General Trading Licence in Dubai and the Cheapest Ways to Get One

A general trading licence in Dubai is the broadest commercial wording a trading company can buy: one licence covering import, export, re-export and distribution across most non-regulated goods categories, instead of a list of specific activities that must each match your shipping documents. It costs a visible premium over standard trading wording on every authority’s published tariff — and whether that premium is worth paying, and where it is cheapest to pay it, are the two questions this guide answers.

Updated July 2026, it covers what the wording actually permits, the mainland and free zone routes, where the cheapest general trading licence in the UAE really sits, the separate world of gold trading, and the customs and tax layer that decides whether the licence ever earns its keep. For a structured route decision against your own product mix and customer map, that is our business setup advisory desk’s daily work.

What “general trading” actually covers

Activity wording is the legal boundary of a UAE licence. A standard commercial licence lists specific categories — “trading in building materials”, “foodstuff trading” — and trading outside them is a violation. General trading collapses most categories into one authorisation: electronics this quarter, textiles next, auto parts after that, all legal under the same licence.

The boundary still exists, just further out. Regulated goods stay gated whatever your wording: pharmaceuticals and medical devices (MOHAP), food (municipality registration per shipment), alcohol, tobacco, precious metals at scale, telecom equipment (TDRA), and anything dual-use. General trading also covers trade, not making — manufacturing needs industrial wording, and services need their own activities. The full category system is mapped in our Dubai trade licence guide.

Who genuinely needs it: trading houses with shifting multi-category flows, re-export businesses feeding Africa, CIS and South Asia demand from UAE hubs, and wholesalers whose opportunity set changes faster than a licence amendment cycle. Who usually doesn’t: anyone whose next three years of revenue sits in one to three related categories — specific wording is cheaper, and banks and customs like licences that match invoices.

The ownership reform, and the activities it did not touch

Before pricing anything, settle the ownership question, because it changed the mainland calculus entirely. The UAE Government portal states the effect plainly: foreign investors’ share “will not be limited to 49 per cent as before; instead, it can be as much as 100 per cent.” The instruments are Federal Decree-Law No. 26 of 2020, effective from early 2021, and Federal Decree-Law No. 32 of 2021 on Commercial Companies, which together abolished the majority-Emirati shareholder requirement and the mandatory local service agent for foreign branches.

What survived is a list of activities where full foreign ownership is not permitted, plus a Cabinet power to designate activities of “strategic impact” with their own licensing requirements:

Activity area where full foreign ownership is not permitted
Security, defence and military activities
Telecommunications
Banking, exchange, financing, insurance and currency production
Commercial agencies
Hajj and Umrah organising
Quran recitation institutes
Fish, pearl and marine animal catching

Source: Full foreign ownership of commercial companies, The Official Platform of the UAE Government (u.ae, checked 4 August 2026). Confirm your specific activity with the licensing authority before incorporation.

For a general trading company none of those categories usually bites — trading in goods sits comfortably in the 100%-owned mainstream. The one to watch is commercial agencies: if your model is to hold an exclusive distribution agency for a foreign principal rather than to trade on your own account, that is a different legal animal with its own ownership and registration rules, and general trading wording does not deliver it.

Route one: Dubai mainland through DET

A DET general trading licence gives unrestricted onshore selling — any UAE customer, any emirate, government tenders included — with premises anywhere in Dubai. DET prices general trading above standard commercial wording on its published tariff, and the first-year total assembles from legal form, Ejari premises and visa count, following the same anatomy as any mainland formation. Since the 2021 ownership reforms, general trading on the mainland is available with 100% foreign ownership.

Mainland is the right answer more often than the free zone marketing suggests: if the bulk of your demand is UAE retailers, contractors and distributors, a free zone licence just inserts a customs-and-distributor layer between you and your own customers.

Route two: free zones — and where the cheapest licences live

Free zone general trading buys three different things: customs suspension on goods held in the zone (duty is paid only when goods enter the mainland market), 100% foreign ownership as standard, and packaged pricing. The catch is the mirror image: direct mainland sales are restricted, flowing through distributors, a branch, or dual-licence schemes.

From AED 6,000

RAKEZ's published base Starter Package — the floor before the general-trading uplift, rakez.com, checked Aug 2026

On price, the map is stark. The northern emirates own the budget tier: RAKEZ publishes a Starter Package at AED 6,000 and UAQ an all-inclusive package from AED 2,266 a month (rakez.com and uaqftz.com, both checked Aug 2026), while Ajman Free Zone and Hamriyah sit in the same bracket but publish no tariff. All of those are base figures, before the general-trading uplift each authority applies.

