Abu Dhabi Golden Visa Cost 2026: No Published Fee Table

Abu Dhabi publishes the rules in detail and the price nowhere

Every enquiry about the Abu Dhabi Golden Visa cost runs into the same wall. The emirate documents its long-term residence programme carefully — seven categories on the Abu Dhabi Residents Office site, thresholds on the Department of Economic Development pages down to the exact salary and the exact property value — and at no point does any of it say what you will pay. We read every Abu Dhabi category page we could reach before writing this, and found no fee published on any of them.

The short version is that Abu Dhabi has no equivalent of the itemised total Dubai Land Department prints for its investor route. That absence is why the figures circulating for Abu Dhabi are ranges rather than numbers, and why two advisers can quote you AED 4,700 and AED 10,140 for the same profile without either of them being caught out. Neither can be checked against a published schedule, because there is no published schedule to check.

On this page we work through it in order: what Abu Dhabi does publish, the five-year versus ten-year contradiction sitting between Abu Dhabi and the federal portal, the ICP lines that actually price the file, what Dubai prints that Abu Dhabi does not, an estimate built only from published numbers, the costs that appear in no schedule at all, and where a provider's own margin hides.

• Abu Dhabi Residents Office: seven Golden Visa categories, no fees published.
• Department of Economic Development: conditions and thresholds, no fees published.
• TAMM: the nomination channel, stated as carrying no additional cost.
• ICP: the federal authority that issues the permit and publishes fee lines.
• Dubai Land Department: an itemised AED 9,884.75 total, for Dubai only.

What ADRO and ADDED actually publish: conditions, not costs

The Abu Dhabi Residents Office lists the programme as valid for up to ten years across seven categories: investors, entrepreneurs, brilliant talents, specialists, students, pioneers of human action and front-line workers. The category pages are specific about who qualifies and silent about money, which is an unusual combination for a government service page and the single most important thing to understand before you ask anyone for a quote.

The Department of Economic Development is the more detailed of the two. Its skilled professionals page requires the applicant to be employed in the UAE, in a role classified by MoHRE as Level 1 or Level 2, holding at minimum a bachelor's degree or equivalent, on a minimum monthly salary of AED 30,000 or equivalent, with a valid UAE practising licence where the profession requires one. Evidence runs to a salary certificate plus six months of bank statements.

The real estate page is equally precise. It asks for property purchased with a minimum total value of AED 2,000,000 outside a mortgage, and allows mortgages through national banks on properties worth more than AED 2,000,000 provided the investor's own capital is at least AED 2,000,000. Documents come from the Department of Municipalities and Transport rather than from Dubai Land Department. The entrepreneur route asks for an approved pioneering project, or an SME with annual revenue of no less than AED 1,000,000, or a previous project sold for no less than AED 7,000,000.

• Skilled professionals: MoHRE Level 1 or 2, bachelor's degree or equivalent, AED 30,000 monthly salary.
• Real estate investors: property with a minimum total value of AED 2,000,000, mortgages allowed above that with AED 2,000,000 of own capital.
• Entrepreneurs: approved pioneering project, an SME with revenue of at least AED 1,000,000 a year, or a prior exit of at least AED 7,000,000.
• Evidence is Abu Dhabi-specific: DMT valuation and search certificates, not DLD paperwork.
• Fees published on any of these pages: none.

These conditions are the ones stated on the Abu Dhabi Residents Office and Department of Economic Development pages at the time of writing in 2026. Eligibility rules in this area are set by the authorities and change without notice, so confirm the current wording on the category page that applies to you before relying on any threshold above.

The five-year, ten-year contradiction that moves your bill

Here is the part no comparison article seems to mention, and it is not a detail. Abu Dhabi's own pages state ten years for the real estate investor route and ten years for the entrepreneur route. The federal portal's category table, which carries an updated date of 28 July 2026 and cites ICP as its source, states five years for real estate investments and five years for entrepreneurs. Both are official. They do not say the same thing.

