UAE investor visa (partner visa)

An investor visa, called a partner visa where the company has more than one shareholder, is a UAE residence permit issued because you own a share of a licensed UAE company. The company sponsors you: you are not its employee and you hold no MOHRE work permit. GDRFA Dubai publishes the fee at AED 730 when the applicant is already in the country, and AED 500 less when the application is made from abroad.

Two audiences arrive here with almost no overlap: residents moving off an employment or family visa, and people abroad who want to know what can be done without flying in. The procedures diverge, so they are handled separately below.

What a UAE investor visa actually is

The federal government does not publish a product called the “two-year investor visa”. The u.ae Investor visa page now carries no body copy at all — it is a container that links to the Green residence and to the visit visa for exploring investment opportunities. The two-year figure everyone quotes belongs to the standard work visa, which u.ae describes as valid for two years and renewable.

What exists in practice is a sponsored residence permit tied to your trade licence, issued through GDRFA or ICP, which authorities and free zones call an investor or partner visa. u.ae’s general rule is that residence “can be for 1, 2 or 3 years on a sponsored visa, or up to 5 or 10 years on an unsponsored visa”. Yours is sponsored, and it ends when the licence ends.

Is there a minimum share capital?

No UAE government source publishes one for a company-sponsored investor visa. The AED 72,000 threshold repeated across this niche appears on no u.ae, ICP or GDRFA page we could locate, so we will not print it as a rule.

Thresholds do exist for the self-sponsored routes, and they diverge by emirate. GDRFA Dubai’s Green residence page states that “upon incorporation or contribution, the investor’s or partner’s share cannot be less than one million paid Dirhams or its equivalent in other currencies”, and restricts the company form to a PJSC, PrJSC, LLC, simple limited partnership or general partnership. ICP’s federal Green residence page asks only for proof of investment or contribution and the necessary licences, with no monetary figure at all.

The chain, and what each stage really gates

The timeline above is the whole sequence. Two points about it are where applications stall.

First, nothing starts until the company has an immigration file. ICP is explicit that the establishment card process cannot begin without a valid trade licence and a valid Emirates ID or Unified Number for one authorised signatory. If your company is in a free zone, ICP states the request must be submitted through the free zone authority rather than to ICP directly.

Second, ICP applies a AED 20,000 penalty where entry permits are issued for an establishment conducting no business activity. A licence bought purely as a visa vehicle is a documented risk, not a shortcut.

If you already live in the UAE: the status change

You do not leave the country to take up an investor visa. GDRFA Dubai runs the move as a named Status Amendment service with a stated completion of 48 hours, a fee of AED 500 plus AED 10 Knowledge Dirham and AED 10 Innovation Dirham, and two published conditions: having a new visa, and cancellation of the previous residence permit.

Read that second condition carefully. Your employment permit is cancelled as part of the change, not after it, so you are briefly between permits. That matters if a mortgage application, a school enrolment or a dependant’s visa hangs off your current status.

Your free zone will add its own change-of-status fee on top of the government one, as a separate line:

Which nationalities or permit types must exit and re-enter instead of amending status in-country is not published anywhere we could verify. If an agent hands you a list, ask which government page it came from.

Do you need an NOC from your current sponsor?

Sometimes, and it depends on the licensing authority, not on federal law. No federal instrument requiring an employer NOC for company ownership was located.

The clearest published requirement is DMCC’s: to be a manager in more than one company, “yes, if you provide a No Objection Certificate from your current sponsor”. u.ae separately confirms that free zones issue NOC letters as part of routine corporate-administration services, so if you are moving between two free zone entities the letter is usually a form rather than a negotiation.

The broader claims — that Dubai DET refuses a mainland licence without an employer NOC, that banks demand one, that a free zone sidesteps the question — come from consultancy blogs, not government sources. That does not make them wrong. It makes them worth one free question to your licensing authority before you pay anybody to handle it.

If you are applying from outside the UAE

Almost all of it can be done remotely. Two steps cannot.

What you can do without being here: incorporate the company, sign the incorporation documents, obtain the licence and have the entry permit issued. DMCC publishes three signing routes — in front of the assigned DMCC executive, at a local notary and then the UAE Embassy, or in front of an approved DMCC International Service Provider in your own country. The third exists precisely for founders who cannot travel. Where a signature must happen on UAE soil, a power of attorney executed and legalised at home does it, and MoFAIC’s FAQ states plainly that “anyone can attest documents on your behalf”.

What requires you to be physically in the UAE: the medical fitness test and the Emirates ID biometrics. Both are in person, both are quick, and both must fall inside the entry permit’s validity — two months per u.ae, and 60 days for the Green residence investor entry permit.

