Dubai company setup and the 9 percent corporate tax

UAE corporate tax is nine percent, and it applies to the part of the annual profit above AED 375,000. Below that line the rate is zero. That single sentence decides how a small company should read every number that follows: a profit of AED 400,000 is not taxed on AED 400,000, it is taxed on AED 25,000, which comes to AED 2,250.

What the tax comes to at different profits

Amounts in AED a year, as of 2 September 2026. The taxable portion is the profit minus AED 375,000; the last column is nine percent of that portion. No case count applies: these are worked examples of a published rate, not measured company results.

The shape of that table is the whole point. Between AED 375,000 and AED 400,000 of profit the tax goes from nothing to AED 2,250, not from nothing to AED 36,000, because only the AED 25,000 above the line is taxed. At AED 1,000,000 of profit the taxable portion is AED 625,000 and the tax is AED 56,250, which is still under six percent of the whole profit. The nine percent is a rate on a slice, and reading it as a rate on the total overstates the bill at every profit in the table.

The line is a threshold, not a cliff

A company that earns one dirham more than AED 375,000 does not suddenly owe nine percent of everything. It owes nine percent of that one dirham. This matters most in the first year, when a young trading company often lands close to the line and someone suggests holding invoices back to stay under it. Holding back AED 25,000 of revenue to avoid AED 2,250 of tax costs AED 22,750 of profit to save AED 2,250 of tax, and the arithmetic never favours it.

Health cover for low paid staff

One cost is regularly left out of a first year budget: the basic health plan for employees earning under AED 4,000 a month. It runs AED 550 to AED 1,000 a year per employee, with cover capped at AED 150,000 a year.

Amounts in AED, as of 2 September 2026.

Two readings of the same plan are worth keeping apart. The AED 550 to AED 1,000 is what the company pays each year for one employee. The AED 150,000 is what the plan pays out in a year at most. They are not two versions of the same number, and the second is a ceiling on cover rather than a cost to anyone.

How long the setup takes

The visa side of a company setup runs on the same clock as any other residence. The medical result comes back in 24 Stunden, the Emirates ID follows 5 bis 10 Werktage nach der Biometrie after the biometrics, the whole visa run takes 2 bis 3 Wochen, and with a bank account opened alongside it plan for 4 bis 6 Wochen. Those are periods of time, not amounts, and for a company the last one usually governs, because an account is what turns a licence into a working business.

What this page deliberately does not say

It names no licence fee, no free zone package price, no office or flexi desk cost and no visa quota. Those figures are not in the data set behind this page, and free zone pricing in particular changes package by package, which is exactly the kind of number that goes stale on a page and misleads a year later. What is here is the tax arithmetic, the basic health plan, the identity card and the medical, all of which we can point at.

Source and how these numbers were built

Rate, threshold, fees and periods as of 2 September 2026, from our running list of UAE fees and processing times. Every figure in the tax table is calculated from two published numbers, the nine percent rate and the AED 375,000 threshold, and can be recomputed line by line. Rule changes here are expensive to miss, so we post them the day they land on our Telegram channel, t.me/dxbradar.

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