We are not going to resolve it for you, because we cannot: one is an emirate-level description of the programme it nominates people into, the other is the federal table describing the permit ICP issues. What we can do is show why it matters financially. Almost every fee attached to a UAE residence permit is priced per year — the residency renewal fee, the Emirates ID, and the GDRFA issuance fee that its own page says increases by AED 100 annually whenever the residency is over two years.

So the term is not a presentational detail on a Golden Visa quote. It is the multiplier. A provider who quotes you a single Emirates ID figure without saying whether it covers five years or ten has made a AED 500 decision on your behalf, and a provider quoting the whole file has made roughly a AED 1,000 one. Ask which term the quote assumes, and ask which of these two sources they are relying on for it.

• Abu Dhabi Residents Office and ADDED: ten years for real estate investors and entrepreneurs.
• u.ae category table, updated 28 July 2026: five years for real estate investments and five years for entrepreneurs.
• u.ae puts ten years on public investments, exceptional talent, top university students, humanitarian pioneers and frontline heroes.
• ICP residency renewal is charged per year of the permit.
• Emirates ID is charged per year of residence.
• GDRFA states its issuance fee increases by AED 100 annually where the residency runs over two years.

Two official sources describing the same routes with different durations is a reason to confirm your own term directly with ICP or through the nominating Abu Dhabi authority before budgeting, not a reason to assume the longer or the cheaper one. We have quoted both above rather than picking a winner.

The federal ICP schedule is what actually prices an Abu Dhabi file

Abu Dhabi applications are finalised with the Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Port Security, and ICP is the authority that does publish numbers. They are scattered across individual service pages rather than gathered into a table, which is presumably why so few quotes cite them, but they are there and they are specific.

The residency permits renewal service lists application fees at AED 100, a renewal fee of the residence permit per year at AED 100, and smart service fees at AED 100, with a stated service completion duration of two days. The New Identity Card Issuance service lists, for residents, fees for issuing a new identity card per year of residence at AED 100 plus smart service fees of AED 100, with a stated duration of five days. The same page publishes an urgent service at AED 150 against its citizen and GCC citizen lines, available only at the Authority's service centres.

Read those two pages together and the structure of a UAE residence bill becomes legible in a way no Abu Dhabi page makes it. Two authorities, two applications, both priced per year of the permit, both charging a separate AED 100 smart service fee. That is the skeleton. Everything a provider adds sits on top of it.

• ICP residency renewal: application fees AED 100.
• ICP residency renewal: AED 100 per year of the residence permit.
• ICP residency renewal: smart service fees AED 100, stated duration two days.
• ICP Emirates ID, residents: AED 100 per year of residence.
• ICP Emirates ID: smart service fees AED 100, stated duration five days.
• ICP Emirates ID: urgent service AED 150, published against the citizen and GCC lines, at Authority service centres only.

The ICP page quoted here is the renewal of residency permits service. ICP does not publish a single consolidated Golden Visa issuance schedule, so a first application assembled from these lines is an estimate built from the published per-year structure rather than a quoted price. Confirm the applicable service and fee with ICP before committing to a figure.

What Dubai publishes that Abu Dhabi does not

The contrast is worth seeing in full, because it explains why Dubai figures keep leaking into Abu Dhabi quotes. Dubai Land Department's Golden Visa application for investors publishes a complete itemisation: medical examination AED 700, Emirates ID for ten years AED 1,153, confirmation of residency permit for ten years AED 2,856.75, Dubai Land Department fees AED 4,020 and administrative fees AED 1,155, for a total of AED 9,884.75. Processing is stated at seven to ten business days, the property condition is AED 2 million wholly owned, and the applicant must be inside the UAE.

