Dubai Freelance Visa vs Free Zone Company: 2026 Costs and Who Actually Wins
Every comparison of the Dubai freelance permit against a free zone company is a comparison of licence prices, and the licence price is the least interesting number in the decision. The two routes make you a different kind of taxpayer under UAE corporate tax law, and the relief that currently hides that difference stops applying to tax periods ending after 31 December 2026.
Ask which is cheaper and you get a spread: a freelance permit from roughly AED 5,750, a free zone company package from roughly AED 6,000 in Ras Al Khaimah upwards. The two products sit close together inside a single emirate, and which one an agency recommends tends to depend on which one it sells.
For a solo freelancer with turnover under AED 1 million a year, the freelance permit wins on structure rather than price: as a natural person you sit outside UAE corporate tax altogether, with nothing to register for it, nothing to elect and no annual return to file. A free zone company is a juridical person from day one. It is currently sheltered by Small Business Relief up to AED 3 million of revenue, but that relief only covers tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2026 and no extension has been announced. After it lapses the company either meets the full Qualifying Free Zone Person conditions, audited IFRS financials included, or pays 9% on taxable income above AED 375,000.
The licence price is the part of the decision that matters least
Here is what the routes cost, as reported by UAE formation and freezone-comparison guides rather than read off each authority’s own fee schedule. Treat these as the shape of the market, not as quotes.
| Route | Reported cost | What it actually buys |
|---|---|---|
| SHAMS, Ajman Free Zone, RAKEZ freelance permit | From roughly AED 5,750-6,000 | Permit only. Residence visa, establishment card, medical and Emirates ID are separate |
| GoFreelance (TECOM/DDA) | Roughly AED 7,500 for the permit alone | The Dubai-branded permit. Establishment card reported around AED 2,000, residence visa around AED 3,300-6,340 on top |
| Fujairah Creative City freelance permit | Roughly AED 7,500-15,000 | Wide reported spread depending on package and visa inclusion |
| RAKEZ free zone company | Roughly AED 6,000-8,240 before visa costs | A juridical person for roughly what a permit costs, on a Ras Al Khaimah trade licence |
| IFZA free zone company | Roughly AED 9,000-14,000 depending on package and visa allocation | The Dubai-addressed company package, at the top of the free zone range |
| DET mainland licence | Roughly AED 15,000-25,000+ | Trading onshore with UAE clients without a free zone intermediary |
Sources: UAE formation-agency and freezone-comparison cost guides, not the authorities’ own fee schedules. Treat every figure as indicative: guides disagree with each other by several thousand dirhams on the same zone, and our earlier check for the UAE free zone bank account piece put IFZA’s zero-visa package at roughly AED 12,900. That figure and the range above are not directly comparable: ours measured a package with no visa allocation, while this range rises precisely as visas are added. Verified 2026-07-28.
Across the free zone routes the whole spread runs from roughly AED 5,750 to AED 15,000, and in Ras Al Khaimah the permit and the company sit within about AED 1,500 of each other. In Dubai the gap is wider, from roughly AED 1,500 to AED 6,500 depending on which IFZA package you are quoted against GoFreelance. The mainland licence sits above all of it, but it answers a different question, trading onshore with UAE clients.
For anyone earning enough to consider relocating to Dubai in the first place, none of those figures is a decision variable. They are a rounding error against Dubai rent, which property guides put at roughly AED 35,000 a year for a studio in International City and AED 70,000-100,000 for a one-bedroom in Downtown. A single month of the wrong apartment costs more than the entire licence decision. The number that deserves the attention is the tax one.
The real fork: which kind of taxpayer you become
This is where the two routes stop being variants of each other.
A freelance permit makes you a natural person doing business. Under Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023, in force since 1 June 2023, business activity carried on by a natural person is subject to UAE corporate tax only where total turnover from that activity exceeds AED 1,000,000 within a Gregorian calendar year. That figure comes from concordant tax-advisory summaries of the decision, PwC’s among them, rather than from the decision text itself, which we could not read at source; it is the load-bearing number of this article and worth confirming with an adviser before building a plan on it. Below that line you are not a taxable person for corporate tax purposes at all: nothing to register for, nothing to elect, no corporate tax return. VAT is a separate question with its own threshold, covered below. The same decision keeps wages, personal investment income and real estate investment income outside the scope, on the same summaries.
A free zone company makes you a juridical person, and juridical persons are inside the corporate tax net from incorporation regardless of what they earn. The standard rate structure is 0% on taxable income up to AED 375,000 and 9% above it, with registration and an annual return either way.
