RAKEZ company setup

RAKEZ — the Ras Al Khaimah Economic Zone — was formed in 2017 by merging two older bodies: RAK Free Trade Zone, which had been licensing companies since 2000, and the RAK Investment Authority, which held the emirate's industrial land. That merger is the reason RAKEZ is shaped differently from every other authority on this site.

It operates a group of business and industrial parks across the emirate rather than a single tower or district, and the parks are graded by what a business physically needs: desks and offices at one end, warehouses, workshops, yards and industrial plots at the other. There is an academic zone as well, for education providers.

The structure is the standard one — full foreign ownership, no minimum capital requirement, a trade licence, constitutional documents and an establishment card that lets the company sponsor residence visas.

Almost every authority on this site licenses free zone companies and nothing else. RAKEZ issues both free zone and non-free-zone licences — the second being a company that can trade inside the Ras Al Khaimah local market the way a mainland company does, licensed through the same authority.

That matters if you are genuinely undecided between free zone and mainland, because it means the decision does not also force a change of authority, address and process. It is the closest thing in the UAE to being able to change your mind cheaply.

It is not a loophole. A non-free-zone RAKEZ licence is a different licence with different rules, and a free zone company still cannot trade freely into the UAE local market without the right arrangement. What you get is one counterparty for both routes, which is a real convenience and not a change in the underlying law.

Two reasons, and they are honest ones. The first is space: RAK has industrial land, and it is available at a cost that Dubai's industrial zones do not attempt to match. If your business makes, stores or moves physical things, this is usually the first authority to model rather than the last.

The second is the emirate's own position. RAK is roughly an hour up the coast from Dubai, it has its own port and airport, and it has been building an industrial base for decades — cement, ceramics, pharmaceuticals, building materials. A manufacturing business is not an outlier there; it is the local economy.

What it is not is a Dubai address. If your proposition depends on a client seeing a Dubai licence, RAK will not give you that, and the saving does not buy it back.

No fee, no turnaround and no visa quota, on this page or in a quote. RAKEZ pricing moves with the facility more than any other authority we file with — an office desk, a flexi arrangement, a warehouse and an industrial plot are four different conversations, and a single headline figure would be wrong for three of them.

The same applies to timing. Land and facility allocation involves steps a licence-only application does not, and anyone quoting you a date is quoting you something they do not control.

The RAKEZ appointment sits with Bareq Almas Businessmen Services, our sister company, rather than with Almas Financial Services. In practice you deal with the same people and one file; we say it plainly because an appointment is a specific commercial fact and a reader is entitled to know which entity holds it.

It changes nothing about how the work is done. It does mean that if you want the paperwork to name the entity you contracted with, ask us, and we will lay out exactly which company does what before you sign anything.

Almas free zone company setup starts at a figure our client has confirmed in writing, shown on this page with its exclusions attached — visa, Emirates ID and medical are per person, not per company.

For a desk-and-licence RAKEZ company that entry figure is a fair opening. For anything involving a warehouse, a yard or an industrial plot it is not, and we will quote the facility properly rather than lead you in on a number that was never going to hold.