Question
What is an establishment card and do I need one?
The short answer
An establishment card — also called an immigration card or an immigration establishment file — is the registration that connects your company to the immigration authority so that the company can sponsor entry permits and residence visas. It is separate from the trade licence and separate from any labour file. You need one if the company will sponsor anybody at all, including its own owner; you do not need one if nobody will be sponsored under it. On the federal channel, ICP publishes the issuing service's own fee lines as AED 100 to apply, AED 100 per year of issuance and AED 100 for smart services, with cancellation published at AED 50 for the card, AED 50 to cancel the electronic-system subscription and AED 100 for smart services. Free zones that run their own immigration channel publish their own charges, and those are materially different from these.
What it actually enables
Three things follow from having one: the company can be named as sponsor on entry permits, it can be named as sponsor on residence permits, and it gets an account in the authority's electronic system through which those transactions are filed.
Without it, the licence is a licence and nothing more. The company exists, it can trade, and it cannot put anybody on a visa.
Where it sits in the sequence
- After the trade licence, because the card is issued against the licensed entity.
- Before any entry permit or residence visa, because the sponsor has to exist in the immigration system first.
- Alongside, not instead of, the labour registration where the activity and jurisdiction require one — labour and immigration are different authorities and different files.
- Renewed on its own cycle, and amended on its own service when the entity's details or its service categories change.
The lines that are not the small ones
The per-year and application fees above are small and exact because the authority publishes them that way. They are not the whole picture and should not be read as the cost of the card.
ICP separately publishes a subscription to its electronic establishment system and a guarantee held against that subscription, both materially larger than the annual fee. Amendments have their own charges — adding a service category, or adding and increasing visit-entry-visa privileges, are separately priced services. And free zones bundle or unbundle the card so differently that the figure on a zone's package tells you almost nothing about the figure on another's.
There are also published penalties rather than fees. Dubai's channel publishes a late fine on the establishment card of AED 100 per month, and ICP publishes fines against establishments that breach the conditions attached to the card or misuse its smart services — those are considerably larger and we do not quote them as though they were prices.
Where this stops
Related
Questions that come up next
Sources
Where this comes from
- ICP — Issuing an Establishment Card (service fees)
- ICP — Renewal of Establishment Card (service fees)
- ICP — Cancellation of Establishment Card (service fees)
- ICP — Amend/Add To Establishment Card (service fees)
- Velarozone cost catalogue — establishment-card lines captured per jurisdiction, including the Dubai channel's published late fine
This page is general information about UAE business setup, not legal, tax, immigration, or banking advice. Rules, fees, permitted activities, and bank policies can change. Final eligibility depends on your facts and the applicable rules at the time of application.