What attestation costs in the UAE

MoFAIC charges AED 150 to attest a personal document and AED 2,000 to attest a commercial one. Those two numbers come from MoFAIC’s own published fee tables and they are the only attestation fees charged on the UAE side of the chain. Add the transaction surcharge of AED 3 plus 2% and one personal document is AED 156.

Almost every story of attestation costing far more than expected traces back to one of three things. The document was counted as two. It was classified commercial rather than personal. Or the figure being compared bundled an agent’s margin into a line labelled as a government fee.

This page publishes the fees we could trace to a government source, with the date each was checked. Where no official source publishes a figure, it says so and stops. That is less satisfying than one all-in number, and it is the only defensible thing to do: no UAE mission publishes a global attestation tariff, so a site showing a single flat embassy fee for every country is showing you a number it invented or copied from someone who did.

How much does MoFAIC charge to attest a document?

AED 150 per personal document and AED 2,000 per commercial document, plus AED 3 and 2% per transaction. MoFAIC’s public fee lookup returns AED 150 for every one of the 35 document types in its individual-affairs list — birth and death certificates, educational certificates, employment contracts, marriage contracts, medical reports, police reports, good conduct certificates, work experience certificates, court rulings, and general and single-purpose powers of attorney — for documents issued inside and outside the UAE. Its commercial list returns AED 2,000 for articles of association, certificates of good standing, board resolutions and meeting minutes, commercial licences, company set-up contracts, financial statements, ISO certificates, patent and trademark registrations, price lists, and around fifty more.

There is one published exception. A commercial document that was issued in the UAE and attested outside it is AED 150, not AED 2,000.

Commercial invoices and certificates of origin do not use this service at all; they go through eDAS 2.0. We are not publishing a fee for them, because MoFAIC contradicts itself — its FAQ describes a flat rate, its live fee table serves a sliding scale by invoice value. Ask MoFAIC directly before you budget for an invoice.

Why AED 150 is rarely the number you actually pay

The tariff is per document, and MoFAIC decides what counts as a document. Four rules do most of the damage.

A certificate and its transcript are two documents. MoFAIC states it plainly: “educational documents (certificate & transcripts are treated as two different documents)”. A graduate who needs both, which is most graduates because employers ask for both, pays AED 300 at the MoFAIC stage. Every home-country stage that charges per document doubles as well.

A memorandum and articles of association are two documents. The UAE mission pages carry identical wording: “Memorandum and articles of association must be attested separately.” At AED 2,000 each that is AED 4,000 for what a founder thinks of as one file.

A long commercial agreement can be several documents. MoFAIC’s FAQ: “Commercial contracts or agreements may be considered as multiple documents based on its content.” There is no published rule converting page count into document count. The UAE Embassy in New Delhi says the same thing from the other direction — the fee “depends on the matter / content”, and applicants are asked to show the documents at the counter to find out. This is the largest genuinely unknowable cost in the commercial chain.

A power of attorney is AED 150 or AED 2,000 depending on what it says. Every mission page repeats the rule: “A power of attorney containing commercial content is considered a commercial document.” A general power of attorney for family matters, or a single-purpose one to sell a car, is AED 150. The moment it authorises anything to do with a company it is AED 2,000. The gap is AED 1,850 and MoFAIC applies it at submission.

One more, on the home-country side: “Documents apostilled in a bundle are not accepted. Each document must be apostilled individually.” Where your home foreign ministry charges per certificate, stapling them together saves nothing and gets the bundle refused.

Which documents are AED 150 and which are AED 2,000

The two government fees that are free and are charged for everywhere

Two of the most-quoted numbers in this market are for services the governments concerned do not charge for.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs charges nothing for the attestation the UAE requires. MEA’s own page lists normal attestation as free of cost. The apostille, which the UAE does not accept and which you should not buy for a UAE-bound document, is Rs 50 per sticker. The Rs 84 that circulates as “the MEA fee” is not a government fee: it is the service charge of the outsourced agency that receives your document, because MEA has not accepted documents from individuals at its counter since July 2012. Four named agencies do that work — BLS International Services, Superb Enterprises, IVS Global Services and Alhind Tours & Travels — plus Rs 3 per page for scanning. MEA is not consistent with itself here: older MEA pages and the e-Sanad portal still publish superseded agency fees. Rs 84 is the figure on the page MEA updated on 12 August 2026.

