UAE Free Zone Hidden Costs: The 19 Zones That Won't Tell You What They Charge

The biggest of the UAE free zone hidden costs is not a fee. It is the absence of a published price at all: we tried to find an official setup price for all 40 UAE free zones, and 19 still give us nothing usable — 18 that publish no price we could find, and one that offers only a calculator whose own disclaimer calls the result an estimate.

This is not an article about surprise charges. It is a record of what happened when we priced every zone in the country, one at a time, with the specific obstacle named for each that would not give us a number.

How many UAE free zones publish a price?

Twenty-one of 40 carry a cost figure we could source to the authority itself, 20 of them in AED. Better than our first pass suggested — and still not a price list, because several of those official figures are freelance permits or single tariff line items rather than the cost of setting up a company.

| Pricing state | Zones | Share | |---|---:|---:| | Official source, AED figure recorded | 20 | 50% | | Official source, no AED figure (DIFC, USD only) | 1 | 2.5% | | Nothing published that we could find | 18 | 45% | | Gated behind an estimate-only calculator | 1 | 2.5% |

Consultant-sourced figures used to occupy a fifth row. There are none left: on a second research pass every one failed against the authority's own material, so we deleted them rather than keep them under a label. The five casualties are named at the end.

Ten of the 19 are in Dubai. The emirate with the most free zones is still the least transparent about what they charge.

What are the four ways a free zone avoids publishing a price?

1. A broken page. IFZA's site has no pricing and /en/packages returns a 404. Fujairah Creative City's packages page also 404s. The page that should hold the answer exists as a link and not as a document.

2. An advisor phone number. SAIF Zone publishes its tier structure — a 3-visa Office, an 8-visa Suite, a four-instalment payment plan — and puts the price behind a scheduled call. twofour54 advertises "no minimum capital required" without publishing a single number.

3. A calculator with no published output. Ajman Free Zone's calculator explicitly states its results are "estimates only" and subject to governmental fee changes. A calculator is not a price list — it commits the zone to nothing, which is why we hold AFZ as gated rather than published.

4. A site that blocks automated access. Dubai Maritime City's dmca.ae returns 403. HFZA and Fujairah Free Zone serve JavaScript redirects that yield metadata only. For HFZA that is a rendering wall rather than a policy refusal, and we expect to close it.

A fifth, rarer case: Gold and Diamond Park has no publicly reachable official regulatory page at all — only a retail site — with the registrar unclear from public sources.

The 19 zones, and what we found

| Zone | Emirate | What blocks a price | |---|---|---| | IFZA | Dubai | No pricing on ifza.com; /en/packages 404s; partner-agent model, prices quoted by agents rather than the authority | | Dubai Silicon Oasis | Dubai | Not published on dso.ae | | Dubai South | Dubai | Not published; thin official pages | | Dubai Studio City | Dubai | Not published; not covered by TECOM's GoFreelance permit | | Dubai Production City | Dubai | Not published; not covered by TECOM's GoFreelance permit | | Dubai Science Park | Dubai | Not published; not covered by TECOM's GoFreelance permit | | Dubai CommerCity | Dubai | Not published | | DWTC Free Zone | Dubai | Not published; eServices platform only | | Dubai Maritime City | Dubai | Not published; dmca.ae returns 403 | | Gold and Diamond Park | Dubai | No official regulatory page exists publicly; retail site only, registrar unclear | | ADAFZ | Abu Dhabi | Not published | | ADGM | Abu Dhabi | Publishes a full official Schedule of Fees, but in USD only — no AED figure exists to record | | twofour54 | Abu Dhabi | Not published for licences, freelance permits or facilities | | SAIF Zone | Sharjah | Tiers published, prices given on a scheduled advisor call | | HFZA | Sharjah | JavaScript redirect on setup, FAQ and promotions pages; nothing readable | | RAK Maritime City | Ras Al Khaimah | "Pay for only what you need"; quote-based, no fixed price | | Ajman Free Zone | Ajman | Cost calculator is estimate-only and quote-based; explicitly says "estimates only" | | Fujairah Free Zone | Fujairah | Fee schedule not accessible; JavaScript-rendered site | | Fujairah Creative City | Fujairah | Packages page returns 404; broken official page |

ADGM is the row worth reading twice. It is not being secretive — it publishes a genuine, complete fee schedule, in dollars. We will not convert a published figure into a currency the authority did not state it in. That is our constraint, not ADGM's failure, and DIFC sits in exactly the same position.

