Dubai Production City in 2026: licence segments, fees, capital and tax status

Dubai Production City (DPC) is not a free zone of its own. It is a licensing business unit inside the single Dubai Development Authority zone, and it has no statute. No law, decree or Dubai Executive Council resolution names DPC: the zone exists as cadastral plots inside the Clusters under Law No. 15 of 2014, and as a licensing business unit created by a decision of the DDA Director General.

The key risk. Publishing segment 19.6 operates under a regime of its own: the FZ-LLC form only, registration of every title with both the Authority and the federal media regulator, and an express prohibition on opening a branch anywhere in the UAE, other free zones included. Yet Dubai Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025 introduces precisely that branch route as the way to operate outside the zone. Two instruments in force contradict each other, and no official source resolves the contradiction.

Item	Position	Basis
Legal basis of the zone	Dubai Law No. 15 of 2014 as amended	Law No. 10 of 2018, Law No. 8 of 2023
Regulator	Dubai Development Authority (DDA)	Arts. 3 and 22 of Law No. 15 of 2014
Operator	TECOM Group PJSC, listed on the Dubai Financial Market	TECOM public disclosures
Year of launch	2003, as the International Media Production Zone	press material, not an instrument
Number of licence segments	nine (19.1 to 19.9)	Part Four of Decision No. 1 of 2021
Rows in the fee table	eleven	Art. 14.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021
Standard annual fee	AED 15,000	Art. 14.1
Publishing fee	AED 20,000	Art. 14.1
Two manufacturing rows	AED 25,000, one activity each	Art. 14.1
Default minimum capital	AED 10,000 — but no DPC segment falls under it	Art. 15.1
Capital range in DPC	AED 50,000 to AED 500,000	Art. 15.1
Registration of a publication title	AED 5,000 per title	Art. 14.4
Company registration	AED 3,500 plus activity fees	Decision No. 3 of 2017
VAT Designated Zone status	none	Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017
Corporate tax	0% only with QFZP status; printing and packaging qualify, media services do not	Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2023, Ministerial Decision No. 229 of 2025
Audit	mandatory for a QFZP regardless of revenue	Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025

What Dubai Production City actually is — and why it is not a separate free zone

Dubai Production City (DPC) is a licensing business unit inside the single Dubai Development Authority free zone. It is not a free zone in its own right: it has no statute, no separate registry and no separate regulator. In law, a company registered in DPC is registered in the Creative Clusters — the same zone that houses Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Knowledge Park, Dubai International Academic City, Dubai Outsource City, Dubai Studio City, Dubai Science Park, Dubai Design District and Emirates Towers.

The distinction between a “zone” and a “cluster” is not pedantry; it decides what law reaches your company. Because DPC is a cluster, a DPC company is governed by the zone-wide Private Companies Regulations 2016, the zone-wide employment regulations, the zone-wide schedule of registry fees and the zone-wide licensing procedure. DPC has no company law of its own. Exactly three things are specific to it: the list of licence segments, the annual licence fee and the minimum paid-up capital — Part Four, Article 14.1 and Article 15.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 of the Director General of the DDA.

The industrial profile: print, packaging, publishing

DPC is the only industrial cluster in the Creative Clusters. Its nine segments cover printing and packaging machinery, printing consumables, printing presses, signage and exhibition work, packaging, publishing, publishing support services, promotional material and general warehousing. None of them is broadcast media: the broadcasting segments 20.1 and 20.2 belong to Dubai Studio City, not to DPC. The similarly named Dubai Media City covers advertising, PR, production and digital media — segments DPC simply does not have.

History: the zone opened as IMPZ in 2003

The zone opened on 14 July 2003 as the International Media Production Zone (IMPZ), launched by the Dubai Media City organisation. The present name arrived later, through a TECOM commercial rebrand. No legal instrument effected the change of name — and there was nothing to effect: Dubai legislation — laws, decrees and Executive Council resolutions — does not name the community. Trade press reports the new identities being unveiled at a TECOM reception on 22 March 2016, alongside new identities for Dubai Media City and Dubai Studio City. There is no government announcement of the rename. The licensing decisions corroborate the timing indirectly: Decision No. 1 of 2014 uses “IMPZ” throughout, Decision No. 1 of 2021 uses “Dubai Production City”, and the intervening Decision No. 1 of 2018 is not published at all.

A verifiable point that is rarely made anywhere. The DPC fee schedule has not changed in nominal terms since at least 2014. Decision No. 1 of 2014 already used the 19.1 to 19.9 numbering and the same eleven amounts: AED 15,000 / 15,000 / 15,000 / 15,000 / 25,000 / 15,000 / 25,000 / 20,000 / 15,000 / 15,000 / 15,000. In the years since, the regulator was renamed (DCCA to DDA), the zone was renamed (IMPZ to DPC), and VAT and corporate tax arrived — while the licence fee stayed where it was. Capital requirements, unlike the fees, were re-based in 2021 — across five of the eleven rows. That is set out below.

The legal base: which instruments actually govern a DPC company

The DPC legal base has four layers: the emirate-level law on creative clusters, the zone’s corporate regulations, the DDA Director General’s decisions on licences and fees, and UAE federal tax legislation. At no layer is there an instrument in which “Dubai Production City” appears as the name of a zone — the licensing-category decisions being the sole exception.

The foundation is Dubai Law No. 15 of 2014, issued on 27 October 2014. It defines the Creative Clusters as “the zone established pursuant to the above-mentioned Law No. (1) of 2000, and the areas amalgamated into it pursuant to the above-mentioned Decree No. (12) of 2011, Decree No. (4) of 2013, and Decree No. (22) of 2013”, and Article 3 declares those areas a free zone. Article 22 states the governing prohibition: no person or entity may conduct any activity in the Creative Clusters unless licensed by the Authority.

How the renamings and amendments changed the law

Law No. 15 of 2014 has been amended twice, and the two amendments are of very different weight. Law No. 10 of 2018, issued on 19 September 2018 (Official Gazette No. 439), was technical but did more than is usually reported. It made three substitutions of terms — Dubai Creative Clusters Authority to Dubai Development Authority, “Creative Clusters” to “Clusters”, and “Creative Products” to “Products” — and it did so not only in Law No. 15 of 2014 but in any other legislation in force in the emirate and in the legislation applicable to any government entity. And, as a fourth step, it renamed the statute itself: “Law No. 15 of 2014 Concerning Creative Clusters in the Emirate of Dubai” became “Law No. 15 of 2014 Concerning the Dubai Development Authority”. Law No. 8 of 2023, issued on 6 February 2023 (Official Gazette No. 603), replaced Article 3 in its entirety. The new Article 3 has three paragraphs and contains no list of anything. The Law applies to: the DDA as a public authority with legal personality and financial and administrative autonomy; the clusters and the land plots whose boundaries and areas are demarcated on the plans attached to the Law and which constitute a free zone governed by the legislation applicable to the DDA, including Decree No. 30 of 2017; and any other zone or land plot that comes under DDA supervision by resolution of the Ruler.

The plans are not reproduced in the published text, and Article 3 itself names no plot and no community. DPC physically occupies plots amalgamated by Decree No. 12 of 2011 of 4 April 2011. The decree amalgamated eleven plots into the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone, three of them the ground DPC stands on: Plot 72 in Al Hebiah 2, Plot 1233 in Al Hebiah 4 and Plot 2 in Al Me’aisem 1 (the legislation portal transliterates these as Al Houbbia 2, Al Houbbia 4 and Me’aisam 1 — the spellings vary between instruments, the cadastral numbers do not). That decree names no community either: it works purely in plot numbers and survey-area names.

Why the 2003 Licensing Regulations are still in force

Article 31 of Law No. 15 of 2014 has two paragraphs, and the second matters more than the first. Paragraph (a) repeals Law No. 1 of 2000. Paragraph (b) preserves the resolutions issued under the repealed law — but only so far as they do not contradict the new law, and only until other resolutions are issued to supersede them. That is what keeps the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone Licensing Regulations 2003 alive — and with them regulation 8.1, which requires every licensee to appoint a manager who is a natural person.

Instrument	Date issued	What it does	Status
Law No. 1 of 2000	2000	established the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone	repealed by Article 31(a) of Law No. 15 of 2014
DTMFZ Licensing Regulations 2003	2003	licences; manager requirement (reg. 8.1)	in force by virtue of Article 31(b)
Decree No. 12 of 2011	4 April 2011	amalgamated eleven plots, including the DPC plots	in force
Decree No. 4 of 2013	30 January 2013	amalgamated Plot 616-4745, Nad Al Sheba 3	in force
Decree No. 22 of 2013	23 July 2013	amalgamated Plot 14, Zaabeel Second	in force
Law No. 15 of 2014	27 October 2014, Gazette 380	the cluster statute; Articles 3 and 22	in force as amended; not amended since 2023
Private Companies Regulations 2016	in force 1 February 2017	the zone’s company law	in force
Decision No. 3 of 2017	6 August 2017	registry service fees	in force
Law No. 10 of 2018	19 September 2018, Gazette 439	renamed DCCA to DDA and the statute itself	incorporated
Decision No. 1 of 2021	no date of issue stated in the text	licence segments, fees, capital	in force; replaced Decision No. 1 of 2018
Law No. 8 of 2023	6 February 2023, Gazette 603	replaced Article 3 of Law No. 15 of 2014	the latest amendment to the statute
Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025	3 March 2025, Gazette 707	free zone esta­bli­shments operating outside the zone	in force, unamended

Decision No. 1 of 2021: an instrument with no date and no signature

How the document that matters most to DPC is drawn deserves a note of its own. Decision No. 1 of 2021 carries no date of issue, no commencement article, no signature and no seal. Its only attribution is the preamble: “I, Malek Sultan Al Malek, Director General of the Dubai Development Authority, after perusal of the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone Licensing Regulations 2003 and Regulation 3.2 thereunder do hereby amend certain sections or provisions of Decision No. 1 of 2018 regarding the categories of business for which a licence may be issued in the Zone. This Decision replaces Decision No. 1 of 2018 concerning licence categories as amended.”

Two consequences follow. First, the power to publish licence categories comes from regulation 3.2 of the Licensing Regulations 2003, not from the statute directly. Second, Decision No. 1 of 2021 cannot be dated: any specific date attached to it has no source. Its currency rests on something else — it is the only licence-categories instrument in the current section of the DDA legal database, while Decision No. 1 of 2014 has been moved to the archive. The intervening Decision No. 1 of 2018 is published in neither the current section nor the archive, so the chain 2014 → 2018 → 2021 cannot be traced end to end in primary sources; its only trace is an archived circular, No. 302.

Regulator and operator: how the DDA and TECOM divide the work

The regulator of DPC is the Dubai Development Authority, a Dubai government body; the operator is TECOM Group PJSC, a public company listed on the Dubai Financial Market. The DDA issues licences, maintains the company register, records changes and imposes sanctions. TECOM owns and manages the real estate, leases premises and sells service packages. They are two different counterparties under two different contracts, and confusing them is expensive.

The Authority’s own wording leaves no room for interpretation: TECOM’s districts operate “under the jurisdiction of Dubai Development Authority”, and the DDA is responsible for company registration, licensing, employee services, planning, development and regulatory implementation.

TECOM Group PJSC: a listed operator

TECOM Group began trading on the Dubai Financial Market under the ticker TECOM on 5 July 2022. The offering sold 625 million ordinary shares — 12.5% of issued share capital — at AED 2.67 per share, raising approximately AED 1.7 billion. The majority shareholder is DHAM LLC with 86.5% (87.5% together with DHAM FZ-LLC). The UAE retail tranche was oversubscribed almost 40 times — that figure is the retail tranche specifically; the global offering as a whole was oversubscribed a little over 21 times. The practical consequence for a tenant: the landlord under the lease is a listed company with published financials, not an arm of government.