Dubai’s zones start higher — Meydan publishes AED 12,500 for standard wording (meydanfz.ae, checked Aug 2026) and IFZA quotes on enquiry — and the operational port zones, JAFZA and Dubai South, quote per configuration but bring the warehousing and port adjacency a physical trader actually uses.

Two of those authorities publish enough detail to build a real general-trading budget rather than a headline. Meydan’s published tariff separates the two licence types and prices the visa layer explicitly:

Meydan Free Zone published item	Fee
Standard licence	AED 12,500
General trading licence	AED 15,000
Investor visa	AED 4,000
Employee visa	AED 3,500
Establishment card	AED 2,000

Source: Meydan Free Zone published packages (meydanfz.ae, checked 4 August 2026). Free zone tariffs change; confirm before committing.

That table answers the question the rest of the market keeps vague. The general-trading uplift at Meydan is AED 2,500 over the standard licence — a real premium, but a small one against the cost of amending activities later. And the visa lines matter more than founders expect: a general trading company with a founder and two staff adds AED 4,000 plus two employee visas at AED 3,500 each plus the AED 2,000 establishment card on top of the licence, which is where the “cheap licence” framing stops being useful.

Authority	Published figure	What it covers	Source and date
Meydan Free Zone	AED 15,000	General trading licence	meydanfz.ae, checked 4 Aug 2026
Meydan Free Zone	AED 12,500	Standard licence	meydanfz.ae, checked 4 Aug 2026
RAKEZ	AED 6,000	Base Starter Package, before any general-trading uplift	rakez.com, checked Aug 2026
UAQ FTZ	AED 2,266 per month	All-inclusive package	uaqftz.com, checked Aug 2026
IFZA, Ajman Free Zone, Hamriyah, JAFZA, Dubai South	Not published	Quoted on enquiry per configuration	Checked Aug 2026
DET mainland	Not verified	Published tariff prices general trading above standard commercial wording	Not confirmed — see note below

A note on the mainland figure, because it matters and we will not invent it: we could not confirm DET’s current published general trading fee from an official source at the time of writing. Figures circulating for a DET e-trader or general trading licence should be treated as market-quoted and unconfirmed unless you have them from DET directly. Get the mainland quote in writing before you compare it with anything above.

The cheapest-licence question therefore has an honest two-part answer: the cheapest general trading licence in the UAE is a northern-emirates package; the cheapest one in Dubai is the budget-zone tier plus uplift. Which one is cheapest for you depends on where your goods and customers physically move — a Hamriyah warehouse beats a Meydan desk for a container business, and vice versa for a broker who never touches the box. The free zone licence cost breakdown prices the whole ladder, and our setup cost calculator models your configuration across zones.

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Traders overweight the licence fee and underweight the flow. The licence is a rounding error against one container’s margin — buy the jurisdiction your goods actually move through, not the one with the prettiest package price.

Gold trading: its own lane

The gold trading license in Dubai conversation is really a DMCC conversation. Dubai is one of the world’s great bullion and jewellery hubs, and the trade clusters where the infrastructure is: DMCC, with dedicated precious-metals activities, vaulting, refinery connections and the trading ecosystem — covered in our DMCC guide — plus Gold & Diamond Park for jewellery manufacturing and retail wording, and mainland DET licences around the Gold Souk trade.

Two regulatory layers arrive with the licence. Dealers in precious metals and stones are DNFBPs under UAE AML law — goAML registration, KYC programmes, transaction reporting — obligations we unpack in our AML compliance service and goAML registration guide. And VAT on gold has its own special schemes and reverse-charge mechanics for investment-grade metal, which makes the accounting setup genuinely unlike ordinary goods trade.

The AML layer is not a formality, and it is worth understanding which law you are under. The framework was rebuilt in 2025: Federal Decree-Law No. 10 of 2025 on Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism and Proliferation Financing was issued on 30 September 2025 and expressly repeals Federal Decree-Law No. 20 of 2018 at its Article 41, entering into force two weeks after publication in the Official Gazette under Article 42. Its Executive Regulations are Cabinet Resolution No. 134 of 2025, issued 29 October 2025, which repeal Cabinet Decision No. 10 of 2019 at Article 70 and enter into force thirty days after publication (uaelegislation.gov.ae, checked 5 August 2026).

