About ConsultZone

What ConsultZone is

ConsultZone is a business setup and corporate services consultancy at International Business Tower, Al Amal Street, Business Bay, Dubai. We form UAE companies — mainland, free zone and offshore — and we carry the compliance that follows the licence: immigration files, residence visas, PRO work, attestation and legalisation, accounting, tax filings, annual renewals and, when a company has run its course, orderly liquidation.

We are an authorized channel partner of free zone authorities across the UAE: IFZA, DMCC, JAFZA, DIFC, ADGM, RAKEZ, SHAMS, DUQE and KEZAD. Appointments are renewed periodically and any of them can lapse. If partner status matters to your decision, ask the authority directly — a free zone will confirm or deny an appointment on a phone call, and you should not have to take our word for it.

Two further capabilities sit alongside business setup, and both are published on this site:

• Real Estate & Property Investment — freehold acquisition, brokerage licensing under RERA, off-plan and secondary purchases, and the property-linked residence routes administered by the Dubai Land Department.
• Tax & Financial Advisory — corporate tax, VAT, bookkeeping, audit coordination and outsourced finance, published at depth by the group's specialist advisory practice at finvisors.ae.

The second of those is written by a separate practice inside the same group, which makes one question worth settling early: which entity you are actually contracting with, because that decides who carries the advice you act on. Who we are sets out the businesses behind that arrangement and what changes when a file crosses from one to another.

What you will not find on this page: a founding year, a client count, a headcount, a success rate or an award. Not because there is nothing to say, but because you cannot verify any of it, and this market is saturated with exactly those numbers. A figure you cannot check is a figure you should discount — ours included. Nor is there a mission statement, a vision statement or a list of corporate values. Those cost nothing to write and there is nothing to check them against, which puts them in the same category as an unverifiable figure. Everything asserted below is either a matter of public record, a term of law you can read for yourself, or a commitment you can hold us to in writing.

Two pages on this site carry those names and are written to that standard instead. Our mission is a list of the things that all have to be true before a company can invoice, bank, hire and file, with the ones a formation package leaves to you marked as such.

Our values is written as refusals rather than adjectives — the specific shortcuts available in this trade that we will not take, and what each one costs the client who accepts it. Both can be held against us; that is the point of writing them that way.

What "authorized channel partner" means, and what it does not

A free zone authority has appointed us to present and submit its licences directly. In practice that means three things: current terms from the authority rather than from a reseller, a file that enters the incorporating authority's system under a partner account, and a named channel to escalate an application that has stalled.

Here is the part that competitors leave out of the same paragraph. A channel partner is paid by the authority. Part of what a free zone earns from your licence returns to the firm that placed it. That is a live commercial incentive to sell a free zone licence rather than a mainland one, and to sell the zone that pays best rather than the zone that fits — and it exists at every firm in this market that advertises partner status, whether or not they mention it. How that arrangement works, the decisions where it can pull a recommendation, and how to confirm any firm's appointment in one phone call are set out in what an authorised channel partner is actually paid.

Three things we do about that, and you can hold us to all three:

1. The authority's fee and our fee are quoted on separate lines. You should always be able to see what the government charges and what the consultancy charges. If any quote — ours or anyone's — shows a single blended figure, ask for the split before you pay it.
2. We say when a mainland licence is the right answer, and when no UAE company is. A solo consultant below the AED 1,000,000 natural-person threshold in Cabinet Decision No. 49 of 2023 may need nothing at all.
3. Every service page on this site carries a section on where that service is the wrong purchase. Not a caveat in the footer. A section, with its own heading, in the contents rail, written to be read before you buy.

And here is what partner status is not. It is not an accreditation of quality by the authority. It is not permission to give legal or tax opinions. And it confers no influence whatsoever over an approval decision — no consultancy has that. An incorporating authority approves an activity, a trade name or a shareholder because the file meets its rules. Where an external regulator sits above the licence — the Central Bank, SCA, DFSA, FSRA, VARA for virtual assets in Dubai, DHA or MOHAP for healthcare, KHDA for education, Dubai Municipality for food — the zone cannot speak for that regulator either, and neither can we.

