A UAE company licence through SwiftHub starts at AED 4,499 and reaches AED 12,900 for a Dubai address. Those are licence prices. They are not what your first year costs, and the gap between the two is where most people are caught out.
The calculator above prices our side of the job exactly, because our fees are the part we actually control. What it will not do is invent the rest. The government and zone charges that make up the remainder move with your nationality, your activity and whether you are standing inside the UAE when you apply, and no calculator on any website knows those things about you before you have said them out loud. What the authorities publish for the licence itself, DET's fee by legal form and each zone's own price, is set out on business license cost.
Why every quote you have been given is a different number
If you have collected three quotes, you probably have three numbers that look nothing like each other. That is usually not dishonesty. It is three consultants drawing the line around "setup cost" in three different places.
- What is bundled. One quote is the licence alone. The next includes the establishment card and one visa. The third has a year of desk space in it because the zone would not issue the visa quota without one.
- Promotional pricing. Free zones run offers, and they expire. A figure written into a blog post in March is not a price in September, which is why every number on this page carries the date it was last reviewed.
- Government charges nobody can quote blind. An entry permit for someone already in the country on a visit visa is a different process, at a different cost, from one issued to someone flying in. Same company, same zone, different invoice.
So the useful question is not "what does it cost". It is "what is in your number, and what have you left out". The table and the list below are our answer to both.
What the licence itself costs
Two columns, deliberately. The left is what we charge. The right is what the authority publishes on its own website. They are different kinds of fact and adding them together would produce a number that means nothing.
| Jurisdiction | Through SwiftHub, from | What the authority publishes |
|---|---|---|
| Ajman Media City, Ajman | AED 4,499 | Business Club: AED 4,999. Visionary: AED 12,999. Pioneer: AED 17,999. Innovator: AED 22,999 |
| SPC Free Zone, Sharjah | AED 4,999 | E-commerce, publishing or media licence: AED 5,750 |
| SHAMS, Sharjah | AED 5,750 | Media or e-commerce licence, from: AED 5,760. Trader Package (e-commerce plus general trading): AED 6,500. Trading or service licence, no visa quota: AED 11,000 |
| RAKEZ, Ras Al Khaimah | AED 6,000 | Basic package: AED 6,000. All-inclusive package with one residence visa: AED 14,000. Lite package: AED 12,000 |
| IFZA, Dubai | AED 12,900 | No public rate card. You have to ask. |
| Dubai mainland | AED 10,999 | No single figure. Dubai's fees stack by activity, legal form and trade name, so the licence is priced per file. |
Two of those are worth sitting with. Our Ajman Media City and SPC entry packages come in below the zones' own published starting prices, which you can check at amc.gov.ae and spcfz.ae in about ten seconds. And IFZA publishes nothing at all, so anyone quoting you an IFZA "official rate" is quoting you something else.
The costs that arrive after the licence
This is the list that turns a licence price into a first-year cost. We have not put figures against these because we bill them at cost, with the receipt, and the amounts depend on facts about you rather than facts about the zone.
- Establishment card. Immigration will not process a single visa until the company holds one. It is not optional and it is rarely mentioned in a licence quote.
- Visa allocation. Some zones include a visa quota in the package. Others sell it separately, and a few tie it to the size of the desk or office you lease, which turns your third hire into a property decision.
- Per person, per visa. Entry permit, status change if the person is already in the country, medical screening, Emirates ID. Four separate government steps, each with its own fee, repeated for every employee and every dependant.
- Office or desk. A flexi-desk is enough for many activities. Some licences, and most visa quotas above a handful of people, need real square metres and a registered lease.
- Attestation and legal translation. Only if your documents need it, which usually depends on which country issued them.
- Corporate tax registration. Required whether or not you make a profit. Tax is charged at 9% on profit above AED 375,000, but the registration is universal, and the penalty for registering late is not small.
A worked example: one founder, one visa
Say you are setting up alone at SPC Free Zone, you need a residence visa for yourself, and you want the tax registration and a bank account handled rather than done yourself. Here is our half of it, line by line.
| What you are paying us for | SwiftHub fee |
|---|---|
| SPC Free Zone basic package | From AED 4,999 |
| Residence visa, our fees for one person | From AED 1,300 |
| Corporate tax / VAT registration | AED 600 |
| Bank account assistance, low-risk activity | AED 1,000 |
| What SwiftHub charges | From AED 7,899 |
The visa line covers typing, unemployment insurance, portal access and health cover from AED 500. It does not cover the entry permit, the medical or the Emirates ID, which are government charges we pass through at cost. That is why the line above says "from" and why this page does not end with a single confident total.