The permit asks the tax authority to notice you only once you pass AED 1 million of turnover. The company introduces itself on day one and files every year afterwards, whatever it earned. Today that difference is paperwork. From 2027 it becomes paperwork plus, for anyone with taxable income above AED 375,000, an actual tax bill.
The relief that is currently hiding the difference, and its expiry date
Right now most people comparing the two routes conclude the tax question is a wash, and for 2026 they are close to right. The reason is Small Business Relief, issued as Ministerial Decision No. 73 of 2023 on 3 April 2023: a resident taxable person whose revenue is AED 3,000,000 or less in the current and all previous tax periods can elect to treat taxable income as zero. A free zone company under AED 3 million of revenue therefore pays nothing, same as the freelancer, and the comparison collapses.
Three things about that relief decide the next two years.
It is temporary and its end date is now close. The Ministry of Finance’s own wording is that the threshold applies to tax periods starting on or after 1 June 2023 and continues to apply only to subsequent tax periods that end before or on 31 December 2026. As of mid-2026 no extension has been announced. For a company on a calendar year, the tax period beginning 1 January 2027 is outside it.
It is not automatic. DLA Piper’s note on the decision is explicit that eligible businesses must register and elect for the relief with the Federal Tax Authority. A company that assumed it applied by default and never elected has been paying the standard treatment without knowing.
It excludes exactly the free zone companies that market themselves on 0%. Qualifying Free Zone Persons are carved out of Small Business Relief, along with constituent entities of multinational groups above AED 3.15 billion of consolidated revenue. So a free zone company has to pick a lane: claim QFZP status and live with its conditions, or stay outside it and lean on a relief that expires in December.
What happens to each route in 2027
| Situation | Freelance permit (natural person) | Free zone company (juridical person) |
|---|---|---|
| Turnover under AED 1,000,000 | Outside corporate tax. No registration, no return, no audit | Registered and filing. 0% up to AED 375,000 taxable income, 9% above, unless QFZP conditions are met |
| Turnover AED 1-3 million | Taxable person. 0% up to AED 375,000, 9% above. Small Business Relief was available while it lasted | Same rate structure, plus the QFZP route as an alternative to 9% |
| Keeping 0% above AED 375,000 | Not available. The rate structure is the rate structure | Possible via Qualifying Free Zone Person status: real substance in the zone, qualifying income, transfer pricing compliance, de minimis limit on non-qualifying revenue, and audited IFRS financial statements |
| Slipping on a QFZP condition | Not applicable | Reportedly costs qualifying status for that tax period and the following four, five years in total |
Sources: Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023 for the AED 1M natural-person threshold, via concordant tax-advisory summaries including PwC rather than the decision text; Ministerial Decision No. 73 of 2023 and the UAE Ministry of Finance’s own statement for Small Business Relief; QFZP conditions from our earlier check on tax-advisory summaries of Ministerial Decision 229 of 2025, not the original decision. Verified 2026-07-28.
Read down the first column and the freelance permit’s advantage is that it has almost nothing to say. That is the point, and it is worth being precise about how much of it is tax and how much is paperwork.
Below AED 375,000 of taxable income, the company pays nothing in 2027 either, with or without Small Business Relief. What it still owes at that level is a corporate tax registration, an annual return and the accountant who prepares it, none of which the permit holder has. Above AED 375,000 the gap turns into cash. Take a freelancer billing AED 900,000 a year with AED 700,000 of taxable income after costs: as a natural person the turnover sits under AED 1 million, so corporate tax does not reach them at all. At that revenue they are VAT-registered either way, so the real comparison is VAT alone against VAT plus corporate tax, plus the registration and the annual return that come with it. On those numbers the same person through a free zone company, once the relief has lapsed and without QFZP status, pays 9% on the AED 325,000 above the band, about AED 29,250 a year, for a structure chosen over a licence price difference measured in low thousands.
VAT sits on top of both and does not care which you chose. Registration is mandatory once taxable supplies and imports exceed AED 375,000 over the preceding twelve months, voluntary from AED 187,500, with a fixed AED 10,000 penalty for registering late, per the Federal Tax Authority. That AED 375,000 is a coincidence of arithmetic, not the same threshold as the corporate tax band above: one is measured on revenue and triggers VAT registration, the other is measured on taxable income and decides the rate. Whether your invoices to foreign clients are taxable supplies at all depends on place-of-supply rules that are worth asking an adviser about before assuming either answer.
Crossing AED 1 million does not force you into a company
This is the obvious objection to everything above, and it deserves a straight answer, because most people choosing a structure are choosing it for the version of themselves that earns more than they do now.
