Mainland Licence from ~AED 14,000: What Moves the Number

The Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism publishes a business setup recommendation wizard that returns average fees for each licence route. On 17 August 2026 it returned about AED 14,000 as the average for a normal licence at a physical Dubai mainland location, excluding the rent-linked supplement, and about the same for the instant licence issued at a virtual location. Both figures are for all nationalities and all legal types on the routes where those apply.

On 22 August 2026 a DET service centre confirmed what the number covers: it is the licence fee, as a single line item that does not decompose. Trade name reservation, initial approval, the memorandum of association, the mandatory immigration establishment file, visas and premises are all charged in addition. That is the honest reading, and it is why a from-figure is the only defensible kind of figure at this stage.

Some activities carry a licence issuance line of their own. Executive Council Resolution No. 13 of 2011, which approves the fees and fines of the Dubai economic department, carries Schedule 1 lines for issuing a licence to conduct a general trading activity at AED 15,000 and a contracting activity at AED 10,000. Both are listed separately from the ordinary licence issuance fee, and the Resolution does not say whether they substitute for it or stack on it — a question to settle with DET before you treat either figure as your licence fee. Fee resolutions are amended; confirm the current schedule. For those considering the cost of company formation, understanding these fees is crucial.

Activity also decides whether the instant route is open to you: it carries a restricted activity list, as does the SME licence. An activity that falls outside those lists puts you on the normal route with its own timetable.

The same wizard prices a sole establishment licence at about AED 8,000 against the roughly AED 14,000 average for the company routes — a difference in the licence fee that follows directly from the form, before anything else in the file changes.

Two further routes are restricted by nationality rather than by activity. The SME licence, for UAE and GCC nationals at a physical location, came back at approximately AED 6,000, and the Intelaq home-business licence for UAE and GCC nationals at approximately AED 1,000. Those are rounded, approximate figures from the same 17 August 2026 capture. If you are not eligible, they are not comparisons — they are other people's prices.

This is the variable that moves the number furthest and appears in the fewest quotes. Across our capture of 2,277 Dubai mainland activities, 1,797 name an external authority whose approval is required — Dubai Municipality, the RTA, the Dubai Health Authority, the UAE Media Council, the Central Bank, TDRA, SIRA, KHDA, the Dubai Land Department and others.

Each of those regulators charges on its own schedule, and those schedules are not small relative to the licence fee. We hold captured rows for many of them and publish none of them, because an approval fee we have not re-verified against the authority's current schedule is a number that will be quoted back to us after it has changed. What we will tell you before you commit is whether your activity carries one, which regulator it is, and whether it lands before or after issuance.

The wizard's total for the normal licence rises with the annual rent you enter, and on our capture the supplement tracked five per cent of the annual rent — at AED 50,000 of rent, an additional AED 2,500. That is a rent-linked charge rather than a fixed fee, which is why any single total quoted for a mainland licence is quietly assuming a rent figure someone chose for you.

The instant route sidesteps this with a virtual location, at the cost of the restricted activity list. Where visas are involved, workspace stops being a pure cost question and becomes a capacity question, because premises drive visa quota.

For comparison on the other side of the market, free zone versus mainland options entry packages published by the zones themselves start around AED 5,000 to 6,000 for a licence with no visa, and rise steeply as visas and physical premises are added. That comparison is about market access as much as price, and it is worked through properly in our free zone versus mainland guide rather than settled by a from-figure.

Because a total is a fiction until four decisions have been made, and publishing a fiction is how the whole category ended up with a credibility problem. Every figure on this page is traceable to a captured row with a date and a source, and none of it includes what we charge.

When the four variables are settled, the number stops moving and can be itemised in full — activity by activity, approval by approval, with the authority's charge shown as the authority's charge. That is a quote, and it is a different document from a blog post.