Which side does what

Function	DDA	TECOM Group
Issuing and renewing the licence	yes	no
Company register and registry filings	yes	no
Approving articles, capital, directors	yes	no
Registration of publication titles	yes	no
Sanctions for contra­ve­ntions	yes	no
Leasing offices, warehouses, light industrial units	no	yes
Land plots and community development	no	yes
Service packages and visa processing through axs	no	yes
Publication of prices	yes, in its decisions	no published prices at all

The last row is the important one. The only officially published prices in DPC are the rates in Decision No. 1 of 2021 and Decision No. 3 of 2017. Neither the DDA, nor TECOM, nor the axs platform publishes package prices, rents, visa costs or establishment-card costs. Seven official pages checked on 4 September 2026 produced no figure at all: the setup pages are lead-capture forms that promise to get in touch and discuss the options.

The working rule that follows is simple. Any sentence of the form “a Dubai Production City licence from AED N” does not come from an official source. Treat such figures as one intermediary’s commercial offer, to be verified in a contract, rather than as a price set by the zone.

The nine DPC licence segments: the complete list of activities

Part Four of Decision No. 1 of 2021 contains exactly nine DPC licence segments, numbered 19.1 to 19.9, holding 34 activities between them. A segment is a licence category; an activity is a specific line of work inside it. A licence is issued for a segment and covers a limited number of the activities within it.

There is a structural feature here that causes persistent errors in secondary write-ups. No DPC segment heading in Part Four carries a sentence stating how many activities a licence covers. That number appears only in the fee table at Article 14.1. The correct construction is therefore: take the activity list from Part Four and the coverage number from Article 14.1.

Part Four is not a bare numbered list, though: every activity carries a parenthetical description, and segment 19.5 Packaging additionally has a lead-in sentence explaining that packaging covers the equipment, material and processes for containment and packing prior to sale or shipment, including the recycling of packaging products. Those brackets are worth reading: occasionally what sits inside them is a rule rather than a gloss (see 19.9.1 below).

Segment	Activities	Licence covers
19.1 Printing and Packaging Machinery	19.1.1 Marketing; 19.1.2 Impo­rt/Re-e­xport; 19.1.3 Support Services	two of three
19.2 Printing Consumables	19.2.1 Marketing; 19.2.2 Impo­rt/Re-e­xport; 19.2.3 Paper Mill	two of three
19.3 Printing Press	19.3.1 Digital Printing; 19.3.2 Newspaper Printing; 19.3.3 Commercial and Industrial Printing; 19.3.4 Security Printing; 19.3.5 Support Services	five of five
19.4 Signage and Exhibition	19.4.1 Conce­ptuali­zation; 19.4.2 Fabrication and Production; 19.4.3 Marketing; 19.4.4 Impo­rt/Re­-export	threeexcluding 19.4.2, or oneif it is 19.4.2
19.5 Packaging	19.5.1 Flexible Packaging; 19.5.2 Metal Containers and Closures; 19.5.3 Plastic Containers and Closures; 19.5.4 Packaging Printers; 19.5.5 Label Printing; 19.5.6 Paper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture	fiveexcluding 19.5.6, or oneif it is 19.5.6
19.6 Publishing	19.6.1 Newspapers (Regional and National); 19.6.2 Magazines; 19.6.3 Books; 19.6.4 Online Publishing and Electronic Content and e-Books; 19.6.5 Directories, Guides, Manuals and Catalogues; 19.6.6 Publishing Repre­senta­tives; 19.6.7 Re-printing	five of seven
19.7 Publishing Support Services	19.7.1 Corporate Publishing; 19.7.2 Corporate Content Provider; 19.7.3 Publishing Consultancy; 19.7.4 Publishing Digi­tali­zation	four of four
19.8 Promotional Services	19.8.1 Promotio­nal/Ma­rketing Material	one of one
19.9 General Warehousing	19.9.1 General Warehousing	one of one

Two segments that are priced as four

Segments 19.4 and 19.5 are single segments in Part Four but are each split across two rows in the fee table. The split runs along the capital-intensive manufacturing activities: 19.4.2 Fabrication and Production and 19.5.6 Paper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture are carved out into their own rows at AED 25,000 with a one-activity allowance.

The arithmetic reconciles exactly: 4 = 3 + 1 for segment 19.4, and 6 = 5 + 1 for segment 19.5. That is the strongest internal check the instrument allows, and it confirms the activity list has been read correctly.

What DPC does not have

There is no freelancer segment in DPC. Article 9.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 confines freelancer permits to segments 16.5, 18.9, 21.13 and 25.10 — that is, to Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Knowledge Park and Dubai Design District. A freelancer permit costs AED 7,500 per year, and Article 9.3 states expressly that a freelancer is not an employee for the purposes of the employment regulations. A sole practitioner in printing or publishing must be licensed in another cluster.

DPC has no broadcast segments either: 20.1 Broadcasting TV and 20.2 Broadcasting Radio sit in Part Five — Dubai Studio City. The boundary matters, because Article 4 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 addresses broadcasters and publishers together, and several of its provisions do not reach DPC at all.

The bracket that hides a restriction

Activity 19.9.1 General Warehousing is described in Part Four as companies that deal in the storage of goods and commodities in warehouses for later use on behalf of third parties for a limited period. Then comes a second sentence which is a condition rather than a description: “This activity is restricted to persons, entities or companies that are currently licensed to undertake this precise activity by the relevant authorities in Dubai or elsewhere in the UAE.”

The practical meaning: the DPC warehousing segment is not an entry point into the sector from a standing start. It assumes the applicant already holds a warehousing licence from another authority, in Dubai or another emirate. Neither the fee table nor the capital table mentions this condition, and no secondary write-up of the zone carries it at all.

What the licence costs: the fee table in Article 14.1

The annual DPC licence fee is AED 15,000 for eight of the rows, AED 20,000 for publishing and AED 25,000 for two manufacturing activities. The fee table at Article 14.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 contains eleven rows covering the nine segments, under three column headings: segment or activity, fee in dirhams, and the number of activities allowed within the segment.

Segment or activity	Annual fee, AED	Activities allowed
Printing & Packaging Machinery	15,000	two
Printing Consumables	15,000	two
Printing Press	15,000	five
Signage & Exhibition (except Fabrication and Production)	15,000	three
Signage & Exhibition — Fabrication and Production	25,000	one
Packaging (except Paper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture)	15,000	five
Packaging — Paper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture	25,000	one
Pu­blishi­ng	20,000	five
Publishing Support Services	15,000	four
Promotional Services	15,000	one
General Warehousing	15,000	one

Publishing at AED 20,000 a year is the only DPC segment charged above the standard rate; the only higher figures in the table are the two AED 25,000 manufacturing rows. Article 14 contains no DPC-specific non-segment rows: no separate branch fee, no dual-licence fee.

Registering a publication title: AED 5,000

Article 14.4 is the part of the tariff publishers most often overlook. It is a joint provision for broadcasters and publishers: broadcasters must register channels and publishers must register titles on their licence upon payment of the prescribed fee. Its table has two rows — Broadcasting TV per channel AED 5,000 and Publishing per title AED 5,000. Only the second reaches DPC. The duty bites narrowly: on activities 19.6.1 (Newspapers) and 19.6.2 (Magazines) only. Books, online publishing, directories and catalogues, publishing representation and re-printing do not attract the Article 14.4 title-registration fee.

For publishers with a portfolio, Article 14.5 provides a discount on the title fee that scales with the number of registered titles.

Number of titles	Discount on the title fee
1 to 9	0%
10 to 19	10%
20 to 29	20%
30 to 39	30%
40 and above	40%

What Article 14 does not cover

Article 14.3 — additional locations at AED 5,000 each — applies only to property management services and segments 26.1 and 26.2, and does not reach DPC. Article 14 also carries a general permits sub-table that is not DPC-specific: counter or kiosk for display only AED 1,500, counter or kiosk for display and sale AED 5,000, catering services AED 5,000, self-service ATM AED 1,000, vending machine AED 300, payment machine AED 300, extended working hours to 02:00 AED 2,000, to 03:00 AED 3,000. Article 14.6 is the mirror discount scale for broadcasters (1–3 channels 0%, 4–8 10%, 9–15 20%, 16–25 30%, 26 and above 40%) and does not reach DPC. Article 14 ends there.

The fee table is the licence fee and nothing more. It excludes the registry fees under Decision No. 3 of 2017, the rent, the visa costs and the operator’s service charges. A project budget has at least those four components, and only the first of them is published.

Minimum paid-up capital: why it is never AED 10,000 in DPC

The minimum paid-up share capital of an FZ-LLC in DPC ranges from AED 50,000 to AED 500,000 depending on the segment; the zone-wide default of AED 10,000 applies to no DPC segment at all. Article 15.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 opens by providing that, subject to the minimum paid-up amounts set out for specific segments and activities, for all other activities and for the purposes of regulation 25.1 of the Private Companies Regulations the minimum paid-up capital of an FZ-LLC is AED 10,000. In DPC there are no “other activities”: each of the eleven rows carries its own capital figure.

Segment	Minimum paid-up capital, AED
Printing & Packaging Machinery	100,000
Printing Consumables	50,000
Printing Press	100,000
Signage & Exhibition (except Fabrication & Production)	50,000
Signage & Exhibition — Fabrication & Production	500,000
Packaging (except Paper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture)	50,000
Packaging (with Paper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture)	100,000
Publishing	50,000
Publishing Support Services	50,000
Promotional Services	50,000
General Warehousing	50,000

The most expensive entry point in the zone

Signage & Exhibition — Fabrication and Production, at AED 500,000, is the single outlier in the table. That is fifty times the zone default and ten times the figure in its own segment’s sibling row — for a licence costing AED 25,000 a year and permitting a single activity. The combination of high capital, one activity and prior approval under Article 10.2 makes exhibition fabrication the most heavily gated entry into DPC.

Note the difference in drafting between the two tables for segment 19.5. In the fee table the row reads “Packaging — Paper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture”, framed by activity. In the capital table it reads “Packaging (withPaper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture)”. The AED 100,000 figure attaches to a licence that includes activity 19.5.6, not to that activity taken alone.

How capital connects to the zone’s company law

Article 15.1 does not stand alone; it fills a referring provision. Regulation 25.1 of the Private Companies Regulations 2016 provides that the minimum issued fully paid up share capital of a company shall be such amount as the Registrar specifies from time to time. Decision No. 1 of 2021 is that specification.

The neighbouring regulations complete the capital regime:

•          reg. 25.2 — shares in a currency other than the dirham only with the Registrar’s consent;

•          reg. 25.3 — one class of shares of equal nominal value carrying identical rights;

•          reg. 25.4 — the initial capital is subscribed in cash unless otherwise approved;

•          reg. 25.5 — the Registrar may demand evidence that the capital comes from verifiable, legal sources;

•          reg. 26.4 — all shares must be fully paid when issued;

•          reg. 26.5 — no company shall issue bearer shares.

Read together, regulations 25.4 and 26.4 produce a practical conclusion: capital in DPC is not a figure recited in the articles but money that has to be paid in. Planning to fund it “as needed” is not available here.

Capital was re-based — unlike the fees

The claim that “nothing in DPC has changed since 2014” holds only for the fees. The capital requirements were re-based in Decision No. 1 of 2021, across five of the eleven rows. More than that, Decision No. 1 of 2014 had no AED 10,000 zone default at all: its Article 15.1 referred to regulation 23.1 of the Private Companies Regulations 2003 and set figures by segment only. The default arrived with the switch to regulation 25.1 of the 2016 Regulations.

Segment	Decision No. 1 of 2014	Decision No. 1 of 2021	Change
Printing & Packaging Machinery	500,000	100,000	down fivefold
Printing Consumables	50,000	50,000	unchanged
Printing Press	500,000	100,000	down fivefold
Signage & Exhibition (except Fab & Prod)	50,000	50,000	unchanged
Signage & Exhibition — Fabrication & Production	50,000	500,000	up tenfold
Packaging (except Paper Packaging…)	50,000	50,000	unchanged
Packaging (with Paper Packaging…)	500,000	100,000	down fivefold
Publishing	200,000	50,000	down 75%
Publishing Support Services	50,000	50,000	unchanged
Promotional Services	50,000	50,000	unchanged
General Warehousing	50,000	50,000	unchanged

A working rule follows from the table: any source published before 2021 that states DPC capital requirements is out of date — on five of the eleven rows it will give the wrong figure. The dangerous row is Signage & Exhibition — Fabrication and Production, which stood at AED 50,000 before 2021 and is AED 500,000 now.

