IFZA company setup

IFZA started life in Fujairah in 2018 and moved to Dubai, where it now operates from IFZA Business Park in Dubai Silicon Oasis — the technology district out towards Academic City, inside what is now marketed as Dubai Digital Park. That move is the whole story of the zone: it took a low-friction, low-overhead licensing model built for a smaller emirate and put a Dubai address on it.

The result is the zone that quietly underwrites a very large share of the small companies incorporated in Dubai each year. It issues commercial and professional licences across a wide activity list, it does not require most licence holders to take physical premises inside the park, and its visa allocations are set against the package rather than against square metres of floor space you have rented.

It is also, unusually, a zone that sells almost entirely through registered channel partners rather than over a counter. If you approach IFZA as a member of the public you will generally be pointed back at a partner. That is not a quirk to work around — it is how the authority is designed to operate, and it is why the quality of your partner is the single largest variable in what an IFZA company costs you and how well it is put together.

IFZA fits the company that needs a credible Dubai licence and a bank account, and does not need a warehouse, a shopfront or a regulator of its own. Consultants, agencies, software and IT businesses, traders who move goods without touching them, holding structures, and the enormous middle ground of small service companies — this is their zone.

It is the wrong zone if your activity is regulated by somebody else. Financial services, insurance broking, healthcare, education and legal practice all answer to their own authorities, and a free zone licence does not substitute for that approval. It is also the wrong zone if your business genuinely needs space — cargo handling, light manufacturing, cold storage, a service centre customers walk into. DAFZA and Dubai South exist for that, and putting an IFZA licence on a warehouse business creates a problem you will pay to unwind later.

The failure mode we see most often is a company that was sold IFZA because IFZA was the cheapest quote in the inbox, when the activity it wanted to trade in was not properly covered by the licence that was issued. That is a filing decision, not a price decision, and it is the reason we ask what you intend to do before we tell you where to do it.

An IFZA company is incorporated as a free zone entity with its own trade licence, memorandum and articles, share register and establishment card. The establishment card is the piece that matters for everything afterwards: it is what lets the company sponsor residence visas, and banks will ask for it alongside the licence.

Activities are selected from the authority's list at incorporation, and more than one can usually sit under a single licence where they are compatible. Getting that selection right at the outset is cheaper than amending it afterwards, because an amendment means an authority fee and, if a bank has already onboarded you, a compliance conversation about why your trading activity changed.

Shareholding can be individual or corporate, and a corporate shareholder means attested documents from wherever that company is registered. If that applies to you, tell us early — attestation is the step that most often turns a straightforward file into a slow one.

It means the submission is ours. We file with IFZA directly rather than routing your file through another agent who marks it up and adds a day to every question, and when the authority comes back with a query it comes back to us in a channel we can answer on.

It also means we have no incentive to steer you here. A firm that only holds one partnership recommends that one zone to everybody, and you cannot tell the difference from the outside. We hold appointments across six emirates, so when we say IFZA is right for you, the alternative was available to us and we did not take it — and when it is wrong, we will say so and point you at whichever of the others actually fits.

Almas free zone company setup starts at a figure our client has confirmed in writing, and it is shown on this page with what it excludes attached to it, because the visa, the Emirates ID and the medical are charged per person and not per company.

What we will not do is publish a licence fee for IFZA specifically, because the figure depends on the activity, the visa allocation and the package, and a number that is right for a one-visa consultancy is wrong for a four-visa trading company. Every competitor page you will read on this subject shows a headline figure with the conditions buried. We would rather quote you in writing once we know the two or three things that actually move the number.

The honest version of this comparison is shorter than the ones you will read elsewhere. A free zone licence lets you own the company outright, invoice internationally and operate from within the zone. Trading directly into the UAE domestic market — selling to customers here as a local supplier, tendering for certain government work, opening premises the public walks into — is what a mainland licence is for.

Plenty of businesses that think they need one do not, and plenty that were sold a free zone licence needed the other thing from the start. It is worth settling before you incorporate rather than after, because unpicking it later costs more than getting it right first.

Whichever way that goes, the banking conversation is the same one, and it is worth having before you incorporate rather than after — the licence you choose affects which banks will look at you.