Trade licences & activities
The four words that decide whether a bank takes you.
A licence is a list of permitted activities with a company name attached. Choose that list carelessly and everything downstream — banking, insurance, visas, customs — becomes an argument.
What a licence is
Not permission to exist. Permission to do specific things.
Every UAE trade licence names the activities the company may carry out, drawn from a schedule maintained by the relevant authority. There are well over two thousand of them, they are more granular than most founders expect, and they are enforced.
"Management consultancy" and "business setup services" are different codes. So are "general trading" and "trading in building materials". A company licensed for the first cannot lawfully invoice for the second, and the mismatch surfaces at precisely the wrong moment: when a bank compares your licence to your account activity, when an insurer reads your policy schedule after a claim, or when customs looks at what you are importing against what you are permitted to import.
Activity mismatch, in practice
A consultancy licensed for "management consultancy" starts reselling software to its clients. The invoices say software. The licence says advice. Six months later the bank's periodic review flags the pattern, the account is restricted pending clarification, and the company spends three weeks proving it is not a front while its payroll bounces.
None of that was dishonest. It was a licence that stopped describing the business roughly a year before anybody noticed.
The trade name
Rules that catch people out.
Name reservation looks trivial and rejects more first attempts than any other stage. The constraints are specific and they are applied:
Reservations are time-limited. If the rest of the file drifts past the window the name lapses and the fee is spent.
The sequence
Issuance, and then every year after.
Activity selection
We take what you actually do — including the things you intend to do in year two — and map it onto the authority's schedule. Where an activity needs external approval from a ministry or regulator, that gets identified now rather than discovered later.
1–2 daysTrade name reservation
Three candidate names, checked against the rules above and against the existing register, submitted in order of preference.
1–2 daysInitial approval
The authority confirms it has no objection to you, personally, owning this business doing this activity. It is not the licence, and it does not permit you to trade.
2–3 daysDocumentation and issuance
Memorandum, shareholder resolutions, tenancy or flexi-desk agreement, passport attestations where required. Then the licence itself, the establishment card and the immigration file.
5–10 daysRenewal, annually
Licences expire. In most zones renewal now requires audited financial statements, and a lapsed licence carries fines that compound and can block your visa renewals. We track the date so it does not become an emergency.
Every year, without exception
Licences & changes
The licence, and every change to it.
The six licence categories and what each permits, plus the amendments that come later — name, activity, manager, address, capital, legal form — and what each one costs to file.
The six licence categories
What each permits, what it does not, and the two decisions that cost the most later — how many activities to put on a commercial licence, and whether a permit will actually do what you need.
Changing the licence
A company is formed once and amended repeatedly. Each of these is a formal filing, most need a notarised addendum, and all of them have a downstream cascade — bank, immigration, UBO register, tax and customs — that is what actually gets forgotten.
Renewal, closure and blocks
An expired licence freezes visas and banking before the fine becomes significant, there is no dormant status that suspends obligations, and blocks accumulate across authorities that do not talk to each other.