What the appointment gives youWhat it does not give you, or costs you

1. TermsCurrent terms from the authority rather than from a resellerPart of what the zone earns from your licence returns to the firm that placed it
2. SubmissionA file entering the incorporating authority's system under a partner accountNo influence whatsoever over the approval decision — no consultancy has that
3. EscalationA named channel to escalate an application that has stalledNothing that moves an external regulator: Central Bank, SCA, DFSA, FSRA, VARA, DHA
4. StandingAn appointment the authority will confirm or deny on a phone callNot an accreditation of quality, and not permission to give legal or tax opinions
5. IncentiveLicences presented and submitted directly for the zones named aboveA live pull toward the zone that pays best rather than the zone that fits

That boundary is not peculiar to partner status, and it does not move when you pay more. It runs through the whole engagement: on most of what a client actually wants bought, the work is ours and the decision is somebody else's.

The order the work runs in

The licence is the output of the analysis, not the input to it. A firm that quotes a licence price on the first call is pricing a package, because it has not yet asked the questions that decide your answer.

Six things are established before anyone quotes anything.

Only then is jurisdiction chosen, and only after that the licence.

What reversing the order produces

Not abstractions. Three specific outcomes, all of them expensive, all of them the result of buying a licence before deriving a structure:

• A licence that cannot invoice the customer the business was built around. A free zone company selling services into mainland UAE discovers the restriction after it has issued its first invoice, and the fix is a mainland branch, a second licence, or a distributor it did not budget for.
• A visa quota one short of the family you meant to bring. Quota follows premises. The cheapest desk product quietly caps headcount, and the upgrade mid-year costs more than the right premises would have on day one.
• A 0% expectation the corporate tax regime will not honour. Free zone status is not an exemption. Qualifying Free Zone Person status turns on the activity performed and the customer served, and most free zone service businesses selling to non-free-zone customers earn little or no qualifying income. See UAE corporate tax for new companies for what the 0% actually requires.

Ownership no longer separates a free zone from the mainland. Where your goods go still can

Two claims from the older pitch for free zones still reach founders, and only one of them still tells the routes apart.

Full foreign ownership stopped being a free zone feature. Every free zone allows a company to be wholly foreign-owned, and so, for most commercial and professional activities, does the mainland — since Federal Decree-Law No. 26 of 2020 amended the Commercial Companies Law, a position carried into Federal Decree-Law No. 32 of 2021. What still restricts ownership is the Cabinet's list of activities with strategic impact under Cabinet Resolution No. 55 of 2021. For an activity on that list, the licensing controls, and any share of the capital or the board reserved for UAE nationals, are set by the competent authority rather than assumed. That is why the second row of the table above checks the activity against the list before a jurisdiction is chosen. The sectors on the list, and how ownership is decided in each, are set out on the mainland company page.

Customs treatment is the difference that survived, and it is narrower than it is sold. Goods brought into a free zone from abroad are not charged customs duty while they stay in the zone or leave it again for another country. Duty falls due when the goods cross into the UAE mainland, and a free zone company selling goods to a mainland customer processes a customs declaration for that sale. So a trading company whose buyers sit in the UAE has not escaped duty by licensing in a zone; it has deferred it to the point of sale. A company holding stock for re-export has bought something real. Which of the two you are is fixed by where the goods go, which is why the first row of the table asks who your customers are. VAT on goods held in a zone is a separate question again, decided by whether the zone is a VAT Designated Zone, and many zones are not. The mechanics — customs codes, declaration types, deposits on re-export — are on customs codes and moving goods after the trade licence.

the one claim from the older free zone pitch that survived

1. 01Set ownership aside as a differenceEvery zone allows wholly foreign ownership, and so does the mainland for most activities
2. 02Check the activity against the strategic-impact listCabinet Resolution No. 55 of 2021 decides where ownership is still controlled
3. 03Ask who the customers are and where they sitThe first question of the analysis, and it fixes the answer below
4. Where do the goods finally come to rest
5. With a customer inside the UAE mainlandDuty falls due at the crossing, and a customs declaration follows each sale
6. Held in the zone, then re-exported abroadNo duty while they stay in the zone or leave it again for another country
7. Where the goods go, not who owns the companyVAT is a separate question, decided by whether the zone is a VAT Designated Zone

What we will ask you for, and why we are required to ask

Before we file anything we ask for passports, proof of address, a description of the business specific enough to match an activity code, the ownership chain up to the natural persons who ultimately own or control the company, and — depending on the activity and the jurisdiction — where the funding comes from. Founders find this intrusive. Some firms compete by not asking.

