The Cheapest Free Zone in the UAE: 11 Licences Ranked by Published Price

The cheapest free zone in the UAE by published price is Ajman Media City, whose Business Club package is AED 4,999 a year. It includes zero visas.

That caveat is not a footnote. Three of the four cheapest headline prices in the country are zero-visa prices, and none of the ranking articles currently on page one say so. Below is every UAE free zone that publishes an official AED price, ranked, with the visa count attached to each figure.

What is the cheapest free zone licence in the UAE?

Ajman Media City's Business Club package at AED 4,999 a year is the cheapest officially published free zone licence package across all 40 UAE free zones. It buys a licence, co-working access and up to 10 activities under a run-your-business-virtually model, and no residence visas. The next tier up, Visionary at AED 12,999, adds one. One zone charges less for the licence itself — KEZAD, at AED 0 — but only against a mandatory land lease, which is covered further down.

The ranking: 11 UAE free zones by official published price

| Rank | Zone | Emirate | From (AED) | Visas included | Workspace | |---:|---|---|---:|---|---| | 1 | Ajman Media City | Ajman | 4,999 | 0 | Co-working | | 2 | SRTIP | Sharjah | 5,500 | 0 | Office / co-working | | 3 | SPC Free Zone | Sharjah | 5,750 | Not stated at this tier | Virtual office / flexi-desk | | 4 | RAKEZ | Ras Al Khaimah | 6,000 | Not stated | Co-working membership | | 5 | Shams | Sharjah | 6,500 | Not stated | Co-working | | 6 | Innovation City (RAK DAO) | Ras Al Khaimah | 6,600 | 0 | Shared desk | | 7 | Masdar City | Abu Dhabi | 7,000 | 1 | Virtual desk | | 8 | JAFZA | Dubai | 10,000 | 0 | None — lease is mandatory and separate | | 9 | Meydan Free Zone | Dubai | 12,500 | Not stated numerically | Flexi-desk, registered address | | 10 | UAQ FTZ | Umm Al Quwain | 12,500 | 1, plus Emirates ID | Co-working | | 11 | DMCC | Dubai | 29,205 | Not stated at this tier | Flexi-desk option |

Every price is the authority's own published figure, taken from its own domain, with the observation date recorded against that zone in the directory.

Three rows carry a second figure worth knowing. SPC Free Zone publishes a second official package at AED 6,875 adding unlimited visas on a flexi-desk model, with five activities, 100 shareholders and zero paid-up share capital — AED 1,125 above its own entry price, and the most interesting number in the table. JAFZA's AED 10,000 is registration of AED 5,000 plus a first annual licence from AED 5,000, excluding the facility lease that dominates real cost there. DMCC's AED 29,205 is the lowest package on dmcc.ae; its standard tiers are Basic Biz at AED 35,484 and Jump Start at AED 43,780.

The one zone that charges AED 0 for the licence

KEZAD is absent from the ranking, and the reason is worth a paragraph of its own. KEZAD's published tariff charges AED 0 for a new industrial, trading or service licence and AED 0 for company and branch registration. The only unavoidable published setup fee is an establishment card at AED 1,000.

That is not a cheaper Ajman Media City. KEZAD is a land-and-facility zone: the entry cost is the mandatory lease, at AED 32–38 per square metre a year for serviced industrial plots and AED 36–45 for logistics plots, plus a AED 3 common-area levy. A licence at AED 0 attached to a lease you must sign is a different product from a AED 4,999 co-working package. Note also that KEZAD renews every two years, not annually — AED 5,000 for industrial, trading and service, AED 15,000 for general trading.

How we ranked these

One criterion: the lowest annual licence price the free zone authority itself publishes, in AED, on its own website. Zero-visa tiers are included, and flagged. Nothing is converted, averaged or estimated.

Zones with no published price cannot be ranked, because ranking them would mean inventing a number. ADGM and DIFC do not appear either: both publish official fee schedules, in USD only, and we do not convert.

