A Meydan Free Zone licence starts at AED 12,500 a year and buys a Dubai company with 100% foreign ownership, a flexi-desk address and up to three activity groups on one licence. The standard licence is issued online within 24 hours, or in under 60 minutes through Meydan’s Fawri product at AED 15,000. It fits consultants, agencies, freelancers and e-commerce sellers who want a low fixed cost and have no need for warehouse space or a banking-district address.
Every figure below was read on Meydan Free Zone’s own site on 12 September 2026. Free zone pricing changes and promotions come and go, so treat these as indicative and get a written quotation before you pay anything. This article is general information about setting up a company, not legal or tax advice.
Key takeaways
- The AED 12,500 headline covers the licence and the flexi-desk. Visas, the establishment card and medical testing are charged on top of it.
- Three activity groups are included, with multiple activities inside each group at no extra charge. Anything beyond those three groups costs AED 1,000 per activity.
- A visa allocation costs AED 1,850 per slot and a standard licence carries up to six slots. The slot is the permission to sponsor someone, not the visa itself.
- Fawri at AED 15,000 buys speed and a refund promise, and gives up multi-shareholder structures and post-issue activity changes.
- DMCC publishes setup packages from AED 35,484, so Meydan sits at roughly a third of that entry cost with a very different address and tenant mix.
- The 0% corporate tax headline is conditional, and income that fails the qualifying test is taxed at 9% with no AED 375,000 cushion applied to it.
What the AED 12,500 licence actually includes
The base package is the trade licence, a flexi-desk address and up to three business activity groups drawn from a pool Meydan describes as more than 2,500 activities. That is enough to register a company, sign contracts, invoice clients and apply for a corporate bank account. Meydan states the licence can be issued online within 24 hours and that licence validity runs up to 10 years, with a multi-year discount of up to 15% for longer commitments.
What it does not include is the part that surprises people. Residency visas, the immigration establishment card, medical testing and Emirates ID processing all sit outside the licence fee. A founder who reads AED 12,500 and budgets AED 12,500 will be short by roughly the cost of a visa and an establishment card before the company is operational.
Meydan also sells a non-resident licence at AED 12,500 for founders who want a UAE company without moving to the UAE. That is a legitimate structure for a holding company or a services business billing from abroad, though it changes what a bank will offer you and it does nothing for residency.
Three activity groups, and where the extra charges start
This is the part of Meydan’s structure that genuinely differs from most zones. You pick up to three activity groups, and inside each group you can hold several individual activities without paying more. The groups do not need to be related. Meydan’s own example puts manufacturing, automotive trading and food and beverage rentals on a single licence.
Practically, that means a Dubai marketing agency can hold advertising services, e-commerce and management consultancy on one licence and invoice all three from day one. Activities beyond the three included groups cost AED 1,000 each.
One issue we often see is founders picking activities to match what they sell this quarter rather than what they intend to sell in two years. Adding an activity later is not expensive, but changing the licence triggers paperwork and, for some regulated activities, third-party approvals that take weeks. Map the next two years of revenue before you pick, not the next two months.
Fawri, the 60 minute licence, and what you trade for the speed
Fawri costs AED 15,000 and issues the licence in under 60 minutes from completed application and payment, with a full refund if Meydan misses that window. It draws on a smaller pool of more than 1,800 activities, still with three combinable groups, and the same AED 1,000 charge for extras.
The restriction that matters is structural. Fawri is built for a single individual who is the shareholder, manager, director and ultimate beneficial owner all at once. Multi-shareholder structures are not available at that tier. The package also excludes residency visas, medical and Emirates ID processing, office upgrades and activity changes after issuance, all of which are sold as add-ons.
So the honest comparison is not 60 minutes against 24 hours for AED 2,500. It is a question about structure: a solo founder who will never add a partner to this entity loses nothing, and anyone else does. Two people planning to split equity should take the standard route and pay less. A consultant who wants to sign a contract this afternoon has a real reason to pay the difference.