Publishing 19.6: the segment that lives by its own rules

Publishing 19.6 is the only DPC segment to which Article 4 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 applies: FZ-LLC form only, mandatory registration of every title, a prohibition on branches anywhere in the UAE, and a dedicated forum for content disputes. The zone’s other eight segments are untouched by Article 4 altogether.

Article 4 addresses two groups at once — broadcasters under segments 20.1 and 20.2 and publishers under segment 19.6 — which produces a common error: provisions written for broadcasters get attributed to publishers. The boundary runs as follows.

Article 4 provision	Content	Applies to DPC Publishing 19.6
4.1	prohibition on opening a branch in the UAE, free zones included	yes
4.2	only free zone limited liability companies permitted	yes
4.3	authorised satellite uplink service provider	no — broadcasters only
4.4	prior submission of a proposal and registration of the title	yes
4.5	content disputes before the zone’s tribunal	yes
4.6	uplink restrictions	no — broadcasters only
4.7	satellite service restrictions	no — broadcasters only

The branch prohibition: the segment’s hardest rule

Article 4.1 admits no exception: broadcast licensees and publishers under segments 19.6, 20.1 and 20.2 are restricted from opening a branch within the UAE including any other free zones. A DPC publishing company therefore cannot open a branch on the Dubai mainland, nor in JAFZA, nor in DMCC, nor in another emirate — nor even in a neighbouring cluster of the same zone.

Article 4.2 closes the other possible door: for segments 19.6, 20.1 and 20.2 only free zone limited liability companies are permitted. No branch of a foreign company, no freelancer permit, no branch of a UAE company. A publishing business in DPC exists in one form only, the FZ-LLC.

Title registration: an approval, not a notification

Article 4.4 works as a two-stage approval. Before the production and distribution of any publication, the publisher must provide the Authority with a proposal for that title, setting out its intended content, style and make-up, for registration. And then: the publisher shall not proceed to publish the title unless and until it is registered with the Authority and with the federal media regulator, as provided in Article 14.4.

The practical meaning: launching a new magazine or newspaper in DPC is not an editorial decision but a separate procedure, with the concept approved in advance and an AED 5,000 title fee paid.

Content disputes: the zone’s own tribunal

Article 4.5 places any content dispute involving broadcasters and publishers under the jurisdiction of the Broadcasting and Publication Standards Tribunal Regulations 2016 and the Code of Guidance 2016. Both are published under the regulator’s former name, Dubai Creative Clusters Authority, which Law No. 10 of 2018 changed. The renaming does not affect their force, but you need the old name to find the texts.

Adding segment 19.6 requires separate approval

Article 10.2 lists the items whose addition to an existing licence requires the Authority’s prior approval and payment of the full standard fee with no discount. In DPC there are exactly three: activity 19.4.2, activity 19.5.6 and the whole of segment 19.6. These are the same three items singled out elsewhere by their own fee rows or by a restrictive regime — the decision is internally consistent on the point.

The “NMC” in the decision: who actually registers a title in 2026

Decision No. 1 of 2021 requires a title to be registered with the National Media Council, but that body no longer exists: since 1 January 2026 the UAE federal media regulator is the National Media Authority. The duty is live in substance and stale in nomenclature. The DDA has not amended the text.

Article 3.2 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 lists the licensees that must register with and follow the requirements of the NMC: segments Publishing 19.6, Broadcasting TV 20.1 and Broadcasting Radio 20.2, together with the activities Social Media Platforms 18.2.8, Social Media Influencer 18.9.45, E-services 18.2.5, News Distribution Service 18.3.4 and Interactive Services 18.7.5. Of all the DPC segments only 19.6 Publishing appears in that list. Printing, packaging and warehousing carry no media-registration duty at all.

The chain of succession between regulators

Period	Federal body	Instrument
before 2022	National Media Council (NMC)	the name used in Decision No. 1 of 2021
2022 to 2025	UAE Media Council	Federal Decree-Law No. 57 of 2022
from 1 January 2026	National Media Authority	Federal Decree-Law No. 11 of 2025

Federal Decree-Law No. 11 of 2025 was issued on 30 September 2025, published in Official Gazette No. 808 and came into force on 1 January 2026 by virtue of Article 17. Article 13(1) is drafted as a direct substitution: the National Media Authority replaces the UAE Media Council in exercising the powers conferred on it by Federal Decree-Law No. 55 of 2023. Article 16(1) repeals Federal Decree-Law No. 57 of 2022. Article 16(3) preserves the decisions and regulations of the former bodies to the extent they do not conflict with the new instrument, until replacement instruments are issued. As at September 2026 the National Media Authority has issued no replacements: its own legislation page still lists the same Media Regulation Law, Executive Regulation, media content standards, fee schedule and fines resolution. The saving provision is still doing all the work.

What governs publishing at federal level

The governing instrument is Federal Decree-Law No. 55 of 2023 on media regulation, issued on 2 October 2023. Article 31 brings it into force on 1 December 2023, and Article 30 repeals Federal Law No. 15 of 1980 on Publications and Publishing together with any conflicting provision. Law No. 15 of 1980 is the act many write-ups still cite. Law No. 15 of 1980 must not be quoted as being in force.

At the subordinate level:

•          Cabinet Decision No. 68 of 2024 — the Executive Regulation to Decree-Law No. 55 of 2023, issued on 10 June 2024, published in Official Gazette No. 780 of 31 July 2024 and in force from 31 October 2024. Content standards sit at Article 28. Article 18 is headed “Obligations of the permittee practising the activity of exhibiting films and other artistic works”, and age classification is the first of the obligations listed in it rather than the subject of the article as a whole; Article 18 is addressed to exhibitors only;

•          Article 33 of the same regulation is headed “Advertising and promotion conditions and controls” and is a general advertising provision. Free zones are not carved out for special treatment in it: they are expressly included among its addressees alongside individuals, establishments and media institutions;

•          Cabinet Decision No. 41 of 2025 — media service fees, issued 16 April 2025, published in Official Gazette No. 798, in force from 29 May 2025 (Article 9, thirty days after publication), and repealing Cabinet Decision No. 62 of 2023 by Article 8. The ceiling is AED 100,000 (first issuance of licences for Category One cinema venues with six or more screens and for radio and television broadcasting stations). There is no floor in the usual sense: several services are free of charge (script approval for a local work, screenings by embassies and cultural clubs, importing publications for personal use), and the lowest non-zero rate is AED 15 per copy for circulating foreign publications above ten copies;

•          Cabinet Decision No. 42 of 2025 — administrative fines, issued 16 April 2025, Gazette No. 798, in force from 29 May 2025. The main band runs from AED 5,000 to AED 1,000,000, though the annex also carries a daily AED 150 penalty for failing to renew a licence after the thirty-day grace period. Doubling is a general rule, not an advertising-specific one: Article 3(1)(b) allows the fine to be doubled where the same violation is repeated within one year of the previous one, applied through the annex’s own repeat-violation columns. The annex tops out at AED 1,000,000; no figure of AED 2,000,000 appears anywhere in the instrument.

Decision No. 42 applies expressly to free zones: Article 2 names as its addressees individuals, establishments, media institutions and media outlets engaged in media activities within the State, “including its free zones”. The statute says the same: Article 4(3) of Federal Decree-Law No. 11 of 2025 gives the National Media Authority competence over media outlets and media activities including electronic media and electronic publishing, including those operating in free zones, and Article 4(5) covers monitoring content within the State, free zones included. A DPC publishing company is not in an enclave with its own content-liability regime.

How the DDA responded to the federal change

The Authority did not amend the text of Decision No. 1 of 2021. It issued circulars on compliance with the new federal regime instead — Circular 630 of 12 August 2025, Circular 631 of 13 August 2025 and Circular 644 of 11 December 2025. This is the DDA’s normal pattern: the instrument stays as drafted and practice is communicated by circular. Before filing, the correct route for checking what is current is the DDA circulars index first and the decision text second.

The customs code: the three options in Article 3.6 and what each one settles

Article 3.6 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 gives a licensee three mutually exclusive options: a free zone customs code, a local customs code, or no code at all. The wording is direct: licensees have the option to choose one of the following — (i) to obtain a free zone customs code issued by Dubai Customs which will allow import and re-export from the zone, however the goods shall be stored within the zone bounded area; or (ii) to request a local customs code, however the licensee must pay the appropriate customs duty upon arrival of the goods; or (iii) not to obtain a customs code, which will mean the licensee may not import any goods.

Option	What it allows	The governing condition	Who it suits
(i) free zone code	import and re-export from the zone	goods stored within the zone bounded area	warehousing, re-export, distribution from the zone
(ii) local code	release into the UAE market	duty paid on arrival of the goods	supplying mainland customers
(iii) no code	no imports at all	—	services, consultancy, digital publishing

Which DPC segments this decides

The customs-code option sets the operating model for every goods-facing segment in the zone: 19.1.2 and 19.2.2 (import and re-export of machinery and consumables), 19.4.4 (import and re-export of signage and exhibition materials), the whole of segment 19.5 Packaging, and 19.9 General Warehousing. It is option (i)’s condition that goods be stored within the bounded area that makes the warehousing segment coherent: the warehouse functions as a bonded facility.

The converse is just as sharp: option (iii) renders an import-facing DPC licence inoperable. A company licensed for import and re-export but holding no customs code cannot move a single shipment. For 19.7 Publishing Support Services, 19.8 Promotional Services and purely digital publishing, by contrast, option (iii) is entirely appropriate.

What a customs code does not give you

This is the commonest source of expensive planning errors. A free zone customs code and VAT Designated Zone status are different things, conferred by different instruments at different levels. The code is issued by Dubai Customs and is a customs mechanism. Designated Zone status is conferred by Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017 and is a tax status. DPC is not on the Designated Zones list, and no customs code changes that.

The practical consequence: goods brought into DPC under a free zone customs code are, for VAT purposes, inside the UAE. A supply of those goods within the zone is taxed under the ordinary rules, not under the special regime for designated zones. The VAT section below sets this out in full.

Forms of presence: FZ-LLC, branch and redomiciliation

Three forms of presence are available in the Creative Clusters: a free zone limited liability company (FZ-LLC), a branch of a foreign or UAE company, and a freelancer permit; for Publishing 19.6 only the first is available. The Authority describes the FZ-LLC as a separate legal entity whose shareholders may be individuals, corporates or both, and the branch as a place of business forming a legally dependent part of the parent company and conducting all or some of the operations inherent in the parent’s business.

Feature	FZ-LLC	Branch	Freelancer permit
Separate legal entity	yes	no	no
Minimum capital	per Article 15.1, from AED 50,000	not applicable	not applicable
Available in segment 19.6 Publishing	yes	no, Article 4.2	no, Article 4.2
Available in other DPC segments	yes	yes	in none — DPC has no freelancer segment
Number of members	1 to 75	not applicable	one natural person
Annual cost	fee under Article 14.1	fee under Article 14.1	AED 7,500

The corporate requirements of the Private Companies Regulations 2016

The Private Companies Regulations 2016 carry no date of issue and no commencement date: regulation 3 brings them into force on the day they are published on the Authority’s website, and regulation 4.3 gives previously registered companies twelve months from the effective date to correct their legal status and documentation. The one calendar date anywhere in the instrument is “9 April 2003” in regulation 4.2, naming the 2003 Private Companies Regulations it repeals. The specific dates — entry into force on 1 February 2017 and compliance before 31 December 2018 — come from the DDA’s own explanatory note rather than from the regulations. The two do not reconcile: twelve months from 1 February 2017 is 1 February 2018, not the end of that year. Cite the note for these dates, not the regulations. The provisions that matter for a DPC company:

•          reg. 8.1 — any one or more persons and no more than 75 (or such lesser number as the Registrar may determine) may apply to form a company;

•          reg. 8.2 — separate legal personality; members’ liability limited to the amounts unpaid on their shares;

•          reg. 20.2 — a member may be any body corporate, partnership or natural person, whether a UAE or non-UAE national;

•          regs. 12.3.1 and 16.2.5 — the name must end with the word FZ-LLC; regulation 16 bars undesirable names and names identical to, or so nearly resembling, an existing name as to be likely to deceive; it also sets out a list of restricted words, the exact contents of which could not be read reliably from the published text and should be confirmed with the Registrar;

•          reg. 51.2 — a company shall at all times have a registered office in the zone; reg. 51.3 — a change requires a board resolution, filed with the Registrar within 14 days, effective only on registration;

•          reg. 38 — a register of members recording shareholdings, pledges and dates; changes to members’ details are filed with the Registrar within 14 days under reg. 38.4;

•          reg. 53 — the name and registered office on letters, notices, invoices, cheques, receipts and letters of credit;

•          regs. 63 to 66 — accounting records, financial statements and laying them before the general meeting; regs. 67 and 68 — auditor and audit.