Read the thresholds carefully, because the 2025 rewrite narrowed one of them and a lot of dealer manuals have not caught up. Article 7(2) of Cabinet Resolution No. 134 of 2025 applies the AED 55,000 occasional-transaction trigger, and the AED 3,500 occasional wire-transfer trigger, to Financial Institutions only. The repealed Article 6(2) of Cabinet Decision No. 10 of 2019 applied that same AED 55,000 trigger to Financial Institutions and DNFBPs. A precious-metals dealer is a DNFBP, not a Financial Institution, so that article no longer names you.

What governs a precious-metals dealer instead is a different pair of provisions:

Provision, Cabinet Resolution 134 of 2025	What it does for a precious-metals dealer
Article 3(3)	Scopes a dealer in valuable metals and precious stones into the DNFBP regime on any single cash transaction, or linked transactions, at or above AED 55,000. The amount is unchanged; the article moved down from 3(2) because commercial gaming operators were inserted ahead of it
Article 7(1)	Requires customer due diligence on commencing a business relationship, where a crime is suspected, and where there are doubts about identification data already held — with no monetary threshold at all

The practical reading is that the AED 55,000 in Article 3(3) tells you whether you are in scope; it was never the point below which nothing needs checking. Article 7(1)(b) requires diligence on suspicion at any value.

Article 41(3) of the 2025 Decree-Law also keeps regulations and circulars made under the repealed 2018 law effective where they do not conflict — so older AML guidance you may be working from has not simply evaporated, but it should be read against the new statute rather than instead of it. If your compliance manual still cites only Decree-Law 20 of 2018, it needs a revision date.

Choosing between the two routes: a decision table

Mainland or free zone is the only decision on this page that is hard to reverse, so make it against your customers rather than against a package price.

If this describes you	Route that usually fits	Why
Most customers are UAE retailers, contractors or distributors	Dubai mainland through DET	No customs layer and no distributor between you and your own market
You bid for UAE government tenders	Dubai mainland	Tender eligibility
Goods arrive by sea and leave again for Africa, CIS or South Asia	A port-adjacent free zone	Customs suspension while goods sit in the zone; duty crystallises only on entry to the mainland market
You hold stock in a warehouse	JAFZA, Dubai South, Hamriyah or similar	Warehousing and port adjacency are the actual product
You broker deals and never touch the goods	A low-cost desk-based zone	You are paying for a licence and a visa allocation, nothing more
Your product mix genuinely changes every quarter	General trading wording, wherever you land	The premium buys the flexibility you will actually use
Your revenue for three years sits in one to three related categories	Specific activity wording	Cheaper, and it matches your shipping documents

The row that saves the most money is the last one. General trading is a flexibility purchase, and flexibility you do not use is a cost with no return. A trader importing three related product lines is better served by naming them, because the licence then agrees with every invoice, packing list and customs declaration the business will ever produce.

The row that costs the most when ignored is the first. A free zone licence sold to a business whose customers are all in Dubai inserts a customs entry and a distributor margin between the company and its own market — permanently, and for the sake of a lower package price in year one.

The layer that clears containers: customs, VAT, corporate tax

A general trading licence without customs registration trades nothing. The importer/exporter code — linked to your licence through Dubai Trade for Dubai entities — is what lets goods clear, and the licence activity must plausibly match the HS codes you ship, a linkage we detail in the trade licence to customs code guide. Free zone traders live on customs suspension: duty (commonly 5%) crystallises only when goods leave the zone for the mainland market.

The tax stack for traders:

Layer	Trigger	Trader-specific wrinkle
VAT 5%	Mandatory registration past AED 375,000 taxable supplies	Import VAT via reverse charge; zone-to-zone and designated-zone movements have special treatment
Customs duty	Goods entering mainland customs territory	Suspended inside free zones; re-exports can exit duty-free
Corporate tax 9%	Profit above AED 375,000	Free zone QFZP treatment can cover qualifying trading flows — mainland sales income doesn’t qualify

Inventory is where trading companies’ books go to die: landed cost, FX on purchase invoices, stock counts and margin by category all need a system from day one — the discipline our inventory accounting and VAT services teams run for trading clients monthly.