The cheapest licence is not the cheapest company

If you need a UAE residence visa, the AED 4,999 headline is not your number. The step-up to the first visa is published by three of the cheap zones and it is substantial:

| Zone | Zero-visa price | First-visa tier | Step-up | |---|---:|---:|---:| | Ajman Media City | 4,999 | 12,999 (Visionary) | 8,000 | | SRTIP | 5,500 | 13,990 (1 Visa All-Inclusive) | 8,490 | | Innovation City | 6,600 | 13,200 (Seed, capped at 1 visa) | 6,600 |

All three step-up figures are the zones' own published package prices.

Read that against the ranking and the order changes completely. Masdar City at AED 7,000 includes one visa, making it cheaper than any of the three above once you need residency. UAQ FTZ at AED 12,500 includes a visa, Emirates ID, medical test, basic insurance, establishment card and E-channel access — a materially different bundle from a bare licence at Meydan's identical headline price.

If a zero-visa licence is what you actually want, we cover that case in free zone licences without a visa.

The cheap figures that turned out not to be real

Eighteen of the 40 UAE free zones publish no price at all, and one — Ajman Free Zone — offers only a calculator whose own disclaimer calls the result an estimate.

Five more used to sit in a "consultant-sourced" tier on this site. We went back and checked each against the authority. Not one survived, so all five are now blank rather than ranked:

• KEZAD — AED 9,350. Refuted by KEZAD's own tariff, which charges AED 0 for a new licence and AED 0 for registration. The only published setup fee is a AED 1,000 establishment card, and AED 9,350 matches no line item in the schedule.
• SAIF Zone — AED 10,800 setup, AED 13,350 renewal. Neither figure traces back to any SAIF source. SAIF publishes its tier structure — a 3-visa Office, an 8-visa Suite, a four-instalment payment plan — and gives the price on a call.
• HFZA — AED 11,000. Not confirmed. A second consultancy quotes AED 5,000 for a licence-only alternative; the two describe different products and neither is official. hfza.ae serves a JavaScript redirect on its setup pages, so what it publishes is unreadable without a browser session.
• Dubai Internet City — AED 15,000. Refuted as an entry price. TECOM's only published DIC figure is the GoFreelance permit at AED 7,500 — half the circulating number, and a permit for an individual rather than a company licence. DIC publishes no FZ-LLC price at all.
• twofour54 — AED 15,000. Appears nowhere on twofour54's own site. The same AED 15,000 attaching to two unrelated zones in different emirates, against DIC's real published figure of half that, is recycled boilerplate rather than two independent quotes.

If you see any of those five quoted at you as a price, that is now a test you can apply to the source. For the eighteen genuinely unpublished zones, the route is the same everywhere: request a written quote, and get the inclusions itemised in the same email. The full breakdown is in our UAE free zone price transparency audit.

Cheapest free zone by emirate

• Ajman — Ajman Media City, AED 4,999. See the Ajman Media City profile for package tiers.
• Sharjah — SRTIP, AED 5,500. Three of Sharjah's five zones publish officially; SAIF Zone and HFZA publish nothing we could source.
• Ras Al Khaimah — RAKEZ, AED 6,000.
• Abu Dhabi — Masdar City, AED 7,000, and it includes a visa. KEZAD's licence is AED 0 but its lease is not.
• Dubai — JAFZA at AED 10,000 on licence fees alone, or Meydan at AED 12,500 with a flexi-desk included. Only three of Dubai's 20 zones publish a company licence price.
• Umm Al Quwain — UAQ FTZ, AED 12,500, the only free zone in the emirate.
• Fujairah — no official published price from either Fujairah zone.

What to do with this list

Shortlist on fit first, then price. The right sequence is: confirm your activity is licensable in the zone, confirm the visa count you need is available at a tier you can afford, then compare total first-year cost including visas — not headline licence price.

If you are weighing the six cheapest against each other, the inclusions differ more than the AED 1,601 spread between them suggests. We itemise all six side by side in what a cheap free zone licence actually includes.