The general manager: a requirement arising twice

The manager requirement reaches a DPC company from two separate instruments. Regulation 8.1 of the Licensing Regulations 2003 (the instrument is dated 25 September 2003) requires every licensee to appoint a manager who must be a natural person; regulation 8.2 makes that manager the licensee’s principal representative in the zone, and regulation 8.4 empowers them to manage the day-to-day operations, business and affairs of the licensee. Independently of that, Article 2 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 makes a general manager a licence condition, alongside a registered office, audited accounts and beneficial-ownership disclosure. The same article contains a reference that does not hold up. Article 2.5 reads: each licensee must appoint a general manager as required by regulation 8.1 of the Licensing Regulations and regulation 74 of the PCR, and the role and conditions of the appointment are set out in Schedule 3 to this Decision, which is issued under regulation 14.1 of the Licensing Regulations. The difficulty is that regulation 14 of the Licensing Regulations 2003 is headed “Notification of change of manager”: 14.1 requires the licensee to notify the Authority in writing that a person has become or ceased to be its manager, and 14.2 gives fourteen days to do it. It confers no schedule-making power at all — that power sits in regulation 31.1, under which the Authority may, by decision of the Director General, make implementing regulations. The Licensing Regulations 2003 themselves carry Schedules 1 and 2 only. In short, the enabling citation in Article 2.5 is wrong, and Schedule 3 could not be located in open access.

In the Private Companies Regulations 2016 the general manager is dealt with at regulation 74. The full text of regulation 74 could not be read from the published PDF — the conversion truncates before it — so it should not be quoted verbatim. Its existence is confirmed by Article 2.5 of Decision No. 1 of 2021, and the procedure by DDA Circular 283 of 8 July 2018, “Director and GM appointments in FZLLCs”. Directors, by contrast, are appointed and removed by ordinary resolution of the shareholders under regulations 70 and 71.

Branches and redomiciliation

The Private Companies Regulations contain a dedicated section on branches (regs. 90 to 96: overseas companies and companies incorporated outside the zone; registration of branches; prohibition of an undesirable branch name; requirements of a branch; register of branches; records to be kept by branches; letterheads and service of process) and a section on redomiciliation (regs. 97 to 99: continuation inside the zone, continuation outside the zone, and general provisions).

Decision No. 3 of 2017 prices these steps: conversion of a branch into an FZ-LLC AED 3,500; continuation into the zone AED 5,000 plus activity fees; continuation outside the zone AED 10,000. For a publishing company both branch routes are closed by Articles 4.1 and 4.2 of Decision No. 1 of 2021.

Adding segments and activities: how the top-up is calculated

Adding a standard AED 15,000 segment to an existing licence costs AED 10,000; adding a segment priced above that is charged in full, with no discount. Article 10.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 puts it this way: subject to the prior approval and determination of the Authority, and except for the activities set out in Articles 10.2 and 10.3, a licensee is eligible to add an additional segment to its current licence, provided that each segment added is charged at an additional annual licence fee of AED 10,000 over and above the standard fee for the current segment, provided that the additional segment is a standard segment charged at AED 15,000. Where the additional segment is charged at a higher annual fee than AED 15,000, no discount applies. The additional fee is not pro-rated by reference to the date on which the licence falls due for renewal.

Scenario	What is payable in addition	Basis
Adding a standard segment charged at AED 15,000	AED 10,000	Art. 10.1
Adding Publishing 19.6, charged at AED 20,000	AED 20,000 in full, no discount, plus prior approval	Arts. 10.1 and 10.2
Adding activity 19.4.2 or 19.5.6, charged at AED 25,000	AED 25,000 in full, plus prior approval	Art. 10.2
Adding an activity inside a segment already paid for, within the allowance	AED 0	Art. 10.4
Adding an activity where the licensee is registered at Me’aisem City Centre or My City Centre Al Barsha	AED 1,000 per activity	Art. 10.3
Adding a segment from another cluster	at the Authority’s discretion, priced under Art. 10.1	Art. 11.1

The three DPC items that require prior approval

Article 10.2 lists the items that cannot be added in the ordinary way: they require the Authority’s prior approval and payment of the full standard fee. From DPC the list contains activity 19.4.2 Fabrication and Production, activity 19.5.6 Paper Packaging and Recycling Product Manufacture, and segment 19.6 Publishing. No other DPC item appears in Article 10.2.

The shopping-centre rule that is easy to miss

Article 10.3 is an unusual provision that operates by geography inside the zone: a licensee registered at an address in either Me’aisem City Centre or My City Centre, Al Barsha may add additional activities to its licence for an additional annual fee of AED 1,000 per activity. City Centre Me’aisem sits physically inside Dubai Production City and is listed among the community’s amenities. For a retail licensee at that address, adding an activity costs a tenth of the ordinary rate.

Article 10.4 settles activities inside a segment already paid for: adding activities from the same segment, within the Article 14 allowances, attracts no additional fee. Article 10.5 allows the Authority, at its discretion, to increase the number of activities permitted under a segment.

Adding a segment from another cluster

Article 11 consists of a single sub-clause. In full: a licensee licensed in one cluster may add an additional segment or activity from another cluster at the sole discretion of the Authority. There are no criteria, no appeal procedure and — importantly — no figures anywhere in Article 11. Claims that a cross-cluster addition costs a fixed amount under Article 11 are not borne out by the text: the price comes from Article 10.1, and the availability comes from discretion.

DDA registry fees: Decision No. 3 of 2017

Registering a company in the Creative Clusters costs AED 3,500 plus activity fees; every other registry transaction is priced separately and ranges from AED 100 to AED 10,000. The governing tariff is Decision No. 3 of 2017, “Amending the Fees Relating to the Transactions and Services Under the Dubai Creative Clusters Private Companies Regulations 2016”, issued on 6 August 2017 by Abdullah Ahmed Al Habbai as Director General of the Dubai Creative Clusters Authority — that is, under the regulator’s former name, changed by Law No. 10 of 2018. Article 2 repeals and replaces the schedule to Decision No. 1 of 2017; Article 3 provides that it comes into force on the day it is published on the Authority’s website.

Transaction	Fee, AED
Incorporation / registration of a company	3,500 plus activity fees
Change of company name	2,000
Change of parent company name	2,000
Change of director or secretary	200 per person, maximum 1,000
Change of financial year end	200
Amendment of the articles of association	500
Increase of share capital	3,000
Reduction of share capital	3,000
Transfer of shares	3,000
Pledge registration, amendment, transfer or termination	3,000
Conversion of a branch into an FZ-LLC	3,500
Amalgamation	3,500
Continuation of a company into DCC	5,000 plus activity fees
Continuation of a company outside DCC	10,000
Change of general manager	1,000
Change of address	500
Voluntary winding up	1,500
Extract from the register	500 consolidated, 200 per individual list
Re-issue of consti­tu­tional documents	1,000 per document
Attestation	100 per document
Notarisation	200 per document
Certificate of good standing or of incumbency	1,000
Company information letter	500
Letter or NOC to a third party	250
Tax exemption certificate	250

How this tariff relates to the licence fee

The tariffs in Decision No. 3 of 2017 and Decision No. 1 of 2021 do not overlap: the first prices registry transactions, the second prices the right to trade. A company pays both. The first year is always more expensive than those that follow: the AED 3,500 registration fee sits on top of the annual licence fee, with activity fees added where activities need individual approval.

The schedule itself has exactly twenty-five numbered rows, and the Knowledge & Innovation fee is not one of them but a note beneath the table: “Each service type is subject to AED 20 Knowledge & Innovation Dirhams or other applicable fees”. So AED 20 is charged on each service separately — and that is usually lost in secondary write-ups. On a single transaction it is immaterial; across a year with twenty registry filings it becomes a visible line.

The companion instrument on sanctions

Decision No. 2 of 2017 on fines and sanctions for contraventions of the Private Companies Regulations 2016 applies alongside it. It is published on the Authority’s website and reaches breaches of corporate duties — late registry filings, absence of a registered office, failure to file accounts. Content sanctions are not part of it: those sit in the federal framework and in the zone’s tribunal instruments.

One detail for anyone reading the primary text. The preamble to Decision No. 3 of 2017 cites “Law No. (15) of 2016” — and that is not a typo. It refers to Dubai Law No. 15 of 2016 on the Legislation issued by the Authorities of Free Zones and Special Development Zones in Dubai, the instrument that frames the zones’ own rule-making. The preamble also cites the Private Companies Regulations 2016, the Licensing Regulations 2003 and Decision No. 1 of 2014. It is easy to confuse that law with Law No. 15 of 2014, but they are different instruments on different subjects.

Operating outside the zone: Resolution No. 11 of 2025 and an unresolved conflict

Since 3 March 2025 a free zone company may lawfully operate within the Emirate of Dubai by one of three routes: a branch within the emirate, a branch operating out of the free zone, or a permit for specific activities. The regime is set by Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025, “Regulating the Conduct of Free Zone Establishments’ Activities within the Emirate of Dubai”, issued on 3 March 2025 (3 Ramadan 1446 AH). Article 15 provides for publication in the Official Gazette and entry into force on the day of publication; the legislation card on the Dubai Supreme Legislation Committee portal gives this as Official Gazette issue No. 707. The licences on routes 4(a)(1) and 4(a)(2) run for one year, renewable, under Article 4(b); the permit on the third route is issued under Article 7 for a period not exceeding six months.

Route	What it is	Validity	Fee
Article 4(a)(1)	a licence to establish a branch within the emirate	one year, renewable	under DET’s existing tariff
Article 4(a)(2)	a licence for a branch operating out of the free zone	one year, renewable	AED 10,000 per year, Art. 12
Article 4(a)(3)	a permit to conduct specific activities within the emirate	temporary, up to six months, Art. 7	AED 5,000, Art. 12

The DDA’s prior approval is mandatory on all three routes

Articles 5, 6 and 7 are built identically: the application goes to the Department of Economy and Tourism on its forms, and in every case the approval of the Licensing Authority must be obtained — for a DPC company, the approval of the Dubai Development Authority. The wording differs, though: only Article 5(a)(2) speaks of “prior approval”, while Articles 6(a)(3) and 7(3) require simply “the approval”. That is no practical relaxation, but the distinction is worth preserving when the provision is quoted. Also required: the approval of the government entities supervising the activity, a valid free zone licence, payment of the fees, and compliance with conditions set by resolution of the Director General. Articles 5(b) and 6(b) state expressly that the branch has no separate legal personality and is not deemed independent.

The other operative provisions: Article 3(b)(2) requires separate financial records for activity inside and outside the zone; Article 8 allows the establishment to engage its existing workforce registered on the free zone portal and to continue benefiting from the zone’s employment privileges; Article 10 subjects such companies to Dubai’s general legislation; Article 11 governs supervision and inspection under procedures agreed between DET and the Licensing Authority.

