The One Freezone Passport: One Licence Across Dubai's Free Zones

The Dubai Free Zones Council announced the initiative on 22 July 2025. The Dubai Media Office described it as an initiative aimed at enhancing the ease of doing business across Dubai's free zones, allowing businesses to maintain a single licence while accessing multiple free zones — using facilities in another zone without obtaining an additional licence there.

The announcement was made alongside the first company to use it. Louis Vuitton retained its warehouse operations in Jebel Ali free zone versus mainland comparison and established a corporate office at One Za'abeel in DWTC Free Zone. The Media Office stated that the expansion licensing was completed in five days.

The initiative is positioned within the Dubai Economic Agenda D33. Officials quoted in the announcement framed it in terms of Dubai's attractiveness to global enterprises rather than in terms of any specific fee or timetable, and no schedule of charges was published with it.

The position before the announcement was straightforward and expensive: as Fragomen put it, businesses would need to apply for a separate licence for each zone. A company operating a warehouse in one zone and an office in another therefore held two licences, filed against two registers, renewed on two cycles and dealt with two authorities. This highlights the importance of understanding what is UAE trade licence requirements.

The passport collapses that into one licence with a second operating location. It is worth being precise about the claim: this is not a merger of Dubai's free zones into a single jurisdiction, and it does not change which authority regulates the facility you occupy. It changes how many licences you hold.

The Dubai Free Zones Council has not, at the time of writing, published a consolidated public rulebook for the scheme. What is in circulation comes from professional firms describing it for clients, and the conditions they set out are consistent with each other and consistently restrictive.

Of the conditions above, the one that constrains most plans is the restriction on staff. A second location you cannot staff from that location is a facility rather than an operation, which fits a warehouse, a showroom-adjacent office, or a piece of specialised infrastructure, and does not fit opening a second team.

Fragomen noted in August 2025 that various regulatory points were expected to be clarified in future. That remains the honest position on the immigration mechanics: how establishment cards, visa quotas and residence sponsorship interact with a secondary location is not something a public source settles, and it should be confirmed with the zones involved rather than inferred.

The profile the scheme was built around is visible in its first user: an established company, one activity, one ownership structure, needing two physically different kinds of space in two different zones. Storage in one place, a corporate address in another.

It is not a setup route. A company being formed now chooses one zone and licenses there; the passport is a mechanism for an existing licence-holder to extend. Nor is it a substitute for the DED route to onshore licensing where the underlying need is to trade inside the UAE domestic market, which is a different question about market access rather than about premises.