Every check worth running on a UAE formation consultant is public, free, and takes an afternoon

In one UAE jurisdiction the firm forming your company is licensed for that work, and in the rest it is not

Setting up and maintaining a non-exempt special purpose vehicle or foundation in Abu Dhabi Global Market requires the appointment of a Company Service Provider holding a licence from the ADGM Registration Authority for that controlled activity. ADGM publishes the list of firms that hold one. A licensed provider must keep any client money in a Client Account, reconcile that account at least monthly, act as the official office address for the vehicles it holds, and file audited annual accounts with the ADGM Registration Authority. The framework took effect on 12 April 2021 and was amended in February 2023.

Now take the same firm, doing the same work, on a Dubai mainland limited liability company or in most of the country's free zones. It holds a trade licence for a consultancy activity. There is no separate permission for the work itself, no published list of firms permitted to do it, no client account rule, no obligation to tell an incorporating authority how it handled your money. The task is identical. The standing behind it is not.

That asymmetry is the honest starting point for choosing a firm, and it cuts in an uncomfortable direction for anybody selling the service, this one included. Where the state has not built a professional gate, the gate is yours to build, out of public records that cost nothing and an hour of reading. This page sets out the records, then the harder question underneath them: whether the work you are about to pay for is work you should be buying at all.

We sell business setup advice. Our consultancy page is where we make the case for it. This is not that page, and the two are meant to disagree in places.

The firm is supervised, and it is not supervised for competence

A firm that forms companies for third parties, administers them, or supplies an official address is a Designated Non-Financial Business and Profession under UAE anti-money-laundering law — the category the instruments call trust and company service providers, alongside real estate brokers, auditors, and dealers in precious metals and stones. The Ministry of Economy and Tourism supervises it. The obligations that follow are real: enrolment on goAML with the UAE Financial Intelligence Unit, a compliance officer, customer due diligence on the people it forms companies for, record keeping, and reporting when a trigger is met. The Ministry can impose administrative penalties for failing to enrol.

This is genuinely useful to you, and it is useful for one narrow purpose. It tells you the firm sits inside a supervised category and can be asked to prove it. It tells you nothing whatsoever about whether the firm knows which activity code fits your business, which second authority has to clear it, or what your first financial year should end on. Nor does it move the responsibility off you, which is the separate point made in a consultant can do every step and the authority will still come to you.

Two separate things are therefore worth asking, and most enquiries ask neither:

Are you enrolled on goAML, and who is your compliance officer? A firm inside a supervised category that cannot answer this in a sentence is either outside its own obligations or does not know it has them. Both answers are informative, and neither takes a week to give.

What did you conclude about my activity, and what did you rule out? This is the competence question, and no record answers it. A firm that has understood the business will name the activity line it recommends, the category that falls out of it, and at least one alternative it considered and rejected. A firm that has not will send a package price.

Four public records, and precisely what each one proves

None of these is a reference, and that is their value. A reference is a person the firm chose. A record is a fact the firm did not.

The pattern is worth stating plainly, because it is the whole method. Every genuine credential in this market attaches to a named individual and a specific jurisdiction. A firm's brochure attaches to neither. When a proposal says "our tax team" or "our legal team", the check is not whether the team exists. It is whether the person who will actually do your work appears on the relevant list, by name.

The Ministry of Economy and Tourism separately maintains a practising auditors record, which is the equivalent test for the audit side of any group that offers accounting as well as formation. Ask which entity in the group holds which permission, because a group that presents as one firm is frequently three licences with one logo.

The decision is a sequence of gates, and only the last one is about choosing a supplier

Most of the material written about picking a formation firm starts at the choice. That is the wrong end. Three questions come first, and two of them can close the decision before any firm is contacted.

Each gate closes a different way. Where a jurisdiction compels an intermediary — a non-exempt ADGM vehicle, an offshore company that must run through a licensed corporate agent — the question is not whether to hire but which name on the authority's list, and the vetting collapses to a short one. Where nobody has to appear on your behalf and the structure is ordinary, the authority's own channel is open to you and the intermediary is a convenience purchase, which is a fair thing to buy and a different thing from a necessary one. Only what survives both gates is advice, and advice has a shape: a question, an answer, a reason, and a named person who gave it.

Settling the jurisdiction yourself turns on three limits, and none of them appears in a price list

The first gate asks you to settle the jurisdiction before anybody is hired. That is less daunting than it sounds, because the choice between mainland, free zone and offshore is decided mainly by what each structure cannot do, not by what it costs. A firm can help you apply these limits. It should not be the only party in the conversation who knows them, because the limit that rules a structure out is the one a package price leaves unsaid.