Two deadlines that must be checked separately

Article 9 requires DET, in coordination with the Licensing Authority, to issue the list of economic activities a free zone establishment may conduct in the emirate within a period not exceeding six months — that is, by 3 September 2025. The list has not been published by any official source — a year past the deadline. In mid-October 2025 advisers were still writing that the Department of Economy and Tourism would issue it “in due course”. Meanwhile, according to business press reporting (Gulf News, 8 October 2025), the Department is already accepting permit applications through the Invest in Dubai platform — a fee of AED 5,000, a six-month renewable term, and non-regulated sectors: technology, consultancy, design, professional services and trading. No official service page could be located, so this is press reporting rather than confirmed practice of the authority. The accurate statement of the position is this: the Article 9 deadline passed and the regime went live without a published list. The boundaries of what the third route permits are not publicly fixed, and Article 7(6) makes the temporary permit expressly conditional on the activity appearing in that list.

Article 13 provides a transition: establishments already operating outside the zone at the date the resolution took effect must comply within one year, that is by 3 March 2026, with the Director General able to extend the grace period once for the same period — to 3 March 2027. No Director General resolution and no Department announcement exercising that power could be found. It cannot be asserted either way: the accurate statement is that no exercise of the extension has been published.

The conflict nobody has resolved

This is where the central legal knot of the subject sits. Article 4.1 of DDA Decision No. 1 of 2021 prohibits publishers under segment 19.6 from opening a branch within the UAE, free zones included. Resolution No. 11 of 2025 makes the branch the principal way out of the zone — routes 4(a)(1) and 4(a)(2). Article 14 of the resolution repeals “any provision in any other resolution” to the extent it conflicts, and a decision of the DDA Director General is arguably such a resolution.

No official source resolves the tension. The DDA has issued no circular on Resolution No. 11 of 2025 — the Authority’s full circulars index, including 2026 entries, was checked. The procedure for obtaining the prior approval that Articles 5 to 7 require is not publicly documented.

The practical conclusion for a DPC publishing company: do not plan on the branch route inside the emirate until the Authority has given a written position. For the other eight DPC segments the Article 4.1 restriction does not apply, and the resolution’s routes are available in the ordinary way. On how the zone and mainland regimes now compare in general, see our analysis of mainland versus free zone in 2026.

Corporate tax: when a DPC licence gives 0%, and when it does not

Registration in DPC does not by itself produce a 0% corporate tax rate: the rate applies only to the qualifying income of a company that meets every condition of Qualifying Free Zone Person status. The headline rate under Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 is 9% on taxable income above AED 375,000; the threshold itself is set by Cabinet Decision No. 116 of 2022. For a QFZP the rule is different and harsher: 0% on qualifying income and 9% on all other taxable income — from the first dirham, with no AED 375,000 nil band. That follows directly from Article 3(2) of the decree-law and is routinely overlooked.

Four channels of qualifying income, not two

Qualifying income is defined by Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2023. Article 3(1) sets out four independent bases:

•          (a) income from transactions with a Free Zone Person — qualifying whatever the activity, except income from Excluded Activities;

•          (b) income from transactions with a Non-Free Zone Person — qualifying only in respect of Qualifying Activities that are not Excluded Activities;

•          (c) income from Qualifying Intellectual Property under Article 7(1);

•          (d) any other income, provided the de minimis requirements in Article 4 are met.

Paragraph (d) changes the whole picture and is almost always missing from secondary write-ups. Income that is not qualifying by activity is still taxed at 0% for as long as the company stays inside the de minimis threshold. The question is not “does it qualify or is it 9%”, but how fast non-qualifying revenue accumulates towards the point at which the status is lost outright.

All four paragraphs are subject to the carve-outs at the head of Article 3: income attributable to a domestic or foreign permanent establishment, income from the ownership or exploitation of immovable property, and taxable intellectual property income under Article 7(2) are not qualifying income. The permanent-establishment carve-out bites on paragraph (a) as well: selling to the mainland branch of a free zone company is not qualifying income.

Beneficial recipient: a narrow condition

Article 3(2) and 3(3) of Decision No. 100 of 2023 require the free zone counterparty to be the beneficial recipient — to have the right to use and enjoy the goods or services with no contractual or legal obligation to supply them on to another person. The practical consequences: an intermediary, agent or nominee does not satisfy it; nor do goods destined for the counterparty’s mainland or foreign permanent establishment. A DPC printer selling through a free zone reseller fails paragraph (a).

Separately: a Free Zone Person is a juridical person registered in a free zone. It does not need to be a QFZP itself. And an overseas customer is not a Free Zone Person — exports run on paragraph (b) and need a qualifying activity.

The fourteen qualifying activities

The list was replaced by Ministerial Decision No. 229 of 2025, issued on 28 August 2025. The critical detail: it takes effect from 1 June 2023, rewriting the rules retroactively across the whole life of the regime, and its Article 6 repealed Ministerial Decision No. 265 of 2023. Positions taken for 2023 and 2024 have to be re-tested against the new text.

Article 2(1) lists fourteen: manufacturing of goods or materials; processing; trading of qualifying commodities; holding shares and securities for investment; ownership, management and operation of ships; reinsurance; fund management; wealth and investment management; headquarter services to related parties; treasury and financing services to related parties or on own account; financing and leasing of aircraft; distribution of goods or materials in or from a designated zone; logistics; and ancillary activities.

For DPC, three definitions in Article 2(3) are decisive:

•          manufacturing “includes the production, improvement or assembly of products and materials from raw materials or components”;

•          processing “includes the preparation, treatment, transformation or conversion of goods or materials into another form”;

•          logistics services are the storage and transportation of goods or materials on behalf of another person without taking title to them, including cargo handling, warehousing, customs brokerage and freight forwarding.

The logistics definition is conjunctive, not disjunctive, and that matters decisively for segment 19.9. Article 2(1)(n) also makes ancillary activities qualifying — those necessary for the performance of the main activity, or making a minor contribution to it. For a mixed manufacturing-and-services business that is the most useful relieving provision on the list.

The table below is an application of those definitions to the DPC segments, not a published classification by the authorities: neither the Ministry of Finance nor the Federal Tax Authority has issued a sector list mapped to free zone segments, and in a disputed case it is the substance of the transaction, not the segment name on the licence, that governs.

DPC segment	Transactions with a Free Zone Person that is the beneficial recipient	Transactions with other juridical persons
19.3 Printing Press (commercial, digital, newspaper printing)	qualifies	qualifies as manufacturing or processing
19.5 Packaging (packaging manufacture)	qualifies	qualifies as manufacturing or processing
19.4.2 Fabrication and Production	qualifies	fabrication is manu­factu­ring; installation, project management and stand hire are services and leasing and do not qualify
19.1 and 19.2 in respect of Marketing and Impo­rt/Re­-export	qualifies	does not qualify — trading is not on the list except qualifying commodities
19.6 Publishing, physical production of titles	qualifies	qualifies as manufacturing
19.6 Publishing, digital titles and content licensing	qualifies	does not qualify
19.7 Publishing Support Services (consultancy, content, digi­talisa­tion)	qualifies	does not qualify, unless the service is ancillary to the manufacturing
19.8 Promotional Services	qualifies	producing the material is manu­factu­ring; promotion is a service and does not qualify
19.9 General Warehousing	qualifies	storage alone is not logistics; it qualifies where storage and tra­nsporta­tion are supplied on behalf of another person without taking title
Any transaction with a natural person	excluded activity	excluded activity

The central conclusion for DPC: printing presses and packaging manufacture sit inside the list of qualifying activities, while media, content, advertising and consultancy services sit outside it. Publishing qualifies to the extent it is physical production and does not qualify to the extent it is digital content distribution.

One point on intellectual property specifically. Licensing IP is not on the list of qualifying activities, but income from qualifying intellectual property forms a channel of its own, paragraph (c). The definition lives in Article 1 of Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2023, not in Decision No. 229 of 2025 — Article 4 of the latter sets only the modified nexus formula. Qualifying IP means patents, copyrighted software, and rights functionally equivalent to a patent: utility models, protection for plants and genetic material, orphan drug designations and extensions of patent protection. Marketing-related intellectual property, trademarks included, is expressly excluded. The consequence for a publisher is sharp: copyright in books, articles and design is not qualifying IP — only software is. A publishing house’s royalties get 0% only within the de minimis threshold.

Excluded activities and the natural-persons trap

Article 2(2) of Decision No. 229 of 2025 lists the excluded activities: (a) any transactions with natural persons, except transactions relating to paragraphs (e), (g), (h) and (k) of Article 2(1) — ships, fund management, wealth and investment management, and aircraft financing and leasing; (b) banking activities; (c) insurance activities, without prejudice to paragraphs (f) and (i); (d) finance and leasing activities, without prejudice to paragraphs (c), (e), (j) and (k); (e) ownership or exploitation of immovable property, other than commercial property located in a free zone where the transaction is with a Free Zone Person; (f) activities ancillary to excluded activities.

For DPC, paragraph (a) is the most underrated provision in the whole regime. None of the four exceptions is available to a printer, a packaging manufacturer or a publisher, so every sale to an individual is an excluded activity: a one-off run of business cards, invitations, an author ordering copies of their own book, signage for a self-employed designer. Three consequences to take literally:

1.        It is excluded, not merely non-qualifying. Characterising the printing as manufacturing does not rescue it: paragraph (b) requires a qualifying activity that is not an excluded activity.

2.        That revenue counts as non-qualifying revenue in the de minimis computation.

3.        A large share of small UAE customers trade as sole establishments, where the contracting party is a natural person. Excluded revenue accumulates without anyone noticing.

An uncomfortable point that secondary write-ups pass over belongs here too. Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 defines a free zone as an area “specified and listed in a decision issued by the Cabinet”. No such list is published. The Federal Tax Authority’s Free Zone Persons guide repeats the definition and then refers the taxpayer back to the zone: all taxpayers should check with their respective free zone authority to confirm whether they operate in a Free Zone or a Designated Zone for corporate tax purposes. The guide names no zone at all. The working rule that follows: treat DPC’s status as a free zone for corporate tax purposes as something to confirm with the Authority rather than as established, and do not substitute the Designated Zones list under Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017 for it — that is a different regime.

The second painful item is (e), immovable property. Letting warehouse space is exploitation of immovable property and escapes the exclusion only where two conditions hold together: it is commercial property in a free zone, and the counterparty is a Free Zone Person. Immovable property income is also stripped out of the de minimis computation by Article 4(3) of Decision No. 100 of 2023: it is taxed at 9% but does not destroy the status.

Distribution: the paragraph DPC cannot use

Paragraph (l) of Article 2(1) is the distribution of goods or materials in or from a designated zone. DPC is not a designated zone, so that qualifying activity is unavailable to a DPC company as a matter of principle. That makes the difference between DPC and a Designated Zone free zone anything but theoretical: for trading models it changes the tax rate. Losing that paragraph does not, however, impair the manufacturing route: manufacturing and processing do not depend on designated-zone status.

For the same reason, FTA Decision No. 6 of 2026 — issued 2 June 2026 and published in July 2026 — does not reach a DPC company. It requires QFZPs relying on designated-zone distribution to obtain an agreed-upon-procedures report under ISRS 4400 within 30 days of the corporate tax return deadline, for tax periods beginning on or after 1 January 2026, and it does not extend to any other qualifying activity.

The conditions of the status, the de minimis threshold and the cost of error

Article 18(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 requires a QFZP to satisfy all of: (a) adequate substance in the State; (b) deriving qualifying income; (c) not having elected to be subject to corporate tax under Article 19; (d) compliance with Articles 34 and 55 — the arm’s length principle and transfer pricing documentation; (e) any other conditions prescribed by the Minister.

Adequate substance is set out not in Decision No. 229 of 2025 but in Article 8 of Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2023: the core income-generating activities must be undertaken in the free zone, with adequate assets, an adequate number of qualified full-time employees and an adequate amount of operating expenditure. Core activities may be outsourced to another person in a free zone or a designated zone, provided the company retains supervision and control. For a printing business that is a direct risk: if the printing is in fact placed with a contractor outside the zone, both the activity characterisation and the substance requirement are exposed.

