General Trading vs Naming Your Products: Scope and Cost

In the registers we have captured, general trading appears once per jurisdiction, under the wholesale trade group, and every authority puts it in a class of its own: Ajman free zone versus mainland comparison files it under a General Trading licence type, RAKEZ under a General Trading licence, IFZA under Trade, DMCC as a special licence. Dubai mainland carries both a general trading activity and a general trading wholesalers activity under the same ISIC family.

DMCC's own register also records a minimum share capital of AED 1,000,000 against its general trading activity. That condition has nothing to do with fees and everything to do with whether the route is open to you at all. Conditions like that are attached to the activity, not to the company, which is why they surface late for people who chose the activity last.

At DMCC, general trading is a special licence with its own price line. The standard licence price carries a note that it does not apply to General Trading, so the cost is not the standard price plus a small activity fee.

DMCC's schedule of charges lists the General Trading Licence at AED 50,265 per annum. The standard trading and service licence is AED 20,265 for one year, and that price expressly does not apply to General Trading. New company registration is also higher for general trading: AED 29,000 one time, against AED 9,000 listed for standard activities. DMCC revises its schedule, so check the current figures before budgeting.

Dubai mainland company formation route names the category in legislation rather than in a schedule of charges. Executive Council Resolution No. 13 of 2011, approving the fees and fines of the economic department, carries a Schedule 1 line for issuance of a licence to conduct a general trading activity at AED 15,000, and a contracting equivalent at AED 10,000. Both sit as separate line items alongside the ordinary licence issuance fee, and the Resolution does not say whether they substitute for that fee or stack on it, so confirm with DET which applies before you build a total on it. Fee resolutions are amended, so confirm the current schedule too.

The scope is broad but not universal, and the exclusions are the commercially interesting part. DMCC's condition on the general trading licence is that the company may select general trading to access all activities except oil and gas activities and regulated activities that require third-party approvals.

Read that again in the context of the approval map: across our Dubai mainland capture, 1,797 of 2,277 activities name an external authority. Whole categories of goods (food, pharmaceuticals, telecoms equipment, security equipment, vehicles, tobacco products) carry a named regulator. General trading does not carry you past any of them. If the reason you wanted breadth was to move into a regulated line later without an amendment, general trading does not do the job you bought it for.

Most authorities let a licence carry several activities, and how they charge for the extras is the whole comparison. Sharjah Publishing City's published from-price for a one-year licence with no residence visas for the founding team includes up to five business activities. Meydan charges nothing for additional activities while they stay within three pricing groups, then about AED 1,000 for every activity in each further group. DMCC charges an amendment fee per request and, beyond six activities sharing the same first two digits of the activity code, roughly AED 1,500 per additional activity per year. Those are approximate, rounded figures from captures made in August 2026.

At DMCC the extras are cheap while they stay related. Beyond six activities sharing the first two digits of the code, each costs AED 1,500 a year. A new division with the same first digit costs AED 10,000 a year, and a completely different division costs AED 20,265 a year, the price of the base licence. Three activities with completely different first two digits therefore cost more in annual fees than the AED 50,265 general trading licence, though the higher one-time registration charge pushes the break-even later. General trading only makes sense if the goods are unregulated and you meet the category's own conditions.