Mainland business setup in Dubai. Managed end to end.

Yes — that is the normal starting point, and it is the decision the call is most useful for. Begin with what the business actually does and where your customers will be, and the jurisdiction follows from that. Deciding on mainland first and then working backwards to see whether your activity, premises and budget fit it is how people end up paying for a structure they did not need. We are a partnered CSP across almost every UAE free zone as well as handling mainland, so the recommendation is based on your business rather than on which license we would rather sell. If free zone is the better answer for you, we will say so.

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We do not publish a mainland figure, and you should be wary of anyone who does.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 two to five 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 one to two 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.