Practical guide
Adding an activity
Adding an activity is a licence amendment with its own fee, its own approvals and — if the new activity triggers an external regulator — its own timeline. It is far cheaper than the alternative, which is invoicing for work your licence does not cover.
In practice
Adding a business activity to a UAE licence
When you need to
Whenever what you actually do drifts past what the licence says. A consultancy that starts reselling software, an agency that starts importing merchandise, a trading company that begins offering installation — each has moved beyond its licence and each will be noticed by a bank comparing invoices to activities.
What it involves
An amendment application, a fee, and potentially a change of licence category — moving from professional to commercial changes more than the activity list, including in some cases the ownership and premises requirements.
- Cost
- An amendment fee, generally modest relative to a new licence
- Category change
- Professional to commercial may change premises and ownership requirements
- External approvals
- Some activities trigger a ministry or regulator
- Premises
- Some activities require space the current premises cannot provide
- Timeline
- Days to several weeks depending on approvals
- Visa quota
- Generally unaffected unless premises change
The sequence
How it runs.
Confirm the activity code
Against the authority's current schedule, not last year's.
Check for external approvals
The reason an amendment takes weeks rather than days.
Check the premises requirement
Some activities cannot be held against a flexi-desk.
Submit the amendment
With any amended MOA where the objects clause needs to change.
Update the bank
A materially changed activity list should be notified rather than discovered.
Questions
Through a licence amendment with the issuing authority, including any external approvals the new activity requires and, where the objects clause changes, an amended memorandum.
An amendment fee that is generally modest relative to a new licence, plus any external approval costs. Changing licence category — professional to commercial — can cost considerably more.
No. Doing so creates a mismatch between your invoices and your licensed activity that banks check at periodic review, and insurers check when a claim is made.
One question
Where are you in this?
Then this is the cheap moment to get it right. Structure, jurisdiction and activity codes are the decisions that are expensive to reverse once a bank account and six visas hang off them.
Answer five questionsOr just ask usMost of what goes wrong at this stage is a document mismatch rather than a refusal — the wrong activity on the licence, an unattested certificate, a name that does not match the trade. Usually fixable faster than it looks.
Tell us what is stuckOr just ask usWe quote a single all-in figure with every government fee itemised beside our own, before you commit to anything. No commission from any authority.
How we chargeOr just ask us