A mainland company needs premises it actually occupies, and a short list of activities still sets its own ownership terms

A mainland licence lets you contract with, invoice and deliver to customers anywhere in the country, and it comes with an address that has to exist before the licence does. Every business in the UAE must have a physical address to operate, and the mainland licence file carries a tenancy contract for real premises; in Dubai that lease is attested and recorded on Ejari. Budget the lease as part of the formation, not as something that follows it, because the premises also set how many visas the company can later sponsor.

Ownership is no longer the obstacle older guides describe. Since the 2020 reform of the commercial companies law, investors of any nationality can wholly own an onshore company, and every economic sector is open to them with one stated exception: activities with a strategic impact, where the sector's own regulator decides what a foreign investor may hold. Separately, some professional and civil forms owned by non-GCC nationals are still issued against a local service agent agreement. The agent takes no shares and no profit, but the agreement is a real line in the file. The test is your specific activity, not your broad sector, so confirm the activity line before you assume it is open. Mainland company formation names the list and the forms, and what is actually harder about a mainland company explains why the address, not the ownership, is where the difficulty now sits.

A free zone company is licensed for its zone, and the mainland is a separate permission

Each free zone is its own licensing authority with its own rules, and most were built around particular sectors, so a zone's list of permitted activities narrows the field before its price does. What the licence does not give you is the mainland market. A free zone company selling to customers onshore does so through a mainland-licensed distributor or a mainland branch. In Dubai, Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025 added a branch licence and a time-limited activity permit from the Department of Economy and Tourism, each needing the prior approval of your own zone's licensing authority. The resolution does not reach financial firms licensed in DIFC, and not every activity has been opened under it.

If most of your customers will be onshore, that restriction belongs in the comparison from the first conversation, not in a follow-up after the licence has issued. A firm that quotes a free zone package without asking where your revenue comes from has skipped the question that decides the structure. Free zone company formation sets out the routes and their tax consequences.

An offshore company holds assets and trades abroad, and cannot trade in the UAE at all

An offshore company holds no trade licence and occupies no premises; its address is its licensed corporate agent's. That makes it a useful container for shares, for property in the designated freehold areas and for other assets, and for business conducted entirely outside the country. It also means it cannot invoice customers in the UAE, sponsor a residence visa or lease an office. RAK ICC's own regulations go further and bar its companies from carrying on business with persons inside its zone without express authorisation. Anything that needs a licence onshore needs a licensed entity to do it. Offshore company formation covers what the vehicle is genuinely good for and how it is most often mis-sold.

One description from older material should be retired on sight: none of the three is a tax-free structure by default. A company incorporated in the UAE, in a free zone or offshore as much as on the mainland, sits inside the federal corporate tax regime, and a free zone company keeps a nil rate only on qualifying income, as a Qualifying Free Zone Person meeting the conditions. A proposal that still calls a free zone or offshore vehicle "tax-exempt" is working from the position before corporate tax began, which tells you as much about its reference material as a repealed obligation does. The detail is on UAE corporate tax.

The government's half of the price is published, and the firm's half is the only part you are negotiating

DMCC publishes its Schedule of Charges — establishment, licensing, visas, permits, leasing, the lot — on its own website, in dirhams. Other authorities publish comparable schedules. The emirate departments publish fees for the transactions they run. This means the government-side number in any quotation is a knowable figure, and a founder who has not looked it up is negotiating in the dark against someone who has.

So the useful request is not "break down your fees". It is: give me the authority's own published number for each government line, and your own fee as a separate figure. A firm that will not separate the two is asking you to buy the whole thing on trust, and there is no reason to when one half of it is on a public page.

Two adjacent pages carry the detail rather than this one. What a headline package leaves out — the visa sequence, attestation, external approvals, year two — is worked through in what a low-cost licence leaves out. Lines that describe obligations the UAE has already abolished, and the three questions that settle any of them, are in obligations that no longer exist. A quote carrying a repealed requirement tells you when the firm's reference material was last opened, which is a better signal than any testimonial.

Ask who else pays them, and ask for the answer in writing

A firm that is paid only by you has one interest. A firm that is also paid by a jurisdiction it recommends has two, and the second one is invisible in the proposal.

We have not been able to locate published terms from any UAE licensing authority setting out a paid partner or agent arrangement with formation firms, so this page makes no assertion that such arrangements exist or are common. What it does say is that the question is cheap to ask and the answer is easy to give: are you paid, in any form, by any authority or zone you have recommended to me? Ask it by email so the answer is in writing, ask it before the shortlist rather than after, and treat a non-answer as an answer.

