What does a trade licence in Dubai actually cost?
There is no single number, and anyone giving you one without asking about your activity, visa needs and where you will trade is guessing. The cost is a stack — licence fee, name reservation and approvals, workspace, immigration card, visas, and the consultant's fee — and the honest answer is to have every one of those quoted in writing before you pay anything.
What the total is made of
We deliberately do not publish figures for the government items. They differ by authority and change, and a stale number on a web page is how a client ends up being told a different price on a call.
- Licence fee — varies substantially by authority, activity and free zone
- Trade name reservation and initial approval
- Workspace — a flexi-desk in a free zone package, or a tenancy plus Ejari registration on the mainland
- Establishment (immigration) card, required before you can apply for any visa
- Visa costs per person, including medical and Emirates ID
- Your consultant's service fee
- Renewal in year two, which rarely matches year one
Where the surprises usually come from
Three items account for most of them. Visa quota — a cheap package that allows one visa is not cheap if you need four. Workspace — mainland requires a real tenancy and Ejari, which some quotes omit entirely. And renewal — a first-year discount is common, and the second-year figure is the one that matters.
How we price it
Our business setup service starts at AED 4,999. That is our fee for handling the licence setup itself; government fees are passed on at cost, and anything beyond the licence — visas, banking, Ejari, marketplace onboarding — is quoted once we know what you actually need.
We split it that way because bundling our fee into a single headline number is exactly what makes these quotes impossible to compare.