MoFA Pakistan charges nothing for any attestation. Verbatim: “No fee is charged for any type of attestation either by the Ministry or its Camp Offices. Only prescribed value revenue stamps are required.” The value of those stamps is not published, so we do not state one. The PKR 3,000, PKR 4,500 and PKR 12,000 figures widely quoted as MoFA Pakistan’s fees are its apostille tariff — the wrong service for the UAE entirely. What is genuinely chargeable in Pakistan sits before MoFA: HEC attestation of a university degree at PKR 3,000 per document, or IBCC at PKR 1,200 per matric or intermediate certificate, PKR 3,000 on the express service.

Why this page does not publish a UAE embassy fee

Because the missions do not publish one, and the fee is set per mission. The UAE Embassy in London is explicit: fees are payable only in AED through the MoFAIC website, “the local currency will vary depending on international exchange rate”, and “our fees are updated and revised monthly”. No GBP figure appears anywhere on that page. India, Pakistan and Egypt are the same — charged in AED on the MoFAIC portal, with no INR, PKR or EGP tariff published by the mission.

The one mission we found publishing a local-currency figure is Manila, at PHP 2,350 per document for a birth certificate, diploma or marriage contract.

So when a site shows one flat “UAE embassy attestation fee” applying to every country, ask where it came from. It cannot have come from the missions, because four of the five we checked publish no local-currency figure at all and the fifth publishes one that applies only to the Philippines. A figure in pounds for London is a particularly clear tell, since London says in writing that it does not set one.

There is a second gap we will not paper over. For UAE-issued documents going abroad, MoFAIC’s own worked examples show AED 150 for MoFAIC plus AED 150 for the UAE embassy in the destination country, AED 300 in total. Whether the mirror figure holds for foreign documents coming in — whether the embassy leg abroad is an extra AED 150 on top of MoFAIC’s AED 150 — is not published anywhere we could find. The tables on this page show the MoFAIC AED 150 and flag the embassy leg separately rather than guess it.

Doing it yourself against paying someone

What a degree certificate costs end to end, by country of issue

No country in this list has a complete published total, and the reason is structural. Every chain contains at least one privately priced stage — a notary, a registrar’s copy fee, a courier — and the UAE mission leg is charged in AED at the prevailing rate rather than as a local tariff. What can be stated is the sourced portion, which is in the table above. Read its shape rather than its total.

In India and Pakistan both foreign-ministry stages cost nothing, so the entire home-country bill is an agency fee of Rs 84 or an HEC fee of PKR 3,000. In the Philippines the home-country stages are cheap, PHP 80 for the CHED certification and PHP 200 for the DFA Certificate of Authentication, and the embassy is the expensive part at PHP 2,350. In the UK the FCDO is the costly government stage at £45, and a degree certificate must be certified by a solicitor or notary first — gov.uk names qualification certificates specifically — at a fee nobody publishes. In Egypt the MFA charges EGP 115 for an ordinary document, and charges it again on the translation, because the Egyptian MFA attests the translation itself.

Whichever country, the UAE end is the same: AED 150 at MoFAIC, doubled to AED 300 if the transcript goes too, plus AED 3 and 2%.

Courier and transaction charges inside the UAE

MoFAIC’s courier fees sit on top of the attestation fee and start at AED 31.50 for the regular service through Emirates Post or Zajel, AED 36.70 through Tawzea and AED 40 through Aramex. Express runs from AED 95 to AED 150 depending on provider. The regular package covers up to 25 documents per transaction and the express package up to 10, so sending several documents together is where the courier line stops mattering.

Outside the UAE none of this applies. MoFAIC states that “the courier service provided through MoFA’s website only covers the UAE”; abroad, the mission’s own outsourcing partner collects and returns documents at a fee no mission publishes. If a quote for an overseas chain shows a courier figure, ask the provider to name whose tariff it is.

The AED 3 plus 2% transaction charge applies per transaction, not per document, which is the one place in this whole chain where batching genuinely saves money.