The same logic applies to the shape of the recommendation itself. A firm that recommends the same zone to every enquiry may be right about that zone, or may have a relationship with it. You cannot tell from one conversation, but you can ask what they last recommended against, and why. A firm with genuine range has a recent example. A firm without one usually pauses.

Access is the test that separates a service from a dependency

There is one question that predicts more trouble than every other question on this page combined, and it is asked at the start of an engagement, not at the end: when this is finished, whose name is on the accounts?

The licensing portal, the immigration file, the labour account, the tax record and the email address that recovers all of them are the company, in the only sense that matters on a working Tuesday. A firm that intends to hold them permanently is not selling you a service, it is selling you a subscription you cannot cancel. A firm that intends to be recorded with each authority in its own name — as a named sub-user, as an authorised signatory, as a Tax Agent appointed to your taxable person — is doing the same work with a record behind it and an exit you control.

The full account-by-account position, including what recovery looks like when it has already gone wrong, is in the government accounts that are your company. For vetting purposes one sentence is enough: get the answer before the deposit, in the engagement letter, with "no fee on transfer" written into it.

Language support is worth asking for by name, because the documents that govern are in Arabic

The advice to choose a firm that works in your language is sound, and usually incomplete. You should be able to put your questions, and read the firm's answers, in a language you handle without effort. A formation decided through a half-understood conversation has been decided by the other party. So do not ask whether the firm offers multilingual support. Ask which named person on your file will explain each decision to you in your language, and whether that person is the one who does the work or someone relaying it.

The harder half is the other language. On the mainland the constitution of your company is executed before a notary working from the Arabic text, the courts work in Arabic, and a foreign-language document reaches a court through a legal translator on the Ministry of Justice's list. The language question therefore has a second part that no brochure answers. Who produced the Arabic you are about to sign? Is that translator on the Ministry's list? And will somebody take you through the Arabic clause by clause before the notary appointment, rather than at it? The mechanics are in the Arabic text is the one that governs and legal translation. In DIFC and ADGM, which work in English, the second half largely falls away. It does not fall away in the free zones generally.

Where hiring a formation consultant is the wrong purchase

This is the part a service page will not tell you, and it covers a large share of the enquiries this market receives.

You are forming one ordinary company, in one jurisdiction, and you will be in the country. The authority's own channel exists and is built for you. The federal Basher platform and the emirate portals take applications directly, run the trade name and activity checks, and set out the fees. A single-shareholder consultancy or trading company with no external approval and no unusual structure is a form-filling exercise with a queue attached. Paying a fee to have someone else stand in that queue is a valid convenience purchase and a poor advice purchase, and it should be priced as the former. Which channels are open to you directly, and the sequence a self-filer actually follows, is named in what a fee buys a founder in Dubai.

Your difficulty is one decision, not a process. If what you actually need is an answer about jurisdiction, licence category, legal form or financial year end, buy the answer. An hour of advice from someone who will put their reasoning in writing costs a fraction of a formation package and settles the thing that was actually stopping you. The decisions worth that hour are set out in the setup decisions you cannot undo later.

You want faster access to an authority. Nobody sells that. Applications are processed in the order and to the standard the authority sets, and a firm implying otherwise is describing a relationship it should not have. What a good firm genuinely shortens is the number of times your file is returned — which is a different claim, and a checkable one. What actually causes those returns is in what goes wrong in a formation.

You want a guaranteed bank account. The bank is not in the formation chain and answers to nobody in it. Any firm guaranteeing an outcome it does not control is telling you something about the rest of its guarantees.

You want the formation firm to tell you whether there is a market. Knowing local conditions matters, and deciding without that knowledge is how founders license the wrong activity in the wrong emirate. But a firm that is paid when you incorporate is not an independent judge of whether you should, and a feasibility report written by the party selling the licence is a sales document with a table of contents. Do the free part first: who already holds a licence for your activity can largely be looked up on the same public channels this page uses to check the firm. Whether anyone will buy from you at your price is a question no public record answers. If you pay for fieldwork to answer it, pay someone with no stake in the formation. Where each kind of answer lives, and what it costs, is set out in Dubai publishes your competitors, not your customers.

The licence is incidental and residency is the real purchase. Then the licence is not the product you are shopping for, and the routes are decided by a different authority on different criteria — see a trade licence is not a golden visa.

You are renewing rather than forming. A renewal is a portal transaction on an account that should already be in your name. If you are paying a formation fee for it every year, what you are buying is the fact that somebody else holds your password.

You have already been given the answer and want a second firm to agree with it. Two firms selling the same product will agree. Take a contrary opinion from somebody who is not selling the formation — an accountant, a lawyer on the Legal Affairs list, or the authority itself.