GDRFA Dubai publishes at the other end of the process. Its golden residence renewal service for entrepreneurs lists a residence permit fee of AED 1,100, a fee inside the country of AED 500, delivery of AED 20 and AED 10 each for the Knowledge and Innovation Dirhams, which is AED 1,640, at a stated duration of 48 hours. It also notes that the issuance fee increases by AED 100 annually where the residency runs over two years.

Neither of those schedules applies to an Abu Dhabi application. The AED 4,020 of DLD fees and AED 1,155 of administrative fees are charges of a Dubai authority running its own channel, and transplanting them onto an Abu Dhabi file inflates the estimate by more than AED 5,000. If a quote for Abu Dhabi property lands near AED 10,000 in government fees, that is the first thing to check.

• DLD investor route, published total: AED 9,884.75 for the main applicant, seven to ten business days.
• Of which DLD's own fees and administrative fees: AED 5,175, with no Abu Dhabi equivalent in print.
• GDRFA golden residence renewal: AED 1,640, stated duration 48 hours.
• GDRFA states the issuance fee increases by AED 100 annually over two years.
• Abu Dhabi equivalents published by ADRO, ADDED or TAMM: none.

The DLD and GDRFA figures above are channel-specific schedules published by Dubai authorities for services they operate. They are quoted here for comparison only and should not be applied to an application nominated in Abu Dhabi and finalised with ICP.

Building an Abu Dhabi estimate out of published lines only

Take the ICP lines, apply them to the two possible terms, and you get the only Abu Dhabi arithmetic that rests entirely on published numbers. On a ten-year permit the residency side is AED 100 application plus AED 100 for each of ten years plus AED 100 smart services, so AED 1,200, and the Emirates ID is AED 100 for each of ten years plus AED 100 smart services, so AED 1,100. Together, about AED 2,300 for the main applicant.

On a five-year permit the same two lines come to AED 700 and AED 600, so about AED 1,300. The AED 1,000 gap between those two totals is the entire practical consequence of the term contradiction in the previous section, per person, before anyone adds a medical test or a provider's fee. Across a family of four it is a AED 4,000 swing on the same application.

What this arithmetic is not is a quote. It excludes the medical fitness test, health insurance, document attestation and translation, any typing centre charge, and any handling fee. It also builds the residency side from a renewal schedule because no issuance schedule is published. We are showing it because a floor made of real published lines is more useful than a range somebody rounded, not because it is what you will pay.

• Ten-year permit, ICP residency lines: AED 100 + AED 1,000 + AED 100 = AED 1,200.
• Ten-year permit, Emirates ID lines: AED 1,000 + AED 100 = AED 1,100.
• Ten-year main applicant, published lines only: about AED 2,300.
• Five-year permit, ICP residency lines: AED 100 + AED 500 + AED 100 = AED 700.
• Five-year permit, Emirates ID lines: AED 500 + AED 100 = AED 600.
• Five-year main applicant, published lines only: about AED 1,300.

These totals are assembled from separately published ICP service pages and are an estimate, not a quoted price. They exclude medical fitness, insurance, attestation, typing centre and provider fees, and the residency element is taken from the renewal service because ICP publishes no consolidated Golden Visa issuance table. Confirm every line with the issuing authority.

The lines that appear in no schedule at all

Three costs sit outside every table above, and together they are usually larger than the government fees. The medical fitness test is priced by a health authority rather than by a residency authority, and the emirate you test in decides the figure; Abu Dhabi screening runs through the Department of Health's network rather than through Dubai Health Authority's published catalogue, and we could not find an Abu Dhabi price list published in the same way DHA publishes its tiers.

Health insurance is the second, and in Abu Dhabi it is not optional. Cover is a condition of the residence file, it is a commercial product priced by an insurer against age and medical history, and it appears in no government fee table because no government sets the premium. Any quote that shows insurance as a fixed line has picked a plan for you; ask which one.

The third is paperwork. Degree attestation, legal translation, and the equivalency certificate that a qualification-based