UAE Free Zones: All 33, by Emirate

There are more than forty free zones in the UAE and every comparison article ranks them by headline licence price. That figure changes every year, excludes the visa and the establishment card, and tells you nothing about whether the zone will license your activity at all. These pages do it differently: what each authority actually is, when it was established and under which law, what it licenses, and who it genuinely suits.

Dubai

Dubai has more free zones than any other emirate, and they are not variations on a theme. A commodities zone, a financial centre with its own courts, an aviation district and a technology park solve genuinely different problems.

Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi competes on scale and on specialism rather than on volume of zones. An independent common law jurisdiction, 410 square kilometres of industrial land and a dedicated clean technology cluster are each aimed at a particular kind of business.

Sharjah & Ajman

Sharjah and Ajman border Dubai, which is the whole argument. You get a materially lower cost base without the distances the northern emirates impose, provided you can live with the traffic.

Northern Emirates

The northern emirates compete on cost and space. That works well when your operation genuinely sits where the licence does, and badly when your clients, staff and freight are all still in Dubai.