Visa slots are priced separately from the visas
Meydan charges AED 1,850 per visa allocation, and a standard licence carries up to six allocations. Companies needing more than six are asked for a business plan at setup. The slot is the quota, not the visa, and the visa costs are separate again.
| Item | Indicative cost (Sept 2026) |
|---|---|
| Visa allocation, per slot | AED 1,850 |
| Investor visa | from AED 4,000 |
| Employee visa | from AED 3,500 |
| Immigration establishment card, one-time | from AED 2,000 |
| Medical and Emirates ID assistance | from AED 2,250 |
| First investor visa, all in | approximately AED 7,850 |
Stack those against the licence and a realistic first-year number for one founder on a residence visa lands well above the headline, before you have paid for accounting, a bank account or a website. Budget the whole first year rather than the licence line, and remember the establishment card is a one-time cost while the licence and visas renew.
Meydan against IFZA and DMCC
These three come up together constantly, and they are not competing for the same company.
DMCC publishes business setup packages from AED 35,484, with a licence fee of AED 20,265 a year for activities requiring a new licence, an application fee of AED 1,015 and Knowledge and Innovation Dirham charges of AED 20. In June 2026 DMCC added incentives of 10% on one-year packages and 20% on multi-year setups for new businesses, with renewal discounts of 15%, 20% and 25% for two, three and five-year commitments. You are paying roughly three times Meydan’s entry cost for a JLT address, a large trading community and a regulator that commodity traders and larger firms specifically want on their paperwork.
IFZA does not publish fixed package prices. Its process starts with a consultation and a tailored proposal covering licence type, activities, visa package and office solution, so any IFZA price you read on a third-party blog is that agent’s quotation rather than a published rate. Get IFZA’s number in writing and compare like with like, including visa quota and office type.
Our own pages on Meydan free zone company setup, IFZA business setup and DMCC company formation cover the documents and steps for each. The short version is that Meydan competes on price and speed, DMCC competes on reputation and depth of community, and IFZA competes on flexible packaging through its agent network.
What the 0% corporate tax headline leaves out
Free zone marketing leans hard on 0% corporate tax, and the rule is narrower than the slogan. The UAE applies 0% corporate tax on taxable income up to AED 375,000 and 9% above it. A Free Zone Person that meets the conditions to be a Qualifying Free Zone Person can get 0% on its Qualifying Income, as set out by the Federal Tax Authority.
The trap sits in the next sentence of the rules. A Qualifying Free Zone Person does not get the 0% band on its first AED 375,000 of income that is not Qualifying Income. Income failing the qualifying test is taxed at 9% from the first dirham. For a consultancy in Meydan billing UAE mainland clients, whether that revenue qualifies is a real question with a real tax consequence, and it is answered by the activity and the counterparty, not by the zone’s brochure.
Registration and filing are obligations regardless of the rate you end up paying. We wrote about the mechanics in corporate tax registration for free zone companies, and our corporate tax and accounting and bookkeeping teams handle the filings. Get the qualifying-income question answered by a tax adviser before you choose a zone on tax grounds.
Who Meydan suits, and who should look elsewhere
Meydan works well for service businesses with low physical requirements. Consultants, marketing and design agencies, IT and software firms, recruiters, e-commerce sellers using third-party fulfilment and solo professionals testing a UAE entity all fit the model. The three-group structure suits founders whose revenue comes from several related lines, which describes most small Dubai agencies.
Look elsewhere if you need warehousing, port access or industrial space, since a flexi-desk zone is the wrong tool for physical logistics. Look elsewhere if your clients or bankers weigh the address heavily, which happens in commodities, finance and parts of professional services. Look elsewhere if you are regulated, because financial services firms belong in DIFC and virtual asset businesses face physical presence requirements that a flexi-desk does not satisfy.
The other honest reason to choose a different zone is banking. Corporate account opening in the UAE is a separate process run by the bank, not the free zone, and banks apply their own view of the company’s substance, activity and shareholder profile. A licence issued in 60 minutes does not produce a bank account in 60 minutes. Plan for the account to take considerably longer than the licence and prepare the supporting documents properly rather than treating it as a formality.
