UAE Tax Records 2026: The 7-Year Retention Rules

• 24 July, 2026
• By Safwan, Managing Partner
• Accounting

Last reviewed 24 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 rule that decides whether you survive an audit

UAE tax law sets minimum record-retention periods. For corporate tax, Article 56 of Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 requires taxable persons and exempt persons to keep all records supporting their return for at least 7 years after the end of the relevant tax period. For VAT, records must generally be kept for 5 years; real-estate records must be kept for 15 years. Records must let the FTA readily verify taxable income, and they are the first thing requested in an FTA audit. If you would rather not handle this in house, this is what our corporate tax compliance retainer covers.

“How long do I have to keep my books?” is a simple question with a layered answer, because the period depends on the tax. Get it wrong and you can face penalties and lose the evidence you need to defend an audit. Here is the retention map.

The retention periods

Which records you must keep

Even exempt persons must keep records

A common misconception is that being exempt from corporate tax means no record-keeping. Not so — exempt persons must still keep records to demonstrate they meet the exemption conditions. The obligation is about proving your position to the FTA, whether you pay tax or not.

Digital records and audit readiness

Records can be kept digitally, provided they are complete, accurate and retrievable for the full retention period. Because records are the first thing the FTA requests in an audit, organised, reconciled and searchable records — not a shoebox of receipts — are what make an audit quick and defensible. With e-invoicing arriving, structured digital records also become the norm.

What Dubai businesses should do

1. Map your retention: 7 years CT, 5 years VAT, 15 years real estate.
2. Keep the full set: financials, transactions, balance-sheet and ownership records.
3. Go digital: store records so they are complete and retrievable.
4. Include exempt entities: keep records even where you claim exemption.
5. Stay audit-ready: reconcile regularly so a request is routine.

A worked example: the audit that hinges on year one

A Dubai company files its first corporate-tax return for FY 2024 in September 2025. Under Article 56, every record behind that return (ledgers, invoices, contracts, asset registers, shareholding documents) must survive until at least the end of 2031 (seven years from the end of the 2024 tax period). If the FTA opens an audit in 2030 and the 2024 purchase invoices are gone because “the old system was decommissioned,” the deductions they supported can be disallowed and penalties added: the absence of records, not the underlying transaction, becomes the problem. VAT paperwork for the same year could lawfully have been destroyed after five years; the corporate-tax copies could not.

A retention policy you can actually run

1. Map records to regimes: tag every document class (sales, purchases, payroll, assets, property) with its 7 / 5 / 15-year clock.
2. Default to the longest period where a document serves two regimes, a property invoice inside a CT return follows the longer applicable clock.
3. Keep exports when systems change: migrating accounting software must include complete, readable historical exports.
4. Store audit-ready: the FTA expects records that let taxable income be readily verified: organised by period, retrievable in days not months.
5. Log destruction: when a retention clock genuinely expires, record what was destroyed and when.

Can you keep records in English, and in the cloud?

Yes to both, with conditions. Tax records may be maintained in English or Arabic, but the FTA can require an Arabic translation of any document, at your cost, within the deadline it sets, worth remembering before storing contracts only in a third language. Electronic and cloud storage is fully acceptable provided the records remain complete, legible and readily producible when the FTA asks: scanned originals must be faithful copies, accounting data must be exportable, and access must survive a change of software vendor. The practical tests to run once a year: can you export five-year-old ledgers out of your current system, do the backups actually restore, and can someone other than the one employee who set it up retrieve an invoice from 2021 in under an hour? If any answer is no, the records exist in theory but not in the way an audit measures them.

Common mistakes

The legal basis

Corporate-tax record keeping is governed by Article 56 of Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 (seven years for taxable and exempt persons alike) while VAT and general tax-procedure retention (five years, fifteen for real estate) sit in Federal Decree-Law No. 28 of 2022 and its Executive Regulation (Cabinet Decision No. 74 of 2023). Records are the first request in any FTA tax audit, and clean books are the cheapest audit defence there is, exactly what our accounting and bookkeeping service maintains month by month.

Frequently Asked Questions