It makes you a taxable natural person, which is a different thing from a company: you register for corporate tax and file a return, still without incorporating anything. The rate structure that then applies is the same one the company has been living under all along, 0% on taxable income up to AED 375,000 and 9% above it. What you have avoided in the meantime is every year of filing before that point, and what you keep afterwards is the absence of a company: no corporate formation to maintain, no separate legal person, no audited accounts to consider, no QFZP conditions to re-earn.
Between AED 1 million and AED 3 million of revenue, a natural person can also elect Small Business Relief on the same terms as anyone else, which is worth knowing while it lasts and worth forgetting from 2027.
The practical consequence is that the permit is not a decision you have to unwind at a specific revenue level. The moment that forces a company is structural rather than numerical, and it is in the list below.
What the permit cannot do
The permit wins on simplicity because it is a smaller thing. Its limits are real and they arrive suddenly. The scope below is as described by free zone FAQs and UAE formation guides rather than by a single published rule, and it is consistent across them, but confirm the detail that matters to you with the zone itself before relying on it.
- ✓
You trade under your own name, not a brand. A freelance permit authorises a named individual. If the business needs to be called something other than you, that is a company.
- ✓
You cannot hire employees on it. Subcontracting is described as acceptable, employment is not. The first hire is the moment the permit stops fitting, and it is a re-formation, not an upgrade.
- ✓
It is scoped to one activity. A second, unrelated line of business is a second licensing question rather than something you simply start doing.
- ✓
It has no shares. No co-founder, no equity, no entity to sell later. Any client, platform or investor that requires a contracting company rather than an individual rules the permit out on its own.
- ✓
It still lets you sponsor dependents, so family sponsorship is not the dividing line here. Employment and ownership are.
Residency is a separate purchase, and the government has published its own price for a serious freelancer
The most common misreading of both routes is treating the licence as the visa. A permit authorises the work. The residence visa is a separate document, with its own establishment card, medical test, Emirates ID and mandatory health insurance, and the reported AED 3,300-6,340 visa cost sits on top of every permit figure above.
The route worth knowing about is the Green Residency for self-employment, because it is where the UAE states its own view of what a viable freelancer looks like. Per the Federal Authority for Identity and Citizenship, it runs five years, renewable, self-sponsored with no employer, and lets you sponsor dependents. The conditions are a freelance or self-employment permit issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, a bachelor’s degree or specialised diploma or equivalent, and annual income of not less than AED 360,000 in each of the two previous years.
Read that first condition carefully, because it does not obviously match the permits priced at the top of this article. Those are issued by free zones; the Green Residency condition names a MoHRE permit, and whether a free zone freelance permit satisfies it is not something we could establish from the published requirements. If the five-year self-sponsored route is the reason you are doing any of this, settle that question with the free zone and with immigration before buying the licence, not after.
The income figure is the other useful part. Roughly USD 98,000 a year at the dirham’s fixed peg, achieved twice over, before the UAE will hand a freelancer a five-year self-sponsored residence. Below it you are on the shorter renewal cycle tied to your permit, which works but keeps your residency permanently downstream of a licence you have to keep buying.
If you are not actually moving to Dubai
A large share of the people comparing these two routes have no intention of living in the Emirates. They want the licence, the invoicing address and the 0% headline, from wherever they already are. That is a legitimate thing to buy, and it is worth being precise about what it buys.
A permit or a company gives you a UAE entity or a UAE registration. Neither gives you UAE tax residence, and tax residence is what decides whose rules apply to your income. If you keep living where you live now, your own country continues to tax you on the basis of its own residence test, and the UAE structure changes what is on your invoices rather than who is entitled to tax the money behind them. The two are unrelated questions that the marketing around free zones consistently merges into one.
There is a second-order effect too, and it runs against the cheaper option. Without a residence visa there is no resident signatory anywhere in the structure, which is the profile UAE banks treat most cautiously, and no Emirates ID to satisfy the requests that follow. A structure with no residency attached is the version of this decision most likely to end with a licence you are paying for and no account to run it through.
The banking consequence runs the other way
A UAE bank’s decision on a business account is heavily influenced by whether any signatory holds a real UAE Residence Visa and Emirates ID, as covered in detail in our piece on getting a UAE free zone company banked as a non-resident. A freelance permit holder who took the residence visa is that resident signatory at no extra cost. A free zone company can reach the same place, since the licence normally carries an allocation of investor or employee visas used for exactly this purpose, but it gets there by buying and activating one. The profile that struggles is the third one: a company owned and run entirely from abroad, with nobody resident anywhere in the structure.
The other trap is thinking the company relocates your tax position by itself. It does not, and living in the UAE while running a foreign entity from your apartment there can pull that entity into the UAE rather than push your income out of anywhere. That mechanism, and why it applies to any structure managed from wherever you actually sit, is covered in why “legally offshore” is mostly a myth. The wider question of which structure fits which combination of residence and client base is the subject of how to actually structure an online business.