The personal side of that file is the part founders leave until last: passport copies, photographs and proof of a home address for each shareholder and each manager, and, for a corporate shareholder, the constitutional documents that have to go through attestation. Add one document the list above does not name, because it is asked for more often than founders expect: a business plan. Several free zones want one with the application, a regulator that sits above the licence wants one written for its own review, and a bank asks for a plan or an account questionnaire at onboarding. It is the same company described to three readers, so write it once, to the strictest of them — usually the bank's compliance reader, who wants to know who pays you, in what currency and from which country. Banking advisory sets out what that reader tests.

We ask because we are a supervised business. Corporate service provision is one of the categories of Designated Non-Financial Business and Profession under the UAE's anti-money-laundering framework, now set out in Federal Decree-Law No. 10 of 2025, in force 14 October 2025, which replaced the framework established by Federal Decree-Law No. 20 of 2018. A DNFBP is supervised by the Ministry of Economy and Tourism, must enrol on the UAE Financial Intelligence Unit's goAML platform, must appoint a named compliance officer, must run customer due diligence on every client, and must report suspicious transactions. Fines under the related penalty schedule begin at AED 50,000, and the Ministry has suspended businesses for failing to enrol.

So the firm forming your company is itself a regulated entity with reporting obligations. The questions are not a service standard we selected. They are a legal duty we carry, and the same duty attaches to your own company if your chosen activity falls in a DNFBP category — real estate brokerage, dealing in precious metals and stones, audit and accounting, or corporate service provision. That is the most commonly missed item on a new licence, and it should be settled at activity selection rather than discovered at the first inspection.

Two practical consequences worth more than the compliance lecture:

A firm that does not ask is not lighter-touch. It is either not meeting its own obligations, or it will ask later — at the worst possible moment. The evidence a consultancy declines to collect in week one is very close to what a UAE bank's compliance committee demands at account opening under Central Bank customer due diligence standards. A file assembled properly at the start opens accounts. A file assembled in a hurry in week nine is the single most common reason a formation that "went smoothly" ends with a company that cannot bank.

What you describe casually becomes a filed record. Under Cabinet Decision No. 109 of 2023, records of real beneficiaries, shareholders and nominee directors are filed with the incorporating authority and changes must be notified within 15 days. An ownership arrangement explained loosely on a first call is a document with your name on it a month later, and it has to stay current for the life of the company.

What we do

The recurring obligations that follow a licence — renewals, establishment card, tax filings, UBO updates, payroll and Emiratisation where MOHRE applies — are set out with their deadlines and penalties on the business support page rather than summarised twice here.

Each row above has its own page, and each page says when not to buy it

The table is a summary. The detail sits on the service pages, and each one carries a section, under its own heading, on where that service is the wrong purchase.

Formation, by route. A mainland company, licensed by DET or the emirate's economic department to trade across the UAE market; a free zone company, licensed by the zone and bounded by it; or an offshore company — the vehicle also sold as an international business company (IBC), the term RAK ICC uses, or a non-resident company (NRC). Under any of those names it is a holding vehicle rather than a trading one: no trade licence, no premises and no residence visa, and RAK ICC's own regulations bar its companies from carrying on business in the UAE without the licences a competent UAE authority issues. The whole formation sequence, stage by stage, from trade name reservation to the bank account, is on business setup services in Dubai.

Regulated activities. Virtual assets across the UAE's regulators — VARA, the ADGM FSRA, the DFSA and the SCA — on virtual asset licensing, which also sets the VARA, ADGM and DMCC permissions side by side for a Dubai business; product approvals on product setup.

People and paperwork. PRO services, visa services, document attestation, legal translation and human resources.

Money and tax. Banking advisory, VAT and corporate tax, and audit and accounting.

The end of a company. Company liquidation, for when a company has run its course and has to be closed in the right order rather than left to lapse.

How we quote, and what a headline price leaves out

Two rules govern every quote we issue. The authority's fee and our fee appear on separate lines. And the year-two cost is quoted next to the year-one cost, because a first-year discount that reprices at renewal is not a saving, it is a deferral.

