UAE Corporate Tax Deadline 2026: Key Dates & the AED 10,000 Penalty Waiver

• 03 July, 2026
• By Safvan, Managing Partner
• Corporate Tax

Last reviewed 31 July 2026 by the Exiloz tax team against the UAE legislation in force on that date. Tax law moves — confirm any figure against tax.gov.ae before you act on it.

The first big corporate tax deadline is here

UAE corporate tax is charged at 0% up to AED 375,000 of taxable income and 9% above that. The return is always due nine months after the end of your financial year. For the very common 31 December year-end, that puts the first filing and payment deadline at 30 September 2026. There is also a valuable relief: the AED 10,000 late-registration penalty is waived if you file your first return within seven months of the end of your first tax period — i.e. by 31 July 2026 for a 31 December 2025 year-end.

This is the first real filing cycle for most Dubai companies, so the mistakes are predictable: leaving registration and bookkeeping to the last minute, assuming a free-zone licence means nothing is due, or forgetting that the tax must be paid by the same deadline — there is no separate, later payment window.

Key Corporate Tax Dates for 2026

Documents You Need to File

• Financial statements for the tax period (income statement & balance sheet)
• Trial balance and general ledger
• Corporate tax registration number and trade licence
• Schedules for adjustments, exempt income and related-party transactions

A Simple Corporate Tax Calculation

Your 2026 corporate-tax calendar

A worked example: leaving it to September

A Dubai LLC with a 31 December 2025 year-end plans to “deal with tax after summer.” In September it discovers the books need three months of clean-up, its auditor is fully booked with identical deadlines, and the EmaraTax return needs schedules nobody prepared — related-party disclosures, adjustments, elections. Filing slips past 30 September: late-filing penalties start at AED 500 per month (rising after twelve months), payment penalties accrue on the unpaid tax, and by missing 31 July it also lost the AED 10,000 registration-penalty waiver it qualified for. The fix costs more than the tax. File in Q2–Q3, not on deadline week.

Common mistakes

What happens if you miss the 30 September deadline?

Late filing is penalised monthly, and the meter starts immediately. Under Cabinet Decision No. 75 of 2023, a late corporate tax return costs AED 500 for each month (or part of a month) for the first twelve months, rising to AED 1,000 per month from the thirteenth month. Unpaid tax attracts a separate late-payment penalty of 14% per annum, applied monthly, on the outstanding amount. On the worked example above — AED 27,000 of tax filed and paid six months late — the return penalty alone is AED 3,000 and the payment penalty adds roughly AED 1,890 more, before the FTA even looks at the numbers.

Filing an incorrect return carries its own penalties, and a return the FTA has to chase invites a closer look at transfer pricing disclosures, related-party balances and elections. None of this is deductible: penalties are specifically disallowed when calculating taxable income, so every dirham of fine is paid out of post-tax profit.

How do you file the corporate tax return on EmaraTax?

The return is filed online through the FTA’s EmaraTax portal. A clean filing follows the same eight steps every time:

1. Close the books: finalise the trial balance and produce IFRS financial statements for the tax period (IFRS for SMEs is acceptable below AED 50 million revenue).
2. Adjust accounting profit: add back disallowed items — fines, 50% of entertainment costs, donations to non-qualifying bodies — and strip out exempt income such as qualifying dividends.
3. Apply reliefs and elections: Small Business Relief, transitional relief for pre-2024 assets or the realisation basis must be elected inside the return itself — they cannot be retrofitted later.
4. Prepare the schedules: related-party transactions, connected-person payments and any free-zone qualifying-income analysis.
5. Log in to EmaraTax with UAE PASS, open the corporate tax module and select the tax period.
6. Complete the return — every figure must reconcile to the financial statements you keep on file.
7. Submit before the deadline and download the acknowledgement for your records.
8. Pay via GIBAN — a bank transfer to your unique IBAN or a card payment; the money, not just the return, must arrive by the deadline.

Most of the elapsed time sits in steps one to four — the accounting, not the portal. If the books are reconciled monthly, the EmaraTax stage takes hours, not weeks.

The legal basis

The nine-month filing-and-payment rule comes from Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022; administrative penalties for late filing and payment now sit in the unified regime of Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025, effective 14 April 2026. The seven-month waiver mechanic is covered in our penalty-waiver eligibility checker. To get ahead of the September rush, our corporate tax filing service and accounting team close the books and file well inside the window.

Frequently Asked Questions