How to choose in one pass
- ✓
Under AED 1 million turnover, solo, invoicing under your own name: take the permit. You stay outside corporate tax rather than inside it at 0%, and those are not the same thing when the return is due.
- ✓
Hiring, co-founders, a brand name, or corporate-only clients: take the company and price the accounting, not just the licence.
- ✓
If you go the company route and expect to stay under AED 3 million, check whether Small Business Relief was actually elected for the current period. It is not automatic, and this is the last window for it.
- ✓
If your plan depends on 0% above AED 375,000 from 2027, that plan is QFZP status, with audited IFRS financials and substance in the zone as recurring obligations. Cost that annually before choosing the free zone on price.
- ✓
Get one signatory a real residence visa either way. It is the single biggest lever on whether the account opens.
- ✓
If you are not moving, price the structure on what it actually does for you, which is invoicing and banking rather than tax. Your own country’s residence rules keep applying, and a licence bought for a tax outcome it cannot deliver is an annual cost with nothing behind it.
FAQ
Is the Dubai freelance permit the same as a freelance visa?+–
No. The permit authorises the work; residency is a second application with its own steps and its own bill, reported at roughly AED 3,300-6,340 on top of every permit price quoted by free zones. Buying the permit alone leaves you with a licence and no right to live there.
Do freelancers in Dubai pay corporate tax?+–
Only above a threshold. Under Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023, per concordant tax-advisory summaries of the decision, a natural person’s business activity is subject to corporate tax only where turnover exceeds AED 1,000,000 in a Gregorian calendar year. Above that you become a taxable person, taxed at 0% up to AED 375,000 of taxable income and 9% above it.
Is a free zone company really 0% tax?+–
Only as a Qualifying Free Zone Person, which requires real substance in the zone, qualifying income, transfer pricing compliance, non-qualifying revenue under a de minimis limit, and audited IFRS financial statements. Failing one condition reportedly costs qualifying status for that tax period and the following four. Outside QFZP status the company is on 0% up to AED 375,000 and 9% above.
What is Small Business Relief and does it still apply?+–
It lets a resident taxable person with revenue of AED 3 million or less elect to treat taxable income as zero. It applies to tax periods starting on or after 1 June 2023 and ending on or before 31 December 2026, must be elected rather than applied automatically, and excludes Qualifying Free Zone Persons. No extension has been announced as of mid-2026.
What happens when my turnover passes AED 1 million on a freelance permit?+–
You become a taxable person and start registering and filing, but you do not have to incorporate anything. A natural person above the threshold is taxed at 0% up to AED 375,000 of taxable income and 9% above it, the same structure a free zone company sits under from day one. Nothing about crossing the line forces a company.
Can I get a Dubai freelance permit without living in the UAE?+–
Yes, the licence and the residence visa are separate purchases. What it does not give you is UAE tax residence, so the country you actually live in keeps taxing you under its own rules. It also leaves the structure without a UAE-resident signatory, which is the profile banks treat most cautiously.
Can I hire someone on a freelance permit?+–
No. The permit covers one named individual; free zone FAQs describe subcontracting as acceptable and employment as not. You can still sponsor dependents. The first employee means moving to a company structure rather than amending the permit.
What income do I need for the five-year Green Visa as a freelancer?+–
Annual income of not less than AED 360,000 in each of the two previous years, plus a self-employment permit from the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation and a bachelor’s degree, specialised diploma or equivalent. It runs five years, is self-sponsored, and allows sponsoring dependents.
Which route makes opening a UAE bank account easier?+–
Whichever one puts a UAE-resident signatory on the account. A freelance permit holder who took the residence visa is one at no extra cost; a free zone company gets there too, by using one of the investor or employee visas its licence normally allocates. The profile facing the strictest KYC and the longest review is the one with nobody resident anywhere in the structure.
Written by Daniel Hart, who covers neobanks, account freezes and cross-border banking for neobankfit. Based on Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023 and Ministerial Decision No. 73 of 2023 on Small Business Relief (the latter via the UAE Ministry of Finance’s own summary and DLA Piper’s note, not the original decision text), the Federal Tax Authority’s VAT registration thresholds, the Federal Authority for Identity and Citizenship’s Green Residency conditions, and UAE formation-industry cost guides, qualified in-body where the figure was not verified at source.
This article is general information, not legal or financial advice. UAE tax thresholds, reliefs and visa conditions change, and the treatment of your invoices depends on your clients, activity and countries involved. For your situation, check current terms and consider a qualified adviser.