There is a plain financial argument for entering on the permit rather than arriving on a visit visa and switching: the AED 500 in-country line on the GDRFA fee card is the status change, and applying from outside the UAE removes it. It is the clearest in-country versus out-of-country difference in the published UAE fee schedules.

What free zones charge on top

The government fees are in the tables above. These are the free zone add-ons we could verify from the authorities’ own price lists:

That RAKEZ pair is the most honest published answer to “how much does the visa really add?” — roughly AED 8,000 in package terms.

Two costs never appear in a headline price. Health insurance is mandatory by law, priced by the market and published by no authority, so no package figure you are quoted includes it. And Meydan’s price list shows a refundable AED 3,000 dependant-visa deposit specifically where the sponsor holds an investor or partner visa, against AED 0 where the sponsor is an employee.

One figure to disregard: the “AED 2,200 e-channel plus AED 5,000 refundable deposit” quoted for Dubai relates to the federal MOI e-channel used in the other emirates. Dubai runs on GDRFA, and the AED 5,000 deposit is unverified.

Investor visa, employment visa and Golden Visa compared

The Golden residence is a different instrument, not a bigger version of the same one. ICP’s published investor thresholds are an accredited investment fund letter confirming a deposit of at least AED 2 million, or a commercial or industrial licence plus MOA showing capital of at least AED 2 million, or an FTA letter confirming taxes of at least AED 250,000 annually. The real-estate route needs a Land Registration Department letter for property valued at AED 2 million or more, without loans.

Durations diverge between authorities and both sets of pages are current: u.ae and ICP put real-estate investors and entrepreneurs at 5 years, GDRFA Dubai puts both at 10. For a Dubai application follow GDRFA. u.ae describes the Golden benefit verbatim as “the privilege of not needing a sponsor”.

The 180-day rule and the exemption almost nobody mentions

u.ae states that if a resident lives outside the UAE for more than 180 days continuously, the residence visa “will be nullified automatically”. The published exemption list expressly includes “investors holding valid residence visas in the UAE”. If you split your year, that line may matter more than the fee gap between two free zones.

Which documents need attestation

The visa file itself is light. The attestation bill arrives at three other moments, and the amounts differ sharply.

Where legalisation actually costs you

• A corporate shareholder: certificate of incorporation, MOA and AOA, board resolution, certificate of good standing and certificate of incumbency all need full legalisation, at AED 2,000 each at the MoFAIC step alone
• A regulated activity: an attested degree certificate, assessed by the regulator — AED 150 at MoFAIC, because a degree is an Individual Affairs document
• Family sponsorship after the visa: u.ae's document list requires an attested birth certificate for children, and a marriage certificate is commonly requested for a spouse — AED 150 each

The rule governing all three: the UAE is not a party to the Hague Apostille Convention. An apostille alone is never enough. A document issued abroad needs home-country authentication, then UAE embassy attestation in the country of issue, then MoFAIC attestation inside the UAE. That last step is the one people skip, and skipping it invalidates everything before it. Our degree certificate and marriage certificate pages set out those chains, and documents required for business setup covers the corporate side.

MoFAIC charges AED 150 per Individual Affairs document and AED 2,000 per commercial document, with its own courier at AED 40 for a three-working-day service covering up to 25 documents. If your only attestation need is a degree and a marriage certificate, that is AED 300 in government fees plus courier. You do not need anyone’s help for that, and you should not pay a four-figure package price for it.

After the visa: sponsoring your family

u.ae states that a sponsor needs “a minimum salary of AED 4,000 or AED 3,000 plus accommodation”, and lists the sponsor’s job contract among the required documents. That framing is built around employment, and no UAE government source states what income evidence an investor drawing no salary should present instead. Ask GDRFA or ICP directly rather than trusting a number from an agent.

The rest of the file is published: photograph on a white background, dependant’s passport copy, Emirates ID application receipt, certified lease or proof of property ownership, the sponsor’s passport with a valid residence permit, a medical fitness certificate for anyone 18 or over, the entry permit, medical insurance, and an attested birth certificate for children. A dependant’s residence cannot expire later than the sponsor’s.

Your visa quota depends on jurisdiction. In a free zone, u.ae says only that “the number of visas that a business can get depends on various factors such as the package they have signed up for”. On the mainland, MOHRE sets it under Cabinet Resolution No. 203 of 2022, according to legal status, size of the work facilities, projects undertaken and business requirements. Neither is negotiable at visa stage, so decide it when you choose the licence. The full first-year cost picture puts the visa in proportion: in Dubai the visible statutory government fees for a small mainland setup total roughly AED 3,058, and almost everything above that is activity licence fee, rent and intermediary margin.