Visas & immigration
Every route to a UAE residence.
Golden Visa by category, the Green Visa, employment and investor routes, sponsoring your family, and the processes nobody explains until you are already in the queue.
Before the list
The route decides everything after it.
There are more ways into UAE residence than most people are shown, and the one you are offered is usually the one whoever you asked happens to administer. An employer processes employment visas. A free zone sells investor visas. A property agent mentions the Golden Visa. None of them is wrong, and none of them is looking at the whole field on your behalf.
The distinction that matters more than the term is who holds it. An employer-sponsored residence ends when the job does, and it takes your family's residence with it. A self-sponsored one does not. That difference is invisible while everything is going well and decisive at the exact moment it stops — which is why the routes worth knowing about are the ones you would have to ask for by name.
The Golden Visa, by route
Nine ways in, testing completely different facts. The property route is the most marketed and the talent routes are the most under-used — several of them cost nothing and require no investment at all.
The Green Visa and self-sponsorship
Five years, no employer, and a much lower bar than the Golden Visa. A very large number of people in Dubai already meet the skilled-employee conditions and are on a two-year employer visa because nobody told them.
Other residence routes
Remote work, retirement, job exploration, study, environmental contribution, company ownership and household staff — each with its own conditions and its own restrictions on what you may then do.
Sponsoring your family
Salary thresholds, attested certificates and the age limits that arrive faster than families plan for. Attestation is what determines the timeline in almost every case, and it happens in another country.
The process itself
The mechanics behind every route above — what each stage does, what it costs, and the three ways an immigration record gets blocked.
Next step
Not sure which of these applies to you?
Describe the situation in two lines. We will tell you which of these you actually need and which you can ignore.
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