED 92,625 has to be in the bank on day one. Excludes mainland setup, annual renewal (typically 60-80% of year one) and dependent visas.

Read down the two buckets and the pattern is clear: setup costs are dominated by the license and the two visas, while year-one operating is dominated by the office. Knowing which line sits in which bucket is what lets you plan — the setup bucket is a one-time hit you clear at launch, but the operating bucket is what you re-commit to at every renewal. Everything else in this guide is really an expansion of these two buckets and the choices that move them.

Free zone vs mainland

Before you compare individual zones, you face a more basic fork: set up in a free zone or on the mainland. The two routes are governed differently, priced differently and suit different businesses, so the choice shapes every number that follows. This calculator models the free-zone route in detail; the mainland is described here as context so you can decide which path fits your business before you start costing it.

A free zone is a designated economic area with its own registration authority and its own package pricing. The headline attractions are 100% foreign ownership with no need for a local Emirati sponsor, straightforward package pricing that bundles the license and registration, full repatriation of capital and profits, and fast, standardised processing. The main trade-off is scope: a free-zone company is set up to trade within its own zone and internationally, and to sell directly into the UAE mainland market it generally works through a distributor or a mainland branch. For consultancies, trading companies, e-commerce, media and most service businesses that bill international or B2B clients, that trade-off rarely bites — which is why the free-zone route is the default for most new founders.

The mainland route means a license from the emirate’s Department of Economic Development (the DED, or DET in Dubai). Its advantage is reach: a mainland company can trade anywhere in the UAE, deal directly with the local market, and bid for government contracts — things a free-zone company cannot do without extra structure. The trade-offs are a mandatory physical office (a flexi-desk usually will not satisfy the requirement), a different and often higher fee structure with municipality and chamber-of-commerce charges, and rules that have loosened but still differ by activity. Because mainland costs turn on the specific activity, office lease and emirate in ways a package price does not, this tool deliberately keeps its scope to the free-zone route rather than quoting a mainland figure it cannot pin down precisely.

The major UAE free zones

The UAE has more than 40 free zones — JAFZA, IFZA, SHAMS, DAFZA, Dubai Internet City and many more — each with its own pricing, industry focus and visa rules. Comparing all of them is paralysing, so this calculator models five of the most representative, spanning the price and prestige spectrum from Dubai’s premium hubs to the country’s most affordable zone.

DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre), in Jumeirah Lakes Towers, is the flagship all-rounder — built around trading and commodities but home to consultancies, e-commerce and services of every kind, and one of the world’s most-awarded free zones. DIFC (Dubai International Financial Centre) is the premium financial district in Downtown Dubai, running its own independent common-law courts and aimed at banks, funds, fintech and legal firms — the credibility is high and so is the price. ADGM (Abu Dhabi Global Market), on Al Maryah Island, is Abu Dhabi’s common-law financial hub, offering a DIFC-style regime at generally lower cost. RAKEZ (Ras Al Khaimah Economic Zone) is the value option — the most affordable of the five, with a higher visa quota and fast processing that suit startups and small trading businesses. SPC (Sharjah Publishing City) focuses on media, publishing and content, with freelance-friendly licensing and Sharjah’s lower cost base.

First-year total = trade license + one investor visa + one employee visa + entry (flexi-desk) office + one-off professional/legal/bank fees + year-1 utilities and insurance. RAKEZ and SPC are the most affordable; DIFC the premium. Your own total depends on office type and headcount.

The table above applies each zone’s own fee schedule to a comparable first-year setup so you can see the spread in pure dirham terms. Use it to frame the decision, not to make it: a finance firm that needs a common-law jurisdiction and institutional credibility is choosing between DIFC and ADGM regardless of the sticker price, while a bootstrapped e-commerce founder is almost always better served by RAKEZ or SPC. Match the zone to the business first — jurisdiction, industry focus, visa quota and location — then let the first-year total confirm the choice rather than drive it. The cheapest zone on paper is only the right one if it also grants the visas you need and carries the license activities you will actually bill for.

Office types: flexi-desk, dedicated & private

Your office choice is one of the biggest single levers in the whole calculation: it sets a large slice of your year-one operating cost. The calculator ties the office type directly to the zone you chose, showing the annual rent for each option that particular zone offers. Your visa quota is a separate question — it is an allocation the free zone grants against your licence, confirmed at licensing, and this tool models it at the zone level because no zone publishes a per-desk-tier allocation you could rely on in advance. In practice a larger physical footprint gives you room to negotiate a higher allocation, but the number is set by the zone, not by the desk you tick here.

There are three broad tiers. A flexi-desk (also called a hot-desk or shared desk) is the cheapest — a shared workstation you book rather than own, ideal for a solo founder or a small remote team. A dedicated desk is a fixed workstation reserved for you in a shared space, a step up in cost. A private office is your own enclosed unit — the most expensive option, and the physical footprint a growing team needs. Not every zone offers all three: DIFC, ADGM and SPC in this tool pair a flexi-desk with a private office, while DMCC and RAKEZ also offer the middle dedicated-desk tier.

The practical rule is to start from the headcount you need on visas and confirm the allocation with the zone before you commit to a licence, then take the smallest, cheapest office that suits how you actually work. The calculator prices only the employee visas your chosen zone's quota covers — the investor takes one of those slots — and flags anything beyond it rather than quietly billing you for visas the zone would not issue. Ask for a quota increase in writing if you need one; zones price those case by case. Because the office also drives that year-one operating subtotal, getting this input right is what keeps the whole estimate honest.

