Small Business Relief Now Runs to 2029, Not 2026

Ministerial Decision No. 73 of 2023 set the AED 3 million revenue threshold and confined it to tax periods ending before or on 31 December 2026. Ministerial Decision No. 131 of 2026, issued on 29 July 2026, replaced Clause (2) of Article (2) with new wording: the threshold applies to tax periods commencing on or after 1 June 2023 and continues to apply to subsequent tax periods that end on or before 31 December 2029. The decision took effect the day after its publication.

The Federal Tax Authority's Small Business Relief guide predates the amendment, so it still shows the 2026 end date. The decision text sets the date, not the guide. Anything published before 29 July 2026 that gives an end date is stale on that point, and that includes earlier versions of this page.

Nothing else about the relief moved. Decision No. 131 replaces one clause only, Clause (2) of Article (2) of Decision No. 73. The revenue threshold, the backward-looking test, the exclusions and the election mechanics are unchanged.

The revenue test looks backwards as well as at the current period. Once the AED 3 million threshold has been exceeded in any tax period, the relief is no longer available, including in a later period where revenue happens to fall back below it.

A Qualifying Free Zone Person cannot claim Small Business Relief. This is not a penalty; the two regimes are alternatives, and a QFZP already has a 0% rate on its qualifying income.

Where it causes confusion is with free-zone companies that are not QFZPs: a free-zone licence does not by itself make a company a Qualifying Free Zone Person. An entity licensed inside a zone that does not meet the QFZP conditions is not automatically shut out of Small Business Relief by virtue of its address. Which regime applies is a question about the company's activities and how it meets the conditions, not about where it is registered.

The relief reduces both tax and compliance burden, since eligible businesses file a simplified return. When it falls away, a business that has been operating inside it moves to ordinary corporate tax compliance: full return, taxable income properly computed, records to support it.

The extra three years change the timing of that transition, not its nature. The work that makes it uneventful is bookkeeping done during the year rather than reconstructed after it, and a business that has been keeping minimal records because the relief made precision unnecessary is the one for which the first post-relief filing is expensive. That is now a 2030 problem rather than a 2027 one for a calendar-year business, which is an argument for using the time rather than for forgetting about it.