Relocation to Dubai

Short answer: no! To get the tax benefits of being in Dubai, you need to live there for at least 6 months of the year. There are also rules which your home country will have around how many days you can return to avoid remaining tax resident in your home country. The key is establishing ‘non-residence’ in your home country and ‘residence’ in Dubai to get the tax benefits. We go through what this would mean for you in the initial Consultation.

At the moment, there is no income tax in the Dubai which means any income you earn whilst resident of the UAE, you won’t have to pay tax on. However, they have now introduced corporation tax at a maximum rate of 9% payable on business profits. There are however some favourable exemptions which you can take advantage of by structuring your company in the right way. We can advise what these are in the initial Consultation.

You can run a business from anywhere these days if you are set up to do so. The key thing is your personal tax residence because that will drive how you are taxed. If you can make yourself ‘non resident’ for UK tax purposes then you will benefit from not having to pay UK income tax and mitigate corporation tax too to a certain extent. Careful planning is required though to avoid falling foul of tax legislation and transfer pricing regulations.

Not long. A lot of the paperwork can be done from the UK and you can have the company registered, VISA issued and the Emirates ID within two weeks (although that is pushing it!). Usually 4-6 weeks is what you should allow. Below is a video showing the process we went through to set up Capture Accounting in Dubai and how long it took.