Deadlines
Nine months is less time than it sounds
The filing itself takes an afternoon. Getting the accounts underneath it into a state that supports a computation is what takes the nine months, and it is the part people start in month eight.
Precisebooks
The Federal Tax Authority requires the corporate tax return to be submitted, and the liability settled, within nine months of the end of your tax period. Return and payment share the date. A 31 December year end means the end of the following September.
Nine months sounds generous. It is not, and the reason is that almost none of it is filing time.
What actually consumes the nine months
The return is a computation, and a computation is only as good as the financial statements under it. If the bookkeeping is current and reconciled, the sequence is short: close the year, prepare statements, compute taxable income with the adjustments the law requires, file. If it is not, the sequence starts with reconstructing a year of transactions from bank statements, and that is where months go.
Then there are the questions that cannot be answered quickly because they are questions about facts rather than numbers. Whether a free zone entity meets the qualifying conditions is a question about what it actually does, where its substance is and who it sells to, not something the licence answers on its own. Related party transactions need documenting. Exempt income needs identifying as exempt before it can be treated that way.
None of those are hard. All of them are slow when the answer has to be assembled in month eight.
Filing is not optional if you owe nothing
Registration and filing are obligations in their own right. A business with no tax to pay still files. The nine month clock runs the same way.
The honest version of the advice
If your year ends on 31 December, the useful question in January is not "when is the return due", it is "will the books support a computation without a reconstruction exercise". If the answer is no, the work to fix that is the work, and it is cheaper in February than in August. If the answer is yes, the return is a short piece of work and the deadline is not the thing to worry about.
What this is based on
The Federal Tax Authority requires taxable persons to submit their tax return and settle their corporate tax liability within a period not exceeding nine months from the end of the tax period. A tax period ending 31 December therefore falls due at the end of the following September.
SourceChecked
Corporate tax is charged at 0 per cent on taxable income up to AED 375,000 and 9 per cent on taxable income above AED 375,000.
SourceChecked
UAE rules change. These notes are general information, not advice for your entity, and we re-check every one of them on a schedule.
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