DED trade license in Dubai. Applied for and managed end to end.

That is the normal starting point, and it is the single thing worth getting right before anything is filed. The activity you register against decides which external approvals you need, what premises you must hold, how many visas you can sponsor and what the whole thing costs — two businesses of the same size can sit in completely different places on all 4. Bring a plain description of what you intend to sell and to whom, and we will map it to the DET activity list on the call. 30 minutes, free, no obligation — and if a free zone serves you better than mainland, you will hear that too.

No. Creative Zone is a private business setup firm. The license itself is issued by Dubai Economy and Tourism, the government department most people still call DED. We prepare and submit your application to them, carry the external approvals your activity triggers and deal with the follow-ups, but the decision to issue always rests with the authority. Anyone who tells you they can guarantee an approval is telling you something they cannot deliver.

We do it. You do not need a portal login, a visit to a service centre or a tracking number to watch. We map your activity, reserve the trade name, prepare the memorandum and shareholder documents, submit the application and handle the back-and-forth if the authority asks for more. You are told what is happening at each stage rather than having to go and look. Where something genuinely needs you in person — biometrics and the medical for your residence visa — we tell you upfront and book it around your dates.

They are the same authority. The Department of Economic Development was renamed Dubai Economy and Tourism, and both names are still in everyday use — including on plenty of current paperwork. A DED trade license and a DET trade license are the same instrument. If you have been quoted for one and are comparing against the other, you are comparing the same thing.

No — neither is a service we offer, and it is better to say so now than after a call. The eTrader license and the freelance permit are specific low-cost permits with their own eligibility rules and their own limits on what they let you do. If what you actually need is a standard DED trade license that lets you invoice properly, hold premises and sponsor visas, that is the conversation we can have.

Yes. Renewals, adding or changing activities, shareholder changes, visa amendments and the Ejari side of a renewal are all things we handle for existing companies, including ones we did not set up. If you only want to look up a license number or check a license status, that is a free lookup on the authority’s own portal and you do not need us for it.

For most activities, no. UAE law now permits 100% foreign ownership across the large majority of commercial and industrial activities on mainland, and the old requirement to give an Emirati partner 51% no longer applies to them. A small number of activities with strategic impact still require an Emirati partner, and some branch structures require a UAE National Service Agent, which is a different arrangement with no equity attached. We confirm which applies to your specific activity on the first call rather than leaving you to assume.

The short answer is who you are allowed to sell to. A mainland company registered with DED can trade directly with customers anywhere in the UAE and can bid for government contracts, but it requires physical premises with a registered Ejari tenancy. A free zone company is cheaper and faster to set up and usually needs only a flexi-desk, but selling into the UAE market means going through a distributor or opening a mainland branch. If your customers are UAE businesses and consumers, that points to mainland. If they are international, it usually does not.

We do not publish a mainland figure, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Mainland cost is driven by things that are specific to you: the activity and which external approvals it triggers, the premises your activity and visa count require, the Ejari and rent behind that, how many residence visas you need, and whether your structure needs a service agent. A published number would have to assume all of those, and the assumption is where the gap between the quoted price and the real one appears. On the first call we map your actual requirements and put a fully itemised figure in writing. Payment plans are available, so the cost can be spread rather than paid up front.

Typically 2–5 working days for the license itself once your documentation is complete and no external approval is outstanding. What extends it is everything around it: securing premises and registering Ejari, and any Municipality, Civil Defence or Police approvals your activity requires, where the regulator sets the timeline rather than DED. Residence visas add roughly 1–2 weeks after the license is issued. We tell you at the proposal stage which of those apply to you.

Ejari is Dubai’s official tenancy contract registration system, and for mainland it is rarely something you can skip. A trade license is generally issued against a registered address, so in most cases the tenancy contract is registered through Ejari before the DED license can be issued or renewed. This is the single most common reason a mainland setup stalls — the license application is ready and the premises are not. We plan the premises step alongside the license rather than after it.

Your activity has to match what you actually do, and on mainland it does more work than people expect: it determines which external approvals you need, what your premises must satisfy, and what a bank will accept when you open an account. The DED activity list runs to thousands of activities and several of them will look like a fit for your business. Choosing the wrong one is amendable but costs time and fees. Food and beverage is the clearest example: a cafe or restaurant license carries municipality and food safety requirements that a trading or consultancy license does not, and those requirements shape your premises as much as your budget. We map your activity with you on the first call and list the ones you may want to add later, since most licenses include several in the base fee.

There is no fixed cap the way there is on most free zone packages. Your allocation is driven by the size of your premises — broadly, the more office space you hold, the more residence visas you can sponsor. That is one of the reasons the premises decision and the visa decision have to be made together rather than in sequence, and it is a genuine advantage of mainland if you intend to hire.

Bank onboarding is where most new companies stall, and it depends on your activity, your structure and how the file is presented. We prepare the application to the standard UAE banks expect and introduce you to banks that accept your profile. No consultant can guarantee a bank’s decision, and you should be wary of any who claims otherwise.

Corporate tax applies to UAE businesses on taxable profit above the relevant threshold, and VAT registration is currently required once your taxable supplies and imports exceed AED 375,000, or are expected to. Thresholds and rules are set by the FTA and can change, so we confirm your position rather than leaving you to assume it. Both sit with CZTA inside the same group, so registration and the accounting behind it are handled by the same people who set the company up rather than passed to a third party.