The advertised figure you see elsewhere is usually one activity with no people attached to it. These are the lines that follow it.

In figures, where a band is published at all: AED 600 to 2,500 for the trade name and initial approval, AED 1,500 to 2,500 for the establishment card and immigration file, AED 3,500 to 7,000 for each in-country residence visa, from around AED 700 a year for the medical cover that permit requires, and AED 2,000 to 5,000 for each corporate shareholder's attested set. The other four lines — premises, deposited share capital, the first corporate tax return and the year-two renewal — carry no published band at all, which is a fact about them rather than an omission here.

Every figure above is indicative. Authority and government fees are revised without notice and packages are promotional, so confirm the schedule with the authority on the day you commit. We would rather publish a labelled range than a precise number that is wrong by the time you read it.

Cost lineFloor to Ceiling

1. Trade name and initial approvalAED 600 – AED 2,500
2. Establishment card and immigration fileAED 1,500 – AED 2,500
3. Each in-country residence visaAED 3,500 – AED 7,000
4. Each corporate shareholder's attested setAED 2,000 – AED 5,000
5. Medical cover the permit requires, per yearAED 700 and up

04k8k

The premises line is where advice and selling most often blur

Office space — a flexi-desk, a shared office or a leased unit — is not a separate purchase from the licence. It is an output of the same analysis. Three things decide it, in this order: how many people need residence, because the visa quota follows the premises; what the activity physically needs, because a warehousing activity on a desk product is a licence that cannot operate; and, for a free zone company counting on the 0% rate, whether the premises support adequate substance in the zone as well as the licence. Choose on price first and one of those three is usually what gives.

It is also the line on which a consultancy is most often paid by someone other than you. Desks and packages are resold, and a markup, like a channel partner's commission, pulls advice toward the product that pays. So ask any firm recommending premises — this one included — whether it earns anything on the recommendation, and ask for the zone's or the landlord's charge on its own line, next to the year-two figure, before you sign. A premises answer that survives that question is usually the right one.

What stays yours

A UAE company is controlled through a set of logins, cards and files. Where those sit at the end of an engagement determines whether you can leave. This is one of the quieter failure modes in this market: the formation goes fine, and eighteen months later the client discovers they cannot renew a licence or move a visa without the consultancy that holds the credentials.

Ask us to confirm in writing, before you engage, that everything in that table transfers to you on request and without a fee. Then ask every other firm you are speaking to the same question, and notice which ones change the subject.

How to check any consultancy, including this one

You are being asked to hand a stranger your passport and your ownership structure. Verify the stranger. Every check below is free and takes minutes.

Note the Tax Agent point in particular. "Tax consultant" is not a protected title in the UAE. "Tax Agent" is — it means accreditation by the Federal Tax Authority and entry on a public record, and only an accredited agent can formally represent you before the FTA. Ask any firm, this one included, for the number, and then check the record rather than the firm's website.

Why this site publishes what each option is bad at

We cannot outspend the largest firms in this market, and we cannot out-age the oldest. What we can do is publish what they will not: why applications are refused, what each option is bad at, and when the obvious choice is the wrong one.

That is a commercial decision as much as an ethical one. The clients this firm wants read several pages of detail before they call, and they are not persuaded by a page saying everything is easy. They are persuaded by a page that says the free zone 0% headline is narrow and conditional, that a flexi-desk supporting a licence may not support a tax position, and that a "50-year tax holiday" in a zone's founding decree is not an exemption from federal corporate tax.

Every page names the authority behind each claim and carries its sources. Rules here change, and one of them changed retroactively, so each page shows when it was last reviewed. Find something out of date and tell us; we will correct it and date the correction.

The instruments behind that sentence are all named on this page already, and the thing worth seeing about them is that they did not arrive evenly.

Full foreign ownership opened on the mainland in 2020 and activities with strategic impact were listed in 2021; then the corporate tax law in 2022, qualifying income and the beneficial owner record in 2023, the economic substance amendment in 2024 that confined the regime to financial years ending on or before 31 December 2022, the qualifying and excluded activities in 2025, and the anti-money-laundering framework replaced on 14 October 2025. Advice written before any of those dates is not wrong because it was careless. It is wrong because the instrument underneath it moved.