Investor & employee visa costs

Every free-zone setup includes at least one investor (partner) visa — the residence visa that lets the owner live in the UAE on the strength of the company they have formed. From there, each person you hire adds one employee visa. This is why headcount is one of the three inputs the calculator asks for: visas are usually the second-largest cost after the license and office, and they scale directly with the size of your team rather than sitting as a fixed one-off.

Each visa is really two costs stacked together. The first is a fixed government package — the medical fitness test, the Emirates ID, the residency stamping and the immigration/entry-permit fees — which is broadly the same whoever you are. The second is the free zone’s own per-person establishment cost, the charge the zone levies to allocate a visa against your license. Because that establishment cost is set by the zone, the same visa can cost more in one free zone than another even though the government portion is identical. The calculator adds the zone’s per-person cost to the government package for every visa, so the totals reflect where you actually set up, not a generic national average that would flatter cheaper zones and overstate the premium ones.

The consequence is simple: more people means a proportionally bigger bill. One investor visa plus three employee visas costs roughly four visa packages, and moving between zones shifts the per-person figure up or down across the whole team. One deliberate limit belongs here: this tool costs investor and employee visas only. Visas for dependents — a spouse, children or parents you sponsor — follow a separate process and pricing and are handled in the dedicated visa calculators, not folded into your business-setup total. Keeping them out means the number here stays a clean company-formation figure rather than a mixed family-and-business estimate. If you plan to relocate a family alongside the business, cost those dependent visas separately and add them to your own relocation budget, not to the company’s setup total.

First-year cost vs annual renewal

The first year is the most expensive year your company will ever have, and it is important to understand why — because the number this calculator gives you is the first-year total, not your steady-state annual cost. Year one carries a set of one-off charges you never pay again: opening the corporate bank account, the initial legal and incorporation paperwork, accounting setup, and the first registration of the license and visas. Once they are paid, they are gone, and the following years look meaningfully lighter.

From year two onward you pay to renew, and renewal is cheaper than setup. As a rule of thumb, an annual renewal runs about 60–80% of the first-year cost: you renew the trade license, you keep paying for the office, and you renew each visa as it expires, but you strip out all the incorporation one-offs — the bank setup, the initial legal work and the first registration. A company that cost, say, AED 72,000 to launch might therefore cost somewhere in the region of AED 45,000–58,000 a year to keep running, depending on the zone, the office tier and how many visas you carry.

That gap between setup and renewal is worth planning for from day one. Founders who budget only for the launch cost can be caught out by the recurring bill; founders who assume renewal equals the whole first year over-provision and tie up cash they could deploy in the business. The honest position is the one the calculator takes: it shows you the concrete first-year total you need to get off the ground, and you should hold the 60–80% renewal figure alongside it as the running cost to plan for in every year that follows. Renewal itself is context here, not a tool output — but it is context no founder should ignore.

A worked DMCC example

Numbers make the stack concrete. Take a common starting point: a DMCC company with a Flexi-Desk office and one employee alongside the owner. Here is every line the calculator produces, split into the two buckets and then combined — and every figure below is the tool’s own model, so the subtotals and total tie out exactly.

Now combine the two buckets. The setup subtotal of AED 49,240 plus the operating subtotal of AED 23,000 gives a grand total first-year cost of AED 72,240 — that is, 49,240 + 23,000 = 72,240, exactly. A founder who had budgeted only for the AED 15,000 license would be more than AED 57,000 short of what it actually takes to get this company live and running through its first year.

Change any input and the arithmetic redoes itself instantly. Move to RAKEZ and both the license and the per-visa costs fall; switch the Flexi-Desk for a private office and the rent and the visa quota rise together; add a second and third employee and the visa lines scale up in lockstep. The reference DMCC figure is a starting point to reason from, not a ceiling — the point of the tool is to reprice all of it the moment your own choices differ.

Method, sources & honest limits

This calculator is deliberately clear about where its numbers come from and what it does not claim. The costs are drawn from the published fee schedules of the free zones themselves — DMCC, DIFC, ADGM, RAKEZ and SPC — combined with the standard UAE government visa package (medical test, Emirates ID, residency and immigration fees). The first-year model is a straightforward sum: trade license + investor and employee visas + office rent + one-off professional, legal, accounting and bank-account fees + year-one operating costs (utilities, internet and insurance), split into a setup subtotal and a year-one operating subtotal and combined into a grand total.

Exactly five free zones are modelled — DMCC, DIFC, ADGM, RAKEZ and SPC — chosen to span the price and prestige spectrum from Dubai’s premium financial districts to the country’s most affordable zone. Free-zone fees, visa costs and office rents change over time and vary with the specific activity, package and options you choose, so every figure here is a well-grounded planning estimate rather than a formal quotation. Always confirm the current package price with the zone or a licensed setup agent before you commit.

Three honest limits round this out. First, the tool models the free-zone route only — it does not compute mainland setup, which turns on activity, lease and emirate in ways a package price cannot capture. Second, it shows the first-year total and does not calculate annual renewal costs (plan for roughly 60–80% of year one) or dependent visas, which follow a separate process and are handled in the dedicated visa calculators. Third, this is a planning tool, not legal or business-setup advice: confirm your specifics with the relevant free zone and a qualified adviser before committing capital. Content last verified July 2026.

UAE business setup — frequently asked questions