The Minister’s “other conditions” are Article 5 of Decision No. 229 of 2025: meeting the de minimis threshold and holding audited financial statements under Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025. The threshold is 5% of total revenue or AED 5,000,000, whichever is lower.

This is where the real cost of error sits. All non-qualifying revenue aggregates: trading in machinery and consumables with mainland and overseas buyers, digital publishing, content licensing, publishing support services, promotion, sales to individuals, and storage without transportation. On a licence whose segments are substantially trading and services, breaching the 5% threshold is not a risk but the expected outcome. The consequence is set by Article 5 of Decision No. 229 of 2025 and Article 18(2) of the decree-law: the company ceases to be a QFZP for the current tax period and for the four subsequent tax periods — and at that point the manufacturing income that was carefully qualifying is taxed at 9% too.

Two further points. First, compliance with the transfer pricing rules is a condition of the status, not merely an obligation: a failure costs the 0% rate for five periods, and Article 4(4) of Decision No. 100 of 2023 treats a permanent establishment as a separate person. Second, the FTA’s Free Zone Persons guide CTGFZP1 of 20 May 2024 has not been updated for Decision No. 229 of 2025 and still cites the repealed Decision No. 265 of 2023; where they diverge, the decision governs. For a detailed walk through the ways the status is lost, see our analysis of how companies in free zones lose 0% corporate tax.

VAT: why DPC is not a designated zone, and what follows

Dubai Production City is not on the list of VAT Designated Zones, so supplies of goods inside DPC are taxed under the ordinary rules. The list is set by Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017, and it is not fixed: as originally issued it covered twenty zones, seven of them in Dubai: JAFZA North and South, the Dubai Cars and Automotive Zone, Dubai Textile City, Al Quoz, Al Qusais, Dubai Aviation City and Dubai Airport Free Zone. The list has been amended five times since — by Cabinet Decisions No. 35 of 2018, No. 43 of 2019, and Nos. 34, 63 and 81 of 2021 — so the correct citation is “Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017 as amended” rather than a fixed list of twenty. The Federal Tax Authority’s published list carries 27 entries, of which 24 are currently effective; nine are shown for Dubai and seven of those remain in force, Dubai Textile City having ceased on 4 April 2021 and the Al Quoz zone on 1 July 2021. No TECOM or DDA zone appears in any version of it.

This is not an oversight or a temporary state of affairs. The conditions for designated-zone status sit in Article 51(1) of the VAT Executive Regulation: paragraph (a) requires the zone to be a specific fenced geographic area with security measures and customs controls monitoring the entry and exit of individuals and the movement of goods. DPC is a mixed-use community with residential buildings, a shopping centre, a hotel and a running track. Such an area cannot, by its very design, satisfy a fenced-customs-perimeter test.

Feature	A Designated Zone	Dubai Production City
Basis of the status	Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017	not on the list
Supply of goods inside the zone	outside the scope of VAT where Article 51 conditions are met	taxed under the ordinary rules
Bringing goods into the zone	not an import for VAT purposes	a supply inside the UAE
Services	Article 51(6): place of supply is inside the UAE	place of supply is inside the UAE under the general rules
VAT registration	mandatory above the threshold	mandatory above the threshold

What this changes in practice

A DPC company registers for VAT in the ordinary way: registration is mandatory above AED 375,000 of taxable supplies over twelve months and voluntary from AED 187,500. Supplying printed matter to a customer in Dubai is taxed at 5%. Supplying another company inside DPC is also taxed at 5% — there is no designated-zone regime here to apply.

Services: paragraph 51(6) cuts the other way

One frequent misconception about services deserves to be settled properly. Article 51 of the regulation runs to ten paragraphs and is built around goods, but it does reach services — and it reaches them in the opposite direction to the one people expect. Paragraph 51(6) provides expressly that the place of supply of any services is considered to be inside the State if the place of supply is in the designated zone. The neighbouring paragraph 51(8) does the same for supplies of water and any form of energy. Designated-zone status does not relieve services; it pulls them expressly into the UAE VAT perimeter.

So for consultancy, publishing and promotional services the difference between DPC and a designated zone never arises: in both the place of supply of the services is inside the UAE. For DPC that follows from the general rules; for a designated zone it follows from the specific rule in paragraph 51(6).

One further instrument belongs on the radar: Federal Decree-Law No. 16 of 2025 amended the VAT Law with effect from 1 January 2026, removing the obligation to issue a self-invoice under the reverse charge, imposing a five-year limit on claims for refunds of excess tax, and allowing the Federal Tax Authority to deny input tax where a supply forms part of a tax-evasion arrangement. It did not touch the registration thresholds, the designated zones list or the zero-rating of exported services.

Exported services can be zero-rated under Article 31 of the regulation, but the conditions are strict: among others, the recipient must have no place of establishment or fixed establishment in the UAE and must not be in the UAE for more than 30 days during the period the services are performed, where that presence is connected with the supply. Zero-rating an export of services is the result of meeting conditions, not a consequence of holding a free zone address.

For a comparison with a zone whose designated status exists and operates, see our analysis of JAFZA in 2026: the free zone, Designated Zone status and offshore companies. Reading the two regimes side by side is usually the quickest way to settle whether DPC fits a particular goods model.

Audit, reporting and the rest of the compliance load

A DPC company must be audited on two independent grounds: as a condition of the zone licence and as a condition of QFZP tax status. The first ground is Article 2 of Decision No. 1 of 2021, which lists audited accounts among the licensee’s obligations alongside a registered office, a general manager and beneficial-ownership disclosure. The second is Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025 of 25 March 2025, applying to tax periods beginning on or after 1 January 2025 and repealing Ministerial Decision No. 82 of 2023.

Decision No. 84 of 2025 creates two grounds for a mandatory audit for corporate tax purposes: a taxable person with revenue above AED 50,000,000, and — separately — a Qualifying Free Zone Person, with no revenue threshold at all. The second ground is the decisive one: a QFZP must file audited financial statements even with nil revenue. The full set of conditions for the status is set out in our analysis of the Qualifying Free Zone Person regime in 2026. A DPC company claiming 0% cannot decline an audit on the ground that its turnover is small.

Obligation	Who it applies to	Deadline	Basis
Audited financial statements	every zone licensee	annually	Art. 2 of Decision No. 1 of 2021
Audited financial statements	a QFZP with no threshold; others above AED 50,000,000 revenue	per tax period	Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025
Corporate tax registration	all taxable persons	the deadlines have passed	FTA Decision No. 3 of 2024
Corporate tax return	all taxable persons	9 months from the end of the tax period	Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022
Beneficial ownership register	companies in commercial free zones	on registration and on any change	Cabinet Decision No. 109 of 2023
Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax (DMTT)	groups with consolidated revenue of EUR 750 million or more	financial years from 1 January 2025	Cabinet Decision No. 142 of 2024

Economic Substance Regulations: the regime no longer applies

This is a case where the most useful information is about an obligation that no longer exists. Cabinet Decision No. 98 of 2024 inserted Article 2 bis into Cabinet Decision No. 57 of 2020, confining the economic substance regime to financial years 2019 to 2022 inclusive. For financial years ending after 31 December 2022 the regime does not apply, penalties already imposed are cancelled, and penalties already paid are refundable.

The practical conclusion: no ESR report is due for 2023 or any later year. The ESR item still found on many incorporation checklists does not belong to current periods.

Beneficial owners and the minimum tax for groups

Beneficial ownership disclosure is governed by Cabinet Decision No. 109 of 2023, which replaced Cabinet Decision No. 58 of 2020; the regime reaches companies in commercial free zones, and the administrative fines for breach sit in a separate instrument, Cabinet Decision No. 132 of 2023.

Cabinet Decision No. 142 of 2024 introduced the Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax at 15% for multinational groups with consolidated revenue of at least EUR 750 million in at least two of the four preceding financial years, for financial years starting on or after 1 January 2025. The interaction between regimes matters here: QFZP status at 0% is no shelter from the DMTT. If a DPC company belongs to a group of that size, the 0% corporate tax rate is topped up to an effective 15%. The computation is made across the jurisdiction as a whole rather than entity by entity, so a relieved free zone person still enters the UAE effective-rate calculation.

The regime acquired a layer of subordinate instruments in 2026: Ministerial Decision No. 96 of 2026 of 22 June 2026 adopted the OECD commentary and administrative guidance in their 2026 form and replaced Ministerial Decision No. 88 of 2025; Ministerial Decision No. 133 of 2026 of 27 August 2026 specified who must file the Pillar Two information return; and FTA Decision No. 12 of 2026 of 16 July 2026 set the top-up tax registration and deregistration timelines — registration within seven months of the end of the first in-scope fiscal year, extended to 30 November 2026 for years ending before 30 April 2026. That last instrument is easy to confuse with corporate tax registration: it concerns the top-up tax only and does not alter the deadlines in FTA Decision No. 3 of 2024.

Small Business Relief: a choice incompatible with QFZP

Ministerial Decision No. 131 of 2026, of 29 July 2026, extended Small Business Relief to tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2029. The revenue threshold is AED 3,000,000. The exclusion is the point: qualifying free zone persons and members of multinational groups are not eligible. For a DPC company that forces a choice: either QFZP status with 0% on qualifying income, or Small Business Relief. They cannot be combined.

Administrative penalties for corporate tax are set by Cabinet Decision No. 75 of 2023 as amended by Cabinet Decision No. 10 of 2024.

Visas, premises and the things the zone does not publish

Dubai Production City has no visa quota in any instrument, but the operator publishes a rule of its own: one employee sponsored per 80–100 square feet of leased space. The UAE government portal, as at 16 April 2026, puts it directly: the number of visas that a business can get depends on various factors such as the package they have signed up for. Work permits and residence visas for employees are processed through the relevant free zone authority, and the employment relationship is governed by that authority’s regulations together with Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 on employment relations.

The operator is more specific than the federal portal. The zone’s own FAQ states that, to ensure a safe and proper working environment, a company may sponsor one employee per 80–100 square feet of leased space. That is a published rule — but a leasing rule, not a regulatory one: the quota tracks the square footage in the contract, not a decision of the Authority.

So the quota is contractual and space-based. Any publication quoting “N visas with a DPC licence” without tying it to floor area is describing one commercial offer at one moment in time. The cost of a visa, of the establishment card and of e-channel access is published nowhere.

Item	Officially published	Where to look
Licence fee by segment	yes	Decision No. 1 of 2021, Art. 14.1
Minimum paid-up capital	yes	Decision No. 1 of 2021, Art. 15.1
Registry fees	yes	Decision No. 3 of 2017
Freelancer permit fee in the other clusters	yes, AED 7,500	Decision No. 1 of 2021, Art. 9.2
Package prices	no	ask the operator
Rents	no	ask the operator
Visa quota	partly: the “one employee per 80–100 sq ft” rule in the zone’s FAQ	the zone’s website and the lease
Cost of an employee visa	no	ask the operator
Cost of the establishment card and e-channel	no	ask the operator
Number of companies in the zone	no	not published

The employment layer

The employment framework in the Creative Clusters is published and accessible: the DDA Employment General Terms and Conditions, the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone Employment Regulations, Decision No. 3 of 2008 on penalties, and the Student Part-Time Employment Regulations 2016. This is the layer that write-ups about the zone almost never mention, even though it — rather than the federal statute in isolation — determines the terms of the employment contracts.

Government and corporate services for licensees run through the axs platform, which the operator describes as more than two hundred solutions including visa processing, licensing and advisory. No axs service catalogue with prices is published: axs.ae is a customer login portal with no public price list at all.

