Attestation charges in the UAE: every fee, itemised

UAE MoFA charges AED 150 to attest a personal document and AED 2,000 to attest a commercial one. Those two numbers come from UAE MoFA’s own published fee tables and they are the only attestation fees charged on the UAE side of the chain. Add a transaction charge that the UAE Embassy London publishes as AED 3 + 2% — confirm the amount shown at checkout — and one personal document comes to about 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 page we checked publishes a single embassy fee that applies to every country. If a quote shows one, ask which mission’s tariff it comes from and the date it was checked.

How much does UAE MoFA charge to attest a document?

AED 150 per personal document and AED 2,000 per commercial document, plus a transaction charge at checkout. UAE MoFA’s public fee lookup returns AED 150 for the 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 powers of attorney of personal nature — 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, general and commercial powers of attorney, and further types. UAE MoFA publishes no definitive line-by-line list, so a borderline document is classified at submission.

MoFA’s fee-guide lookup, when checked on 23 August 2026, showed one exception: a commercial document issued in the UAE and attested outside it at AED 150, not AED 2,000. We have not re-verified this — confirm it in the portal.

Want the arithmetic for your own documents? Use the attestation cost calculator.

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 UAE MoFA contradicts itself — its FAQ describes a flat rate, its live fee table serves a sliding scale by invoice value. Ask UAE MoFA directly before you budget for an invoice.

Why the total often exceeds AED 150

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

A certificate and its transcript are two documents. UAE MoFA 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 UAE MoFA 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. UAE MoFA’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 its type and content. MoFA’s FAQ lists a power of attorney of personal nature at AED 150, and a general power of attorney or a commercial power of attorney at AED 2,000. Mission pages add the rule: “A power of attorney containing commercial content is considered a commercial document.” The gap is AED 1,850 and UAE MoFA 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 MEA’s current page, checked 27 September 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 (last checked 23 August 2026), or IBCC at PKR 1,200 per matric or intermediate certificate.

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 UAE MoFA 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. We found no mission page currently publishing a local-currency figure.

No UAE mission page we checked publishes a single embassy fee that applies to every country. If a quote shows one, ask which mission’s tariff it comes from and the date it was checked.

Where a mission runs MoFA’s combined Digital Attestation service — “one service, two attestations”, published for New Delhi, Mumbai, Islamabad, London, Dhaka, Canberra, Colombo, Kathmandu, Pretoria and Beirut, among others — one application covers the mission and MoFA. The portal shows the combined amount before payment — do not add a separate MoFA AED 150 on top of it. For Cairo and Manila a combined service is not currently published on a MoFA mission page; confirm with the mission.

For UAE-issued documents going abroad, UAE MoFA’s own worked examples show AED 150 for UAE MoFA plus AED 150 for the UAE embassy in the destination country, AED 300 in total. Where MoFA is a separate stage in your route, the tables on this page show the UAE MoFA 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 (last checked 23 August 2026). In the Philippines the home-country stages are PHP 80 for the CHED certification and PHP 200 for the DFA Certificate of Authentication; the UAE Embassy Manila fee is unknown, because its FAQ page is no longer online. 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 privately set fee. 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 UAE MoFA, doubled to AED 300 if the transcript goes too, plus the transaction charge shown at checkout — or, on a combined mission route, the single amount the MoFA portal displays.

Courier and transaction charges inside the UAE

UAE MoFA’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. MoFA’s newer service page limits a single online application to five documents on the same attestation method; confirm the limit the portal applies. MoFA’s FAQ also retains an older two-tier answer (AED 40 / AED 150); the portal price applies.

Outside the UAE none of this applies. UAE MoFA 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 UAE Embassy London publishes its transaction charge as AED 3 plus 2% per transaction, not per document; MoFA’s service page says only that the total payable is displayed before payment, so confirm the amount shown at checkout.

See what has changed since these fees were checked in the fee and service change log.