Short answer
Your UAE corporate tax return and payment are due nine months after your financial year ends, so a year ending 31 December 2025 is due by 30 September 2026. Registration is required even at zero profit, and registering late costs AED 10,000. Late filing then adds AED 500 per month for the first year and AED 1,000 per month after that.
Corporate tax is still new enough in the UAE that plenty of owners are working from something a friend told them. Two of those things are usually wrong: that you only register if you are profitable, and that the deadline moves if you ask nicely. Neither is true.
The rate
Corporate tax is 9 percent on taxable profits above AED 375,000. Below that threshold the rate is nil, but the filing obligation does not disappear.
The deadline is nine months, not a fixed date
Your return and your payment are both due nine months after the last day of your financial year. There is no single national deadline, which is exactly why owners miss it.
- Financial year ending 31 December 2025, due by 30 September 2026.
- Financial year ending 31 March 2026, due by 31 December 2026.
- Financial year ending 30 June 2026, due by 31 March 2027.
The Federal Tax Authority does not hand out routine extensions. Plan the work backwards from your date rather than waiting for a reminder.
Registration is required even at zero profit
This is the one that costs money quietly. Registration applies regardless of whether you owe anything, and the penalty for registering late is AED 10,000.
There has been a waiver for that AED 10,000 penalty, but it comes with a condition: the first tax return has to be filed within seven months of the end of the first tax period, not the usual nine. Owners who assume they have nine months lose the waiver by two months.
What late filing costs after that
Late filing penalties run monthly: AED 500 for each month or part month for the first twelve months, then AED 1,000 for each month or part month from the thirteenth month onward. Like Emiratisation, this is a meter, not a one off charge.
What to do this quarter
- Write down your financial year end, then add nine months. That is your date. Put it in the calendar with a reminder three months earlier.
- Confirm you are registered. Not "we think we did", actually confirmed on the FTA portal.
- Check whether the waiver applies to you, because if it does, your real deadline is seven months and not nine.
- Get the bookkeeping current. A return is only as good as the accounts underneath it, and rebuilding a year of records in the final month is how mistakes get filed.
- Check your free zone position. Free zone and mainland treatment differ, and assuming you qualify for relief is not the same as qualifying.
The honest summary
Nothing here is difficult. It is a date, a registration and a set of books that need to be current. The expensive part is finding out in month ten.
Our accounting service tracks these dates for you and files on time, so the meter never starts.