Premises: the lease is a licence condition, not a budget line

Regulation 51.2 of the Private Companies Regulations requires a company to have a registered office in the zone at all times. That makes the lease a condition of the licence rather than an item of expenditure. The operator offers commercial space, light industrial units, warehouses, showrooms and land plots, boutique studios, sound stages, retail units, the D/Quarters co-working product and the in5 Media incubator. No minimum lot size is published on the zone’s site today, and neither are areas or rates: the commercial spaces page carries no figures at all, and the space-matching form is a call-back request. The community sits on Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road, around twenty minutes from Al Maktoum Airport, and includes the City Centre Me’aisem mall, the Occidental Dubai hotel, residential buildings and a two-kilometre running track.

All of that is operator marketing rather than regulation. The site still states over 6,700 professionals in the community, and the 13% growth figure survives only in a news item dated 3 June 2024 — which remains the newest item on the site, even though the footer reads 2026. The operator’s published community data has not moved in more than two years. Neither the DDA nor TECOM publishes an official count of companies in DPC.

There is also a direct conflict between the site and the instrument. The zone’s FAQ lists among the initial costs “license registration fees, office lease and a minimum refundable capital of AED 10,000”, and states that a branch of an existing foreign or UAE company has no minimum capital requirement. Article 15.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021, however, sets AED 50,000 to AED 500,000 for the DPC segments. Work from the decision, not from the FAQ page.

One practical caution when reading the marketing pages. Some infrastructure descriptions repeat across TECOM communities: the copy about sound stages with water tanks and elephant doors, for instance, plainly describes Dubai Studio City. Before putting a specific facility into a business plan, confirm it exists by inspection and by lease, not by a website description.

DPC against the other clusters, and against designated zones

Inside the Creative Clusters the choice of cluster is determined solely by the list of segments: the company law, the registry fees, the employment regulations and the tax status are identical across all of them. That makes choosing a cluster a different exercise from choosing between free zones in different emirates, where the regulator, the corporate rules and the tax status all differ.

Cluster	Part of Decision No. 1 of 2021	Freelancer segment	Industrial premises	Designated Zone status
Dubai Production City	Part Four, 19.1 to 19.9	none	yes — light industrial, warehousing	no
Dubai Studio City	Part Five, 20.1 onwards	none	production stages	no
Dubai Media City	segments 18.x	yes, 18.9	no	no
Dubai Internet City	segments 16.x	yes, 16.5	no	no
Dubai Knowledge Park	segments 21.x	yes, 21.13	no	no
Dubai Design District	segments 25.x	yes, 25.10	showrooms	no

No cluster within the Creative Clusters holds VAT Designated Zone status. So the question “which cluster is better for VAT” has no content: there is no difference. The only comparison with substance is against the zones listed in Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017 — and that comparison turns on something else, set out below.

When the cluster has been chosen wrongly

The commonest error is registering in DPC for work that is in substance media or design. The test is simple: if what you deliver is content, a layout, a campaign or a service rather than a manufactured physical object, the DPC segment profile probably does not fit you. Advertising and communications segments sit in Dubai Media City; design, fashion and architecture sit in Dubai Design District; broadcasting sits in Dubai Studio City.

The opposite error is rarer and more expensive: registering a printing press or a packaging plant in a media cluster that has neither the segment, nor the industrial and warehouse space, nor a customs code suited to a goods model.

DPC against a designated zone for a goods business

For a business that moves goods, the choice between DPC and a designated zone turns not on image or rent but on two provisions.

Criterion	DPC	A Designated Zone
Supply of goods inside the zone	taxed at 5% VAT	outside the scope of VAT where Article 51 is satisfied
The qualifying activity “distribution in or from a designated zone”	una­vaila­ble	available
Manufacturing and processing as qualifying activities	available	available
Warehousing as logistics	available	available
Sectoral profile of the licence	print, packaging, publishing	general goods

The conclusion is unexpectedly clean. For a manufacturing model — printing, packaging, fabrication — DPC works fully: manufacturing and processing are qualifying activities regardless of designated-zone status. For a purely trading model — buy, store, resell — DPC is structurally weaker: the designated-zone distribution paragraph is unavailable to it, and only income from transactions with other free zone persons remains qualifying.

Step-by-step: registering a company in DPC

The order of work is set by the instruments, not by the operator’s website: segment first, then fee, then capital, then form, and only then documents. Reordering those first four steps is what causes most of the rework.

Step	What is done	Basis	Cost
1	Identify the segment and the specific activities from Part Four	Decision No. 1 of 2021	—
2	Check the annual fee and the activity allowance	Art. 14.1	AED 15,000 / 20,000 / 25,000
3	Check the minimum paid-up capital for the segment	Art. 15.1	AED 50,000 to 500,000
4	Check whether prior approval is required	Art. 10.2	—
5	Choose the form: FZ-LLC or branch; for 19.6, FZ-LLC only	Art. 4.2, the 2016 Regulations	—
6	Clear the name, ending in FZ-LLC	regs. 12.3.1, 16.2.5	—
7	File the application and consti­tu­tional documents; pay registration	Decision No. 3 of 2017	AED 3,500 plus activity fees
8	Pay up the share capital in cash	regs. 25.4, 26.4	per segment
9	Sign a lease for premises in the zone	reg. 51.2	per the operator’s terms
10	Appoint a general manager who is a natural person	reg. 8.1 of the 2003 Regulations, reg. 74	—
11	Choose a customs code, or decline one	Art. 3.6	—
12	Publishers: clear and register each publication title	Arts. 4.4 and 14.4	AED 5,000 per title
13	Obtain the establishment card, e-channel access and visas	employment regulations, Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021	not published
14	Register for corporate tax and assess QFZP status	Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022, Ministerial Decision No. 229 of 2025	—
15	Register for VAT once the threshold is crossed	Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017	—
16	Disclose the beneficial owner	Cabinet Decision No. 109 of 2023	—
17	Appoint an auditor and secure audited financial statements	regs. 67 and 68, Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025	per engagement
18	Renew the licence annually	Art. 14.1	the annual fee

Where the time is usually lost

Step 4, prior approval. Activity 19.4.2, activity 19.5.6 and segment 19.6 require the Authority’s prior approval. Start with documents and a lease and leave the approval to the end, and the whole project depends on a decision with no published turnaround time and no published criteria.

Step 8, capital. Regulations 25.4 and 26.4 require cash subscription and full payment on issue. At AED 500,000 for exhibition fabrication that is a funding line in its own right, and it must be closed before filing rather than after.

Step 11, the customs code. The option chosen at the outset sets the operating model for the life of the licence. Declining a code makes an import-facing licence inoperable; a local code means duty is paid on arrival of the goods.

Renewal

Renewal in DPC follows ordinary UAE practice: the application goes in well before expiry, and the renewal period runs from the licence expiry date rather than the calendar year. One detail from Article 10.1 matters: there is no pro-rating of the additional fee when a segment is added mid-term, so segments are better added at renewal than at an arbitrary moment. For the general treatment of deadlines, documents and the consequences of being late, see our guide to UAE company and trade licence renewal in 2026.

Common mistakes and what each one costs

Most expensive mistakes in DPC come not from the complexity of the rules but from importing assumptions formed in other UAE free zones. Ten of them, each with its price.

1. Treating DPC as a VAT designated zone

The cost: 5% VAT assessed on the whole volume of supplies for the period, plus penalties. DPC is not on the list under Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017. A company that charged no tax on supplies inside the zone, believing them outside the scope, accrues arrears from its first day of trading. Holding a free zone customs code does not change this — they are different regimes under different instruments.

2. Planning a UAE branch for a publishing company

The cost: the structure cannot be implemented at all. Article 4.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 expressly prohibits segment 19.6 licensees from opening a branch in the UAE, other free zones included. Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025 introduces branch routes but does not expressly displace the prohibition, and the DDA has issued no guidance on it. A project built on “register in DPC, then open a mainland branch” may not clear approval.

3. Budgeting AED 10,000 of share capital

The cost: between AED 40,000 and AED 490,000 of unplanned funding. The AED 10,000 default in Article 15.1 does not reach DPC: the zone minimum is AED 50,000, and exhibition fabrication is AED 500,000. Capital is subscribed in cash and shares are fully paid on issue.

4. Assuming the licence covers every activity in the segment

The cost: paying for an additional segment, or curtailing the business. Segments 19.1 and 19.2 each contain three activities but the licence covers two. Segment 19.6 contains seven activities and the licence covers five. Segments 19.4 and 19.5 are each split across two fee rows, and no single licence covers all the activities in the segment. The assumption “we paid for the segment, so we can do everything listed in it” is wrong for five of the nine segments: 19.1, 19.2, 19.4, 19.5 and 19.6. Only 19.3, 19.7, 19.8 and 19.9 are covered in full.

5. Forgetting the title registration fee

The cost: AED 5,000 per title, plus an inability to publish until it is registered. Article 14.4 requires titles under activities 19.6.1 and 19.6.2 to be registered, and Article 4.4 bars publication until the title is registered with the Authority and the federal media regulator. A publishing house with fifteen magazines pays more in title fees than for the licence itself.

6. Treating zone registration as a guarantee of the 0% rate

The cost: 9% on all taxable income for the current tax period and the four that follow — and with no AED 375,000 nil band, which a QFZP does not get. QFZP status requires several conditions to hold at once: qualifying income, adequate substance, compliance with transfer pricing rules, audited financial statements, and a de minimis threshold of 5% or AED 5,000,000, whichever is lower. Media and consultancy services supplied to a customer outside the free zones are not qualifying income.

7. Skipping the audit because turnover is small

The cost: loss of QFZP status for five tax periods. Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025 requires audited financial statements from a qualifying free zone person with no revenue threshold. The “audit above AED 50,000,000 of revenue” rule applies to ordinary taxable persons, not to a QFZP.

8. Filing ESR reports and citing repealed instruments

The cost: wasted time and, worse, wrong structuring conclusions. The economic substance regime was cancelled by Cabinet Decision No. 98 of 2024 for financial years ending after 31 December 2022, with penalties cancelled and refunded. Separately: Federal Law No. 15 of 1980 on Publications was repealed by Article 30(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 55 of 2023, and the National Media Council has been replaced by the National Media Authority. Material resting on those instruments describes a regime that no longer exists.

9. Selling to individuals and not treating it as a problem

The cost: excluded revenue accumulating, and loss of QFZP status for five tax periods. Paragraph (a) of Article 2(2) of Ministerial Decision No. 229 of 2025 makes any transaction with a natural person an excluded activity; the four exceptions — ships, fund management, wealth management and aircraft leasing — are unavailable to a printer, a packaging manufacturer or a publisher. A one-off run of business cards for a private customer, or a batch of books for an author, is excluded income that cannot be rescued by characterising the printing as manufacturing. The additional trap: a large share of small UAE customers trade as sole establishments, where the contracting party is a natural person.

10. Assuming warehousing is automatically logistics

The cost: non-qualifying revenue instead of qualifying revenue and, where space is let, an excluded activity. Article 2(3) of Decision No. 229 of 2025 defines logistics services as the storage and transportation of goods on behalf of another person without taking title. The definition is conjunctive: storage on its own does not meet it. And where what is actually supplied is space rather than a service, that is ownership or exploitation of immovable property — an excluded activity under paragraph (e), other than commercial property in a free zone in a transaction with a Free Zone Person.

Who DPC suits, who it does not, and when to get professional review

Dubai Production City suits a business that makes or moves a physical object — printing, packaging, fabricating structures or storing goods. Everything else here either has no matching segment or loses its tax advantage on the first contract with a mainland customer.

Who it suits

•          Printing businesses of any kind — digital, newspaper, commercial, industrial and security printing are covered in full by segment 19.3: the licence allows all five activities at a fee of AED 15,000 and capital of AED 100,000.

•          Packaging manufacturers — segment 19.5 covers flexible packaging, metal and plastic containers, packaging printing and label printing across five activities at AED 15,000.

•          Publishing houses with physical production — provided they accept that segment 19.6 costs AED 20,000, requires the FZ-LLC form, requires each title to be registered, and closes the branch routes.

•          Logistics attached to production — segment 19.9 combined with a free zone customs code, provided both storage and transportation are supplied on behalf of another person: storage on its own is not a qualifying activity.

•          Companies whose customers are free zone residents, since income from a transaction with a free zone person that is the beneficial recipient qualifies whatever the activity.

