A free zone’s headline price is 1.83 times below what the first year actually costs

Two figures per zone. The first is the entry price the authority publishes itself, taken from its own material on 3 October 2026. The second is the first-year total for the most common case: a single shareholder, one residence visa, and the cheapest address a visa permits.

That second figure adds the licence, the establishment card, the full visa chain — entry permit, medical, Emirates ID, stamping — and corporate tax registration, mandatory since 2023. None of these is optional for anyone intending to live in the UAE, and none is included in the headline price.

The other 35 free zones we cover are not in this study. They publish no complete price list, and our own estimates have no place in a survey. A figure we could not verify at source does not go in.

This is the study’s least intuitive result. DIFC, the most expensive zone in the panel, shows a gap of 1.09×. AMCFZ, the cheapest, shows 2.36×.

The explanation is one sentence: the establishment card, the visa and the tax registration cost roughly the same everywhere. That floor of about AED 6,800 is added whichever zone you choose. Set against a licence at AED 4,999 it more than doubles the bill. Set against one at AED 73,450 it barely registers.

Put differently, the most aggressive offers are the ones whose headline tells you least about what the year will cost. That is not a criticism of the authorities, which publish a licence price and describe it as one. It is a warning about how that price is repeated afterwards.