The document set behind every consignment

A general trading licence authorises the activity. A consignment moves on paper, and the same paper is what your accountant, your bank and the FTA will later ask to see. The core set is stable whichever route you chose:

Document	What it evidences	Who tends to need it later
Commercial invoice	Price, terms and parties	VAT return, corporate tax computation, customs valuation
Packing list	What is physically in the container	Customs inspection, stock records
Bill of lading or air waybill	Title and carriage	Bank, under a documentary credit
Certificate of origin	Where the goods were made	Duty treatment and preferential rates
Customs declaration	The import or export entry itself	Duty position and the licence-to-HS-code match
Delivery order and proof of delivery	That the goods reached the buyer	Revenue recognition, and any dispute
Insurance certificate	Cover in transit	Any claim, and some letters of credit

Two habits separate trading companies that scale from those that stall. File the document set per consignment, not per month, so a single shipment can be reconstructed end to end without touching six systems. And reconcile the customs declaration to the commercial invoice every time — a mismatch between declared value and invoiced value is the discrepancy that turns a routine query into an audit.

Incoterms deserve a line of their own, because they decide where cost and risk transfer and therefore what belongs in landed cost. A trader quoting the same margin on an EXW purchase and a DDP purchase is quoting two different businesses. Write the Incoterm on the purchase order, and let the costing model read it.

The tax thresholds a Dubai trading company runs against

Three numbers govern the compliance calendar, and none of them is negotiable:

Threshold	Figure	What it triggers
VAT mandatory registration	AED 375,000 of taxable supplies	Registration becomes compulsory; VAT charged at 5% on standard-rated supplies
VAT voluntary registration	AED 187,500	Optional registration, useful where input VAT is significant before revenue arrives
Corporate tax 0% band	Taxable income up to AED 375,000	0% applies; 9% on the portion above, under Article 3 of Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022
Corporate tax registration	No threshold	Required for the company regardless of whether tax is payable

A general trading company crosses the VAT line faster than almost any other business type, because the threshold tests taxable supplies, not profit. One container sold at thin margin can carry a business over AED 375,000 with almost no money made. Watch the rolling twelve-month figure from the first invoice, not the annual accounts.

The voluntary threshold is the one traders under-use. An importer paying VAT on inputs before it has meaningful sales can register voluntarily at AED 187,500 and recover input tax rather than carrying it as cost through the first year. Whether that is worth the filing obligation is an arithmetic question, and it is worth doing the arithmetic.

The records a trading company has to keep — and for how long

Retention periods are statutory, they differ by record type, and getting them wrong is the cheapest expensive mistake in the business.

Record type	Retention period	Basis
General accounting and tax records	7 years	Cabinet Decision No. 74 of 2023, Article 3(1)(c)
Capital asset records	10 years	Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017, Article 60(2)
Real estate records	15 years	VAT Executive Regulations, Article 71(2), as amended by Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2024

For a general trading company the seven-year rule covers the bulk — invoices, customs declarations, stock records, bank statements — while the ten-year capital asset rule catches warehouse racking, forklifts and fit-out. A trader who also holds property in the company inherits the fifteen-year obligation on that asset class. Set the retention policy once, by class, and let the system enforce it.

The practical failure is never the years; it is the format. Customs declarations sitting in a freight forwarder’s portal, invoices in a personal email account, and stock counts on a warehouse whiteboard are not records a tax audit can use, however recent they are. The test is retrievability by someone who is not you.

Where a general trading company actually loses money

The licence conversation crowds out the ones that matter to margin. Four recur:

• Landed cost that nobody calculates. Goods cost, freight, insurance, duty, clearance, demurrage and inland delivery all belong in the cost of the unit. Traders who cost at invoice price and treat everything else as overhead price their goods below cost and only discover it at year end.
• FX on purchase invoices. Buying in a currency other than the dirham and selling in dirhams puts a currency position on the balance sheet whether or not anyone intended one. The dirham’s dollar peg means USD purchases carry little of this risk; euro, yuan and rupee purchases carry all of it.
• Stock that stops moving. Inventory is cash in a shape you cannot spend. Aged stock analysis by category, monthly, is the single most valuable report a trading company can run, and the one most often absent.
• Activity wording that no longer matches the shipments. Banks, customs and the FTA all compare the licence to the documents. A licence describing a business you have drifted away from creates friction at exactly the moments you cannot afford it — clearance, credit and audit.

None of those are licensing problems, which is why the licence decision deserves an afternoon and the operating model deserves the rest of the year.

How Velmont Crest helps

Velmont Crest advises trading companies as accountants first. We pressure-test whether general trading wording earns its premium against your real product mix, price the honest three-year total across the mainland and zone routes, wire the customs code, VAT and corporate tax registrations in the right order, and then keep the books that make a trading company bankable — inventory, landed cost, margin by category, clean statements for the trade-finance conversation. The licence takes a week; the discipline is the business. Talk to us before you pay for flexibility you may never ship.