How we score 52 UAE freezones

The five-dimension model

Every freezone is scored against your answers across five weighted dimensions:

Weights shift when you choose "Other" activity or skip priorities entirely — we redistribute the missing weight to budget and activity so no dimension is silently ignored.

Multipliers

After the weighted score, three multipliers refine the rank:

• Emirate preference — a soft penalty for freezones outside your preferred emirate, with stronger weight for "must be Dubai" or "must be Abu Dhabi".
• Regulated activity — boosts freezones that hold the right regulator licence (DFSA for DIFC, FSRA for ADGM, VARA for Dubai crypto, etc.) when your business requires it.
• Office requirement — penalises freezones that can't offer the office type you need (flexi-desk, dedicated office, warehouse).

Match percentage cap

We cap every match at 99%. No freezone is a 100% match for a real business — there are always trade-offs. The cap forces honest comparison and prevents the illusion of a single "right answer".

Data sources

Every cost figure, visa quota, and licence detail is sourced from one of:

• Official freezone authority websites (e.g. dmcc.ae, difc.com, adgm.com)
• Published tariff PDFs and business proposal documents
• UAE government publications: MoEC, FTA, GDRFA, IPA
• Google Places API for aggregate user ratings (where applicable)
• Direct correspondence with freezone commercial teams (for clarification only — never for placement)

Every freezone detail page shows a Last verified date. We re-verify cost data quarterly and after any freezone fee announcement.

Review data — per-zone counts

Reviews are aggregated from Google Maps via a batch pull, not a live API. The current corpus covers 80,149 reviews across 42 freezones, with a review-weighted average rating of 4.59 / 5.

Last pulled: September 2026. Reviews are not filtered; negative reviews often relate to third-party setup agencies operating inside a zone, not the freezone authority itself.

Currency conversion notes

All costs are displayed AED-first. DIFC and ADGM publish their official tariffs in USD — for those two zones we render AED X (~USD Y) so the source figure is preserved. All other zones publish in AED and are displayed AED-only.

Conversion reference rate: 1 USD = 3.6725 AED, as of May 2026. The AED is pegged to the USD by the UAE Central Bank, so the rate is effectively static.

Update cadence

• Costs verified quarterly (current pass: May 2026) and after any freezone fee announcement.
• Reviews pulled monthly (current pull: September 2026).
• Visa quotas, audit thresholds, and corporate-tax rules are checked whenever the issuing authority publishes a circular.
• Methodology weights change rarely. Any change is announced on the changelog and explained inline here.

Coverage tiers

Conflict-of-interest policy

• No freezone pays for ranking position.
• Scoring weights are public and never adjusted per partner.
• We may earn a referral fee if you choose to set up with a partner — but only after you've already received an unbiased match.
• If a referral relationship influences any data point on this site, we disclose it inline on the freezone page.

Spotted an error?

Cost data shifts. If you see a figure that's out of date or doesn't match the freezone's published tariff, please tell us — accuracy is the entire point.