IFZA company setup

IFZA started in Fujairah in 2018 and then moved to Dubai. It now works from IFZA Business Park in Dubai Silicon Oasis, a technology area near Academic City, now called Dubai Digital Park. The idea was simple: take an easy, low-cost licence and give it a Dubai address.

Today, a large share of the small companies set up in Dubai each year are IFZA companies. It offers commercial and professional licences for many business activities. Most licence holders do not need to rent an office in the park. The number of visas you get depends on your package, not on how much office space you rent.

IFZA is also unusual because it sells almost only through registered channel partners. If you go to IFZA yourself, you will usually be sent back to a partner. This is how the authority is meant to work. So the partner you choose makes the biggest difference to what your IFZA company costs and how well it is set up.

IFZA suits a company that needs a trusted Dubai licence and a bank account, but not a warehouse, a shop or its own regulator. Consultants, agencies, software and IT companies, traders who never handle the goods themselves, holding companies and most small service businesses fit here.

It is the wrong zone if another authority controls your type of business. Financial services, insurance, healthcare, education and legal work each need approval from their own authority, and a free zone licence does not replace that. It is also wrong if your business really needs space, such as cargo handling, light manufacturing, cold storage or a service centre that customers visit. DAFZA and Dubai South are built for that. An IFZA licence for a warehouse business will cause problems that cost money to fix later.

The most common mistake we see is a company that chose IFZA because it was the cheapest quote. Then the licence did not properly cover what the company wanted to do. That is a licence decision, not a price decision. This is why we ask what you plan to do before we tell you where to do it.

An IFZA company is set up as a free zone company. It gets its own trade licence, its memorandum and articles (MOA), a share register and an establishment card. The establishment card is very important: it lets the company sponsor residence visas, and banks will ask for it along with the licence.

You choose your business activities from the authority's list when you set up. You can usually have more than one activity on one licence if they fit together. Choose correctly at the start. Changing it later means paying the authority again, and if you already have a bank account, the bank will ask why your business activity changed.

The shareholders can be people or companies. If a company is a shareholder, you will need attested (officially stamped) documents from the country where that company is registered. Tell us early if this applies to you. Attestation is the step that most often slows a simple application down.

It means we submit your application ourselves. We apply to IFZA directly, not through another agent who adds a fee and slows down every question. When the authority has a question, it comes straight to us, and we can answer it.

It also means we have no reason to push you towards IFZA. A firm with only one partnership recommends the same zone to everyone, and you cannot tell from the outside. We work with zones in six emirates. So when we say IFZA is right for you, we could have chosen another zone and did not. When IFZA is wrong for you, we will tell you and point you to the zone that fits.

Our free zone company setup has a confirmed starting price, shown on this page. The page also shows what is not included: the visa, the Emirates ID and the medical are charged for each person, not for each company.

We do not publish a separate IFZA licence fee. The price depends on your business activity, how many visas you need and the package. A price that is right for a consultant with one visa is wrong for a trading company with four. Many websites show a low headline price and hide the conditions. We prefer to give you a written price once we know the few things that change it.

Here is the simple version. A free zone licence lets you own 100% of the company, send invoices to clients abroad and work from inside the zone. Some things need a mainland licence: selling directly to customers inside the UAE as a local supplier, bidding for some government work, or opening a place the public visits.

Many businesses that think they need a mainland licence do not. And many that were sold a free zone licence needed a mainland one from the start. Decide this before you set up the company. Fixing it later costs more than getting it right the first time.

Either way, talk to us about banking before you set up. The licence you choose affects which banks will accept you.