When the cheapest licence is the wrong answer
The calculator will happily show you that Ajman Media City is the cheapest way to hold a UAE licence. For a consultant with one client and no staff, it often is. For plenty of other people it is the wrong purchase at a good price.
- You need to sell to the UAE market. A free zone company trades inside its zone and internationally. Selling directly to customers on the mainland means either a mainland licence or a distributor, and the second one costs more than the licence you saved on.
- Your clients care where you are registered. Some corporates and most government tenders will not contract with a company in a zone they have not heard of. That is not a rule anywhere, it is just what happens.
- You are hiring. Check whether the visa quota is tied to the facility before you choose on licence price. SPC does not cap visas per licence, which is a genuinely different position from most zones.
- Your activity needs external approval. Food, health, education, financial services and a long tail of others need a regulator's sign-off that the zone cannot give you. The licence is the cheap part of those setups.
We have written the honest comparison across all of them on the free zone comparison page, including where another zone beats the one we would earn more on.
How an estimate becomes a fixed quote
The number above stops moving once we know four things: your activity, your visa count, where each person is applying from, and whether your documents need attestation. That usually takes one conversation.
- We check the activity against the zone's list. Roughly one setup in five starts with someone wanting an activity the zone they picked does not license.
- We price the government charges for your specific people. Nationality and current location both change the immigration route, and therefore the cost.
- You get a written quote with the pass-through costs itemised. Our fee and the government charges appear as separate lines, so you can see which is which.
- Nothing is filed until you have agreed the number. The quote is confirmed before we submit anything, which is the point at which the estimate stops being an estimate.
What we need from you to price it exactly
- Passport copy for every shareholder and every visa applicant
- Your current visa status in the UAE, if you are already here
- Three preferred trade names, in order
- A plain description of what the business will actually do
- Whether anyone needs a family visa in the first year
That is enough to turn the estimate into a quote. It is not enough for us to file anything, which is deliberate: nobody should be handing over certified documents to a consultancy before they have seen a written number.
Questions people ask before they commit
No. The result renders before you have typed anything and you can leave with it. There is an optional form underneath if you want the estimate emailed to you, and it is genuinely optional. Gating a price behind a form is a way of making you call, not a way of giving you a better answer.
Because one of the components is a floor rather than a fixed fee. Health cover starts at AED 500 per person and rises with age and the level of cover, so anything containing it is a starting figure. We would rather show the word than quietly drop it.
Government and zone charges. Specifically: the establishment card, visa allocation where the zone charges for it, and the per-person immigration steps (entry permit, status change, medical, Emirates ID). Plus office or desk rent if your activity or visa count requires it, and attestation if your documents need it. We bill all of those at cost with the receipt attached.
Once we know your nationality, your activity and where each visa applicant is applying from, yes, in writing. Before that, no, and neither can anyone else. A first-year figure quoted to a stranger is a marketing number, and it is almost always the low end of a range presented as if it were the middle.
They register for it like everyone else. A qualifying free zone person can access a 0% rate on qualifying income, but the registration obligation is universal and the conditions are specific. The rate is 9% on profit above AED 375,000. The Federal Tax Authority publishes the current rules at tax.gov.ae, and we handle the registration for AED 600.
Registration becomes mandatory once your taxable turnover crosses AED 375,000 in a rolling twelve months. You may register voluntarily from AED 187,500, which is sometimes worth doing if your customers are VAT-registered businesses. Most first-year companies are below both.
Not in our packages, and you should assume not in anyone else's unless it says so in writing. Ajman Media City is the clearest exception in the market: it publishes tiers by visa count, so the number of visas is in the licence price rather than beside it. Our own figures keep the licence and the visa work as separate lines so you can see what each one costs.
The licence renews annually and the visas run on their own cycle, usually two years. Ajman Media City is unusual in publishing its renewal prices alongside its setup prices, and they are lower than the first year. Most zones do not, so ask what year two looks like before you sign for year one. It is the question that separates a cheap setup from a cheap company.
Talk to someone who has priced this before
We have been setting up UAE companies for fourteen years. If you want the government charges priced for your specific case, send us the estimate from the calculator above or get in touch and we will come back with a written quote that separates our fee from the pass-through costs.