Mainland Company Setup in Dubai

A mainland licence is issued by the Department of Economic Development of the Emirate you register in. It is the structure with the fewest restrictions: you can invoice any customer in the UAE, open premises anywhere in the Emirate, tender for government contracts and hold as many visas as your office space supports.

It also carries obligations a free zone does not: a real tenancy registered with Ejari, an activity list that must match what you actually do, and external approvals for a long list of regulated trades.

When mainland is the right call

Choose mainland if your customers are UAE businesses or consumers, if you want a retail or F&B location, if you intend to bid for government or semi-government contracts, or if you need a visa quota larger than a free zone package will release.

Choose a free zone instead if your income comes from outside the UAE, if you want a predictable fixed annual cost, or if you do not want the commitment of a registered office lease in year one.

100% foreign ownership on the mainland

Since the 2021 amendments to the Commercial Companies Law, the large majority of commercial and industrial activities can be 100% foreign owned with no Emirati shareholder. This changed the calculation for a lot of businesses that had defaulted to a free zone purely to avoid a local partner.

A limited list of activities with strategic impact still requires an Emirati partner or a local service agent. We verify your exact activity code against the current list at the start, because the answer varies by activity and by Emirate.

Office space and visa quota

Your mainland visa quota is tied to the office you lease. As a rule of thumb the authority allows roughly one visa per nine square metres of registered space, subject to inspection and to the activity.

The tenancy must be registered with Ejari before the licence completes. Business centres and shared offices are acceptable for many activities provided the contract is registered properly, which is where a lot of cheap arrangements fall down.

External approvals

Some activities need a no-objection certificate from a ministry or regulator before the DED will issue: healthcare from the health authority, education from the knowledge authority, transport, security, legal consultancy, financial services and food handling among others.

These approvals set your real timeline. A straightforward trading licence completes in days; an activity needing two external approvals can take weeks. We tell you which category you are in before you commit rather than after.