If your company’s financial year ended on 31 December 2025, one date now matters more than any other on your compliance calendar: 30 September 2026. That’s the day your first corporate tax return — and any tax you owe — falls due with the Federal Tax Authority (FTA).
It sounds like plenty of time. It isn’t, for two reasons. First, this is a genuinely new filing obligation for most Dubai businesses, so there’s no “last year’s process” to simply repeat. Second, the FTA has just overhauled how it penalizes lateness, and the new rules are stricter in some ways and more forgiving in others — which means a lot of the advice still circulating online is already out of date. Here’s what’s actually true right now, and exactly what it costs if the deadline passes you by.
When is your actual deadline?
The rule itself is simple: every taxable person must file their corporate tax return, and pay any tax owed, within nine months of the end of their financial year. This nine-month window comes from Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022, the founding legislation for UAE corporate tax.
For the most common case — a business running a standard calendar-year (1 January to 31 December), the numbers land like this:
| Financial year end | Filing & payment deadline |
|---|---|
| 31 December 2025 | 30 September 2026 |
| 31 January 2026 | 31 October 2026 |
| 31 March 2026 | 31 December 2026 |
Filing and payment are treated as one single obligation, not two. You can’t submit the return on time and settle the tax bill later — both need to be done by the same date, and there is currently no general extension mechanism. The FTA does not accept “our auditor was busy” or “we needed more time to reconcile the books” as grounds to push the date back.
This also applies whether or not you actually owe anything. A company sitting entirely inside the 0% band (taxable income under AED 375,000), a business relying on Small Business Relief, or a Qualifying Free Zone Person reporting 0% on its qualifying income — all of them still have to file a return. Zero tax due does not mean zero filing obligation.
What actually happens if you miss it
Missing the deadline doesn’t trigger one penalty — it can trigger three separate ones, and they stack.
1. Late filing penalty Set under Cabinet Decision No. 75 of 2023, this is a flat AED 500 for every month (or part of a month) the return remains unfiled, for the first 12 months. From month 13 onward, it rises to AED 1,000 per month, and it keeps accruing until the return is actually submitted.
2. Late payment penalty — this one changed recently If you owe tax and don’t pay it by the deadline, a separate penalty applies to the unpaid amount. Until recently this was a front-loaded structure (an immediate percentage plus a monthly add-on). That changed under Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025, which took effect on 14 April 2026 and unified the penalty framework across Corporate Tax, VAT, and Excise Tax. Under the new rules, late payment now accrues at a flat 14% per annum, calculated monthly on the outstanding balance, with no cap. It’s a simpler formula, but the meter never stops running until the tax is paid in full.
3. Late registration penalty A flat AED 10,000 applies if a business registers for corporate tax after its deadline — and this one exists independently of whether you’ve filed a return or paid anything at all.
What this looks like in real numbers
Take a business with AED 500,000 in taxable income. Its tax liability at 9% on the amount above the AED 375,000 threshold works out to AED 11,250. If it misses the 30 September 2026 deadline by six months, the cost stacks up roughly like this:
- Late filing penalty: AED 500 × 6 months = AED 3,000
- Late payment penalty: 14% per annum on AED 11,250 for six months ≈ AED 788
- Total extra cost: roughly AED 3,788 — on top of the AED 11,250 in tax that was owed regardless.
That’s a manageable number for one late quarter. It stops being manageable if the delay stretches to a year or more, if the late-registration penalty is added on top, or if the FTA opens an audit before you’ve had a chance to self-correct — which brings us to the one genuinely good-news item in all of this.
A narrow but real opportunity: the AED 10,000 waiver
The FTA currently runs a waiver initiative for the late-registration penalty. If a business files its first corporate tax return within seven months of the end of its first tax period, the AED 10,000 late-registration fine is either waived outright or credited back against future tax liabilities.
For a business with a 31 December 2025 year-end, that seven-month window closes on 31 July 2026 — a full two months before the standard 30 September filing deadline. It’s easy to conflate the two dates. They reward early filers differently: miss 31 July and you keep the AED 10,000 exposure even if you still make the 30 September statutory deadline.
If you’ve already made a mistake: voluntary disclosure
Under the same Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025 reform, the FTA has made self-correction meaningfully cheaper than being caught. Filing a voluntary disclosure — correcting an error in a previously filed return — before the FTA opens an audit results in a substantially reduced penalty. Wait until after an audit notice arrives, and an additional penalty (reported at 15% on top of the standard monthly charge) applies. In other words, the financial gap between “we caught this ourselves” and “the FTA caught this” has widened, which makes an internal pre-filing review genuinely worth the hour it takes.
Don’t forget the seven-year record-keeping rule
Separately from filing and payment, every taxable person must retain corporate tax records — invoices, contracts, bank statements, and financial statements — for seven years from the end of the relevant tax period. Failing to do so carries its own penalty: AED 10,000 for a first offence, rising to AED 20,000 for a repeat failure within 24 months.
A realistic timeline, working backward from 30 September
Most of the businesses that end up filing late aren’t disorganized — they simply started too close to the deadline. A more realistic build looks like this:
- By March: Confirm registration status and tax period; identify related-party transactions or owner balances that will need disclosure.
- April–June: Finalize accounts, reconcile the VAT position, complete any required audit, and decide on elections (including Small Business Relief, if eligible).
- By 31 July: File early if you registered late, to lock in the AED 10,000 penalty waiver.
- August–September: Final review and submission — not the starting point for the work itself.
None of this is complicated once it’s mapped out — but it is unforgiving. There’s no extension, no grace period, and no discretion from the FTA on standard administrative penalties, and the obligation to file applies even to businesses that owe nothing at all. The real risk isn’t the 30 September date itself; it’s the two months before it, where a business that assumed it had “until September” discovers it actually needed to file by 31 July to keep its AED 10,000 registration waiver. The businesses that come through this cleanly are the ones treating the next few months as preparation time rather than a single deadline on the calendar — closing the books early, catching any errors through voluntary disclosure before the FTA does, and filing with room to spare rather than against the clock.
Ready to file with confidence before 30 September? Talk to Gateway Accounting’s corporate tax filing team — we handle registration, return preparation, and FTA filing so nothing slips past the deadline.