Who it does not suit

•          Media, advertising, content and design companies — DPC has no such segments, and services supplied to mainland customers are not on the list of qualifying activities.

•          Purely trading models — the distribution-in-or-from-a-designated-zone paragraph is unavailable to a DPC company, because the zone has no designated status.

•          Sole practitioners — DPC has no freelancer segment at all.

•          Publishers who need a mainland structure — the express prohibition in Article 4.1.

•          Companies budgeting capital at the zone minimum — in DPC there is no AED 10,000 minimum.

When professional review is warranted

There are four situations in which the price of deciding alone exceeds the price of advice.

1.        Mixed revenue and retail customers. Where part of the income is manufacturing and part is services, licensing or sales to individuals, the de minimis threshold has to be computed and revenue allocated between qualifying, non-qualifying and excluded activities. Transactions with natural persons are excluded, and the retail share alone can push a company through the 5% threshold. Getting it wrong costs five tax periods at 9%.

2.        A publishing structure reaching the mainland. The conflict between Article 4.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 and Resolution No. 11 of 2025 is resolved by no official source; what is needed here is a written position from the Authority, not an interpretation.

3.        A group with consolidated revenue of EUR 750 million or more. QFZP status at 0% is no shelter from the DMTT, and the structure calls for an effective-rate computation rather than a choice of zone.

4.        A goods model moving through several jurisdictions. The choice between DPC and a designated zone settles the VAT treatment, the availability of the distribution paragraph and the customs scheme all at once.

If you are weighing DPC against other UAE jurisdictions and forms of presence, start with the country-level overview: company registration and support in the UAE.

Frequently asked questions

How does Dubai Production City differ from the International Media Production Zone? They are the same zone under different names. IMPZ was the original name under which the site opened on 14 July 2003; Dubai Production City is a commercial brand unveiled, according to trade press, on 22 March 2016. No instrument effected the change, and there was nothing to effect: Dubai laws, decrees and Executive Council resolutions do not name the community. Decision No. 1 of 2014 uses IMPZ, and Decision No. 1 of 2021 uses Dubai Production City.

How much does a Dubai Production City licence cost in 2026? The annual licence fee is AED 15,000 across eight of the rows, AED 20,000 for the Publishing segment and AED 25,000 for activities 19.4.2 and 19.5.6. On top of that come the AED 3,500 registration fee in the first year and the activity fees, both published, plus the lease and the visa costs, neither of which is published anywhere.

What minimum paid-up share capital is required for a DPC company? Between AED 50,000 and AED 500,000depending on the segment. The AED 10,000 zone default applies to no DPC segment. The maximum is AED 500,000 for Signage & Exhibition — Fabrication and Production.

Is Dubai Production City a VAT designated zone? No. DPC is not on the Designated Zones list under Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017, and no DDA or TECOM zone is on it. Supplies of goods inside DPC are taxed under the ordinary VAT rules.

Does a DPC licence give a 0% corporate tax rate? Not automatically. The 0% rate applies only to the qualifying income of a company holding QFZP status. Printing, packaging and manufacturing are qualifying activities; media, content and consultancy services supplied to mainland customers are not.

How many visas come with a Dubai Production City licence? No instrument sets a limit, but the operator publishes a rule of its own: a company may sponsor one employee per 80–100 square feet of leased space. The quota therefore tracks the floor area in the lease rather than a decision of the Authority. The UAE government portal states the same point more broadly: the number of visas depends on the package purchased.

Can a DPC company open a branch on the Dubai mainland? For eight of the segments, yes — through the routes in Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025, with the DDA’s prior approval. For Publishing 19.6, Article 4.1 of Decision No. 1 of 2021 expressly prohibits opening a branch in the UAE including other free zones, and that conflict has not been resolved officially.

Does a Dubai Production City company need an audit? Yes, on two grounds at once. Audited accounts are a licence condition under Article 2 of Decision No. 1 of 2021, and Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025 requires them from a qualifying free zone person with no revenue threshold at all.

Can I register in DPC as a freelancer? No. DPC has no freelancer segment: permits are issued only under segments 16.5, 18.9, 21.13 and 25.10 — Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Knowledge Park and Dubai Design District — at AED 7,500 per year.

Key takeaways

•          DPC is not a separate free zone. It is a licensing business unit inside the single DDA zone; it has no statute of its own, and the name appears only in the licensing-category decisions.

•          Nine segments, eleven fee rows. The number of activities a licence covers appears only in Article 14.1, not in the segment list.

•          Minimum capital in DPC starts at AED 50,000. The AED 10,000 default applies to no segment in the zone.

•          Publishing 19.6 has its own regime: FZ-LLC only, every title registered, AED 5,000 per newspaper or magazine title, and no branches anywhere in the UAE.

•          DPC is not a VAT designated zone, and no customs code changes that.

•          Any sale to a natural person is an excluded activity and the fastest route to losing QFZP status; storage without transportation does not count as logistics.

•          The 0% rate does not follow from an address. Printing and packaging are qualifying activities; services are not, and the error costs five tax periods.

•          An audit is mandatory for a QFZP with no revenue threshold, while the ESR regime is cancelled for financial years ending after 31 December 2022.

•          The fee schedule has not changed since 2014, while capital was re-based in 2021 across five of the eleven rows — any pre-2021 source on DPC capital is out of date.

•          Package prices, rents and visa costs are not published; the operator’s visa quota tracks floor area — one employee per 80–100 square feet.

Summary

Dubai Production City (DPC) is a licensing business unit of the Dubai Development Authority free zone in Dubai, specialising in printing, packaging and publishing. The zone opened on 14 July 2003 as the International Media Production Zone and was renamed in 2016 without any instrument. Its legal base comprises Dubai Law No. 15 of 2014 as amended by Law No. 10 of 2018 and Law No. 8 of 2023, the Private Companies Regulations 2016, and Decision No. 1 of 2021 of the Director General of the DDA. Part Four of Decision No. 1 of 2021 contains nine licence segments numbered 19.1 to 19.9; Article 14.1 sets eleven fee rows at AED 15,000, AED 20,000 and AED 25,000; Article 15.1 sets minimum paid-up capital from AED 50,000 to AED 500,000. Company registration costs AED 3,500 plus activity fees under Decision No. 3 of 2017. Registering a publication title costs AED 5,000 and is required only for activities 19.6.1 and 19.6.2. DPC is not on the list of VAT designated zones under Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017. The 0% corporate tax rate applies only to the qualifying income of a Qualifying Free Zone Person under Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2023 and Ministerial Decision No. 229 of 2025; manufacturing and processing qualify, services do not. Audited financial statements are mandatory for a QFZP with no revenue threshold under Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025.

Sources

Legislation of the Emirate of Dubai

1.        Law No. 15 of 2014 concerning the Creative Clusters in the Emirate of Dubai

2.        Law No. 8 of 2023 amending Law No. 15 of 2014

3.        Decree No. 12 of 2011 amalgamating plots into the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone

4.        Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025 regulating the conduct of free zone establishments’ activities within the Emirate of Dubai

Instruments of the Dubai Development Authority

5.        Decision No. 1 of 2021 concerning licence categories — Part Four and Articles 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 14 and 15

6.        Decision No. 1 of 2014 concerning licence categories (International Media Production Zone)

7.        Decision No. 3 of 2017 amending the fees relating to transactions and services

8.        Decision No. 2 of 2017 on fines and sanctions

9.        Dubai Creative Clusters Private Companies Regulations 2016

10.    DDA explanatory note on the Private Companies Regulations 2016

11.    Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone Licensing Regulations 2003

12.    DDA Circular No. 283 of 8 July 2018 on the appointment of directors and the general manager

13.    DDA Employment General Terms and Conditions

14.    Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone Employment Regulations

15.    DDA list of permitted business activities

16.    DDA — forms of presence and setting up a business

17.    DDA — about TECOM Group and the Authority’s jurisdiction

18.    Dubai Development Authority legal database

UAE federal legislation: tax

19.    Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 on the taxation of corporations and businesses

20.    Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2023 on determining qualifying income for the Qualifying Free Zone Person

21.    Ministerial Decision No. 229 of 2025 regarding qualifying activities and excluded activities

22.    Ministerial Decision No. 84 of 2025 on audited financial statements

23.    Ministerial Decision No. 73 of 2023 on Small Business Relief

24.    Ministerial Decision No. 131 of 2026 extending Small Business Relief

25.    Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 on value added tax

26.    Cabinet Decision No. 52 of 2017 — the VAT Executive Regulation with all amendments

27.    Cabinet Decision No. 59 of 2017 on designated zones — Federal Tax Authority file

28.    Federal Tax Authority list of designated zones

29.    FTA Decision No. 3 of 2024 on the registration timeline for corporate tax

30.    FTA Decision No. 6 of 2026 on additional procedures for QFZP compliance

31.    Cabinet Decision No. 57 of 2020 on economic substance — consolidated text with Article 2 bis

32.    Cabinet Decision No. 109 of 2023 on regulating the real beneficiary procedures

33.    Cabinet Decision No. 142 of 2024 on the minimum top-up tax for multinational groups

34.    Federal Tax Authority — corporate tax legislation

35.    Federal Tax Authority — VAT legislation

36.    UAE Ministry of Finance — financial legislation index

UAE federal legislation: media regulation and employment

37.    Federal Decree-Law No. 55 of 2023 on media regulation

38.    Cabinet Decision No. 68 of 2024 — Executive Regulation to Decree-Law No. 55 of 2023

39.    Cabinet Decision No. 41 of 2025 on media service fees

40.    Cabinet Decision No. 42 of 2025 on administrative fines in the media sector

41.    Federal Decree-Law No. 11 of 2025 establishing the National Media Authority

42.    UAE Government portal — recruiting in free zones, as updated 16 April 2026

Official announcements and press material

43.    Government of Dubai Media Office: TECOM Group commences trading on the Dubai Financial Market, 5 July 2022

44.    Gulf News: the launch of the International Media Production Zone on 14 July 2003

45.    Digital Studio Middle East, 28 March 2016: IMPZ rebrands as Dubai Production City

On the status of these sources. Every rule, figure, date and threshold above comes from the primary texts at links 1 to 42. The press material (links 44 and 45) is used solely to date the launch of the zone and the fact of the rebrand, and is the source of no figure. The limits of verification are stated rather than papered over. The date on which IMPZ became Dubai Production City is not confirmed by any official source — there is neither an instrument nor a government announcement — and 22 March 2016 comes from trade press, consistent with the 2014 and 2021 licence-categories texts. Decision No. 1 of 2021 itself carries neither a date of issue, nor a commencement article, nor a signature: its currency rests on it being the only licence-categories instrument in the current section of the DDA legal database, with Decision No. 1 of 2014 moved to the archive. The intervening Decision No. 1 of 2018 appears in neither the current section nor the archive, so the chain 2014 → 2018 → 2021 cannot be traced end to end in primary sources. The Official Gazette issue number for Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025 (No. 707) comes from the legislation card on the Dubai Supreme Legislation Committee portal, not from the text of the resolution itself, which states no gazette number. The Article 9 activity list under that resolution, due on 3 September 2025, has not been officially published even though the Department of Economy and Tourism is already accepting permit applications; whether the Article 13 transition period was extended is neither confirmed nor refuted. Package prices, rents and visa service costs are published by neither the DDA nor TECOM; the only visa figure the operator publishes is the “one employee per 80–100 square feet” rule in the zone’s FAQ. Separately: the list of free zones for corporate tax purposes referred to in Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 is not published, and the Federal Tax Authority’s guide refers the taxpayer to the zone authority instead.The statement that the zone is named in no instrument refers to Dubai laws, decrees and Executive Council resolutions: the name Dubai Production City does appear in federal administrative directories. No company-formation firm, consultancy intermediary or free zone ranking aggregator was used as a source.

This material is provided for information only and does not constitute legal, tax, financial, investment or consulting advice. Before taking any decision, obtain individual professional advice addressing your specific circumstances, jurisdiction, company status and the regulators’ current requirements.

Date of publication: September 2026.