How it works
Registering for corporate tax, step by step
Registration is the easy part. The two decisions buried inside it, your entity classification and your tax period, are the ones that surface expensively at the first return if they were set carelessly.
Precisebooks
Corporate tax registration happens on EmaraTax, the Federal Tax Authority's portal. If you already have a VAT registration you have an account there. If not, you create one.
What to have ready
Your trade licence. The ownership and shareholding structure, including corporate shareholders and their details. Passport and Emirates ID for the authorised signatory. Contact details for the business. If you are in a free zone, the licence and the details of your presence there.
The two decisions that matter
Most of the form is data entry. Two fields are judgements, and both of them cause trouble later if they are guessed.
**Entity classification.** What kind of taxable person you are determines which rules apply to you. Getting it wrong does not usually announce itself at registration; it announces itself at the first return, when the computation you are trying to build does not fit the category you registered under.
**The tax period.** This should follow your financial year. If it does not, you have created a permanent mismatch between the accounts you prepare and the period you are filing for, and every return afterwards inherits it.
Neither is difficult to get right. Both are difficult to change later.
Registration is not the end of it
A registration number is not compliance. Filing is a separate obligation with its own deadline, nine months after the tax period ends, and it applies whether or not there is tax to pay. Businesses that register and then assume the matter is dealt with are a recognisable category, and they turn up nine months later with no accounts.
Free zone entities register too
Being in a free zone does not put a company outside the corporate tax regime. It still registers, and it still files. Whether the 0 per cent rate applies to its income is a separate question, decided on the entity's actual activities and substance rather than on the licence, and it is answered on the return rather than at registration.
What this is based on
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. Free zone businesses are within the corporate tax regime, and the regime continues to honour the incentives available to free zone businesses that comply with all regulatory requirements.
SourceChecked
The corporate tax return must be submitted and the liability settled within a period not exceeding nine months from the end of the tax period.
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.
Ask an AI about us
Opens your assistant with a question already written, pointed at this page. It answers from what we publish, including the notes we keep for assistants.
Tell us what is actually going on.
Twenty minutes, no charge, no obligation. If we are not the right fit we will say so on that call rather than three weeks later.
Prefer to write it out? Send an enquiry instead