Where doing it yourself is the wrong economy

The argument above has limits, and a page that hid them would be its own kind of sales pitch.

Where an intermediary is compelled. A non-exempt ADGM vehicle, or an offshore company administered through a licensed corporate agent, cannot be self-filed. The vetting question there is which licensed name to appoint and on what terms, not whether to appoint one.

Where somebody must be physically present and it cannot be you. Parts of a formation still need a body in the country at a counter, and residence steps need the person themselves. Where you are outside the UAE, what you are buying is attendance and a properly scoped authority to act — the mechanics are in forming a company from outside the country.

Where a second authority has to approve you. A sector approval file is not a form; it is a submission that has to be argued, and a returned file costs months rather than a re-upload. The activities a second authority has to approve sets out who those authorities are.

Where the structure is more than one company. Groups, holding structures, multi-jurisdiction arrangements and anything an investor will later examine are places where a cheap wrong decision compounds quietly for years.

Where you will not run the calendar. Renewals, quota, filings and deadlines arrive whether or not anyone is watching, and no portal chases you. If nobody in the business will own that calendar, paying somebody to own it — with recorded, revocable access — is a real purchase rather than a substitute for one.

The document list a firm sends you is itself a test of the firm

Every formation runs on the same core of paperwork. What changes is the authority asking for it and the order it wants it in. Below is what a founder should expect to be asked for, split by who has to produce it. A firm that sends one identical list for a mainland company, a free zone company and an offshore vehicle has not yet looked at your file.

What only you can supply

• Passport copies for every shareholder and every manager, with each name spelled identically on every document in the file. A middle name that appears on one document and not another is enough to have a file returned.
• Evidence of your status in the country: the visa page or entry stamp if you are here, and the Emirates ID if you are resident.
• A no-objection letter from your current sponsor, where a shareholder or manager is already resident in the UAE on an employer's visa. Whether it is needed depends on the authority, and some free zones ask for it with the formation file itself rather than at the visa stage.
• A business plan or project summary, where the authority asks for one. Several free zones do, and the financial free zones want a regulatory business plan, which is a different and much heavier document.
• For a corporate shareholder, its constitutional documents, attested in the home country and legalised for the UAE. This is usually the longest lead item in the file. The chain is on document attestation.

What the process produces, and in what order

• The trade name reservation, issued by the licensing authority.
• The initial approval, the authority's statement that it has no objection in principle to you carrying on the activity. On the Dubai mainland, foreign investors need the residency authority's approval before it issues.
• Any approval from a second authority that the activity requires.
• The constitution: the memorandum of association, with articles of association alongside it in most free zones, attested or notarised as the authority requires. On the mainland it is executed before a notary from the Arabic text.
• The tenancy. On the mainland this is a lease attested against the licence; in a free zone it is the zone's own facility agreement. An offshore company has none, because its address is its licensed corporate agent's.
• A local service agent agreement, for the professional and civil forms that still need one.

The second list is the part a firm genuinely does for you, and doing it well is a claim you can check: ask how often a file of this kind has come back to them, and for what. The first list is yours whoever you hire, and no firm can shorten the time a foreign ministry takes to attest a certificate. The fuller table, by person and entity type, with what trips each item, is on business setup services in Dubai. Why a complete file matters more than any deposit is in the setup clock starts at a complete file.

What to settle in writing before a deposit moves

1. The entity you are contracting with, its licence number, and confirmation that its activities cover the work. Check it yourself on the public channel rather than accepting a PDF of the licence.
2. The named individuals who will do each part, and which public list each of them appears on for the part that needs one.
3. The government fees as the authority publishes them, itemised separately from the firm's own fee.
4. What is excluded, stated as a list rather than implied by a total — approvals, attestation, translation, medicals, deposits, year two.
5. Whose name every account will be in, and that access transfers on request at no charge.
6. That no original document is held against an unpaid invoice. This should be a single sentence and should not require negotiation.
7. What happens if the application is refused — who pays for the resubmission, and whether the fee is re-charged.
8. The scope of any authority you sign, limited to named acts. A general authority to act is not a formation document.

How to run all of this on us

Every check on this page applies to this firm. Our licence is on the public channel under our own name. Ask us which individual will do your work and which list they appear on. Ask us whether we are paid by any authority we recommend, and hold us to a written answer. Ask us to separate the authority's published fee from ours, line by line. Ask us whose name your accounts will be in, and get "transfers on request, at no charge" in the engagement letter.

And if what you actually need is one company, in one zone, with no second approval and nobody to send in your place, the honest recommendation is the authority's own channel and an hour of our time to check the activity line before you use it. Our position on what we will and will not claim about ourselves is on the about page.

Frequently asked questions