1. 2020Federal Decree-Law No. 26 of 2020Full foreign ownership opened on the mainland
2. 2021Cabinet Resolution No. 55 of 2021Activities with strategic impact were listed
3. 2022The corporate tax lawA federal tax arrived, and free zone status is not an exemption from it
4. 2023Cabinet Decision No. 109 of 2023The beneficial owner record became a filing, changes notified in 15 days
5. 2024The economic substance amendmentConfined to financial years ending on or before 31 December 2022
6. 2025Qualifying and excluded activitiesWhich activity earns the 0%, tested by the customer served
7. 14 October 2025Federal Decree-Law No. 10 of 2025Replaced the 2018 anti-money-laundering framework

Where ConsultZone is the wrong firm to call

If you are shopping on price alone, we lose. For a genuinely simple case — one activity, one shareholder, no visas, no regulator above the licence — the thinnest-margin seller may be the rational purchase. Buy it and skip us. Our fee earns itself on files that have a complication in them.

If you need formal representation before the Federal Tax Authority, what you need is an accredited Tax Agent listed on the FTA's public record, for the reason set out above.

If you need legal advice, litigation or a court filing, you need a UAE-licensed advocate. Setup consultancies draft documents and manage filings; they do not give legal opinions, and a firm that blurs the two does you a disservice you discover only in a dispute.

If your matter is a regulated financial services licence in DIFC or ADGM, the regulatory application is the project and the company formation is a footnote inside it. That belongs with specialist regulatory counsel from the start. We can form the entity and coordinate around them; we should not lead a DFSA or FSRA submission.

If you want ownership concealed behind a nominee, we are not the firm. Beneficial ownership is a filed record under Cabinet Decision No. 109 of 2023, nominee arrangements are themselves reportable, and a structure built to obscure who controls a company fails at the bank even when it passes the incorporating authority. Firms sell this. We do not.

If you need it finished this week regardless, some of it cannot be bought. An embassy legalisation chain runs at the pace of the embassy, and an external regulator's review runs at the pace of the regulator. We can compress our own work and sequence around the bottleneck. We cannot remove it, and a firm promising otherwise is quoting a hope.

Nobody can honestly guarantee approval, a timeline or a bank account. Approvals sit with incorporating authorities and regulators. Onboarding sits with a bank's compliance committee under CBUAE due diligence standards, and accounts are declined for reasons no consultant can override. A guarantee here is a feeling being sold.

If you want a track record measured in decades and tens of thousands of names, we cannot show you one, and we will not invent one. Older and larger firms exist, and that is a legitimate reason to choose them over us.

If the real problem sits in your home country, a UAE company may not solve it. Residency, place of effective management and controlled foreign company rules are decided where you live, not where you incorporate. Take advice in both jurisdictions before building a structure around a headline rate.

And what we will not do, in any engagement: call a licence approved before the incorporating authority has approved it; quote a fixed date for an embassy attestation chain, because no fee shortens it; or hold your portal logins, establishment card and immigration file out of your reach. Those are yours and they transfer on request.

Read that list the other way round — as what you are actually asking for, and who holds it — and it sorts into a small number of destinations.

So: another firm entirely for a simple file or a longer track record, a Tax Agent for representation before the FTA, an advocate for a legal opinion, specialist counsel for a DFSA or FSRA application, and advice where you live for a problem that lives there. For the last three — a concealed owner, a guaranteed date, a guaranteed account — there is no honest seller anywhere, and a firm that offers one is telling you something about itself rather than about your file.

How to start

Bring four things to the first conversation: what the business does, who its customers are and where they sit, how many people need UAE residence, and where the owners are tax resident. With those, a consultant can map your options against the incorporating authorities that can actually issue the licence, and tell you what each route costs to run in year two — not only what it costs to buy in year one.

If any of it points away from a UAE company, we will say so on that call, before you have spent anything. The lines and the contact page are the same two numbers and the same address as below; use whichever is quicker for you.

International Business Tower, Al Amal Street, Business Bay, Dubai +971 56 411 0920 · +971 56 515 5115 · info@consultzone.ae

Frequently asked questions