PRO services in Dubai & the UAE, Checked first. Filed right.

What PRO services cost in Dubai

Pricing in this market is deliberately opaque. Most providers quote a single bundled number so you cannot tell what is government fee and what is margin. Here is the actual structure, so you can compare quotes properly.

The seven areas we cover

Every UAE government transaction an individual or company needs sits in one of these. Each links to the full service page with fees, checklists and timelines.

What changed in 2026 that affects almost everyone

Three changes this year have caught out a large share of the files that come to us. Each has a full guide.

The full consolidated picture is in our guide to UAE visa rule changes in 2026.

How to choose a PRO company in Dubai

The market is crowded and largely unregulated in terms of service quality. Six questions separate the providers worth using from the rest.

What we check before taking any file

Roughly a third of the files that reach us have a blocker the client did not know about. Finding it on day one costs nothing. Finding it later costs a cycle.

Individuals and companies work differently

Which UAE authority actually handles what

Most confusion about PRO services comes from not knowing which body governs which transaction. People go to Amer for a labour matter, or expect MOHRE to issue a residence visa. Here is the map.

So which one do you need?

A useful rule of thumb: MOHRE governs your job, GDRFA and ICP govern your right to be here, and DED governs your company's right to trade. Almost every file touches at least two of them, in a fixed order.

An employment visa, for example, starts at MOHRE for the work permit, moves to GDRFA for the entry permit and residence, passes through DHA for the medical and ICP for the Emirates ID, and is submitted through Tasheel and Amer at each stage. Getting the order wrong is what produces a file that sits for three weeks with nobody able to say why.

Retainer, in-house PRO, or do it yourself

The honest comparison is not between PRO providers. It is between outsourcing, hiring, and absorbing the work yourself. Each is right for someone.

For companies under roughly fifty staff, a retainer is usually cheaper than a salaried PRO once you count the visa, transport and the weeks of the year that person is unavailable. Above that, in-house starts to make sense — and we will tell you when you have reached that point rather than keep billing you.

Corporate PRO services: an outsourced PRO desk for your company

Most Dubai companies do not need a full-time PRO. They need someone who knows which authority owns which process, keeps the renewal calendar, and gets each application typed and submitted correctly the first time. That is what our corporate PRO service does, on a monthly retainer or per transaction.

A company file in Dubai is a chain. The trade licence supports the establishment card, the establishment card supports the labour file, the labour file supports the quota, and the quota supports every employment visa you issue. If one link lapses, everything after it stops, usually just as you are trying to onboard someone.

How a company engagement starts

What we need from a company

For an ongoing engagement we take this set once and keep it current. A one-off task usually needs less.

Where company files come unstuck

The problems we are called in to fix are almost always sequencing problems, not paperwork problems.

Your annual compliance calendar

Almost every emergency we are called into traces back to one of these dates. They interlock, so one lapse stalls several others.

The lead times matter as much as the dates. Anything handled in its final week has no room for a rejection, a missing document or a public holiday — and all three are common.

The terms that actually matter

Six pieces of vocabulary explain most of what happens in a UAE government file.

Government fees at cost: the published figures

The full reference — every published government fee for Dubai PRO work, with the authority that publishes each — is set out in our guide to PRO services cost in Dubai. You can price your own file against it before anyone quotes you.

We do not mark up government fees. So that you can check any quote — ours or anyone else's — here are figures the authorities publish on their own service cards. These are the federal ICP schedule; Dubai files processed through GDRFA and Amer carry their own charges, and typing-centre fees sit on top of either.

If a quote you receive is a single bundled number with no breakdown, you cannot tell which part is the authority's fee and which is margin. Ask for it split. Any provider unwilling to do that is telling you something.

Five checks you can do yourself, right now, for free

We would rather you fixed these without us than paid us to discover them. Genuinely — four out of five files that arrive with a problem have one of these behind it.

• Your establishment card expiry. If it has lapsed, every employee visa transaction is frozen regardless of how clean the individual files are. This is the single most common cause of a stalled company file.
• Your trade licence expiry. It gates the establishment card, which gates everything else.
• Passport validity for anyone with something pending. Six months is the working floor for most applications. Five months and eleven days is a rejection.
• Anyone who left the company more than three months ago. If their residence was never cancelled, you are still their sponsor, with the liabilities that carries.
• Name spelling across passport, contract, tenancy and existing records. The system matches exactly. A middle name present on one document and absent on another is a discrepancy, not a detail.

If all five are clean, most routine transactions will run without difficulty and you may not need us at all. If two or more are not, that is worth a conversation before anything is lodged.

What we will not do

This matters more than a service list, because it is the clearest test of who you are dealing with. These get asked for regularly. We decline them.

We would rather lose the work than lodge something that fails. A rejection is not neutral — it leaves a record, costs time you may not have, and can make the correct route harder afterwards.

Who we are a good fit for — and who we are not

Free zone or mainland: what changes for your file

The mistake we see most often is a free zone company assuming the zone handles everything. It does not — the Emirates ID is always ICP, and several obligations sit outside the zone entirely.

What happens when you contact us

No obligation attaches to any of this, and none of it is chargeable.

• You send one document — trade licence, passport page, Emirates ID number, labour contract or case reference. Whatever you have.
• Same day, we tell you where the file actually sits — which authority holds it, what it is waiting on, and whether the problem you described is the real one. It frequently is not.
• You get the government fee and our fee separately, in writing, with a realistic timeline rather than an optimistic one.
• You decide. If the honest answer is that you can handle it yourself, we will say so — and tell you how.

We publish more than seventy free guides on this site and five free calculators for the same reason. A client who understands their own file is a better client to work with, and a business that only wins through information asymmetry is not one worth building.

PRO services questions