Why does TECOM have seven Dubai districts and only four prices?

TECOM Group operates seven Dubai business districts. Its GoFreelance permit — AED 7,500 a year, per TECOM's own headline — is valid in exactly four: Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Knowledge Park and Dubai Design District. Studio City, Production City and Science Park are not covered, and they are in the table above. We have deliberately not copied AED 7,500 into those three records. A figure true of four districts is not true of seven, and that quiet propagation is how bad numbers enter a market.

The bigger caveat applies to all seven. GoFreelance is a permit for an individual freelancer, not a company licence. No TECOM district publishes a price for an FZ-LLC — one operator, seven districts, and not one published company setup price between them.

Why is this structural rather than accidental?

Because a quote-only model is worth money to the people inside it.

A published price is the same for everyone. A quote can vary by buyer — by nationality, by apparent budget, by which agent introduced you, by how urgent you sound. Opacity is not a website bug; it is the condition that makes price discrimination possible.

It also protects a distribution channel. Most free zone licences are sold through agents, and the value an agent adds in a market with published prices is thin. In a market without them, the agent is the only route to a number. A zone that published a full fee schedule would undercut its own distributors.

None of this is illegal or even unusual. But stop reading the absence of a price as an oversight. It is the design.

What should you ask for in writing before you pay?

Four figures. Get them in an email, not on a call, and get them before any deposit.

1. The all-in first-year figure, itemised, for exactly the configuration you want — the number of visas, the office type, the activities.
2. The renewal figure — and the period it covers. Renewal is where zones make their margin, and only eight of our 40 records carry a published renewal price at all. KEZAD's renewal is charged per two years, not annually; anyone lining that up against another zone's annual figure without halving it has made KEZAD look twice as expensive as it is.
3. The visa step-up. What it costs to go from your package's visa allocation to one more visa, and to two more.
4. The exit fee. What it costs to deregister and close the company cleanly, including any immigration card cancellation.

If a zone or agent will not put those four numbers in writing, that is itself the answer. Our price transparency audit covers all 40 records, and the ranked list of zones with a published price is the shortlist worth starting from.

The five figures that did not survive a second look

Five zones used to carry a number here, sourced from consultancy listings rather than the authority. We checked each against the authority and deleted all five:

• KEZAD, AED 9,350. KEZAD's own tariff charges AED 0 for a new industrial, trading or service licence and AED 0 for registration. The only unavoidable published setup fee is a AED 1,000 establishment card. AED 9,350 matches no line item in the schedule.
• Dubai Internet City, AED 15,000. TECOM's only published DIC figure is the GoFreelance permit at AED 7,500 — half the circulating number, and for a permit rather than a company licence.
• twofour54, AED 15,000. Appears nowhere on twofour54's site. The same round number attaching to two unrelated zones in different emirates, against DIC's real figure of half that, is recycled boilerplate.
• SAIF Zone, AED 10,800 setup and AED 13,350 renewal. Neither traces back to any SAIF source.
• HFZA, AED 11,000. Unconfirmed, with a second consultancy quoting AED 5,000 for a different product entirely.

What we will do about it

We will publish every quote we obtain, dated and attributed to the zone or agent that issued it, and keep the "not published" state visible rather than filling it with a plausible-looking average.

It would be trivial to put a number in all 19 rows above. Every consultancy blog already has — and, as the five deletions show, several of those numbers do not survive being checked. We would rather have 19 honest blanks than 19 invented figures, because a wrong number costs you more than a missing one.

If you have a written quote from any of the 19 zones, send it to us. We will publish it with the date, the configuration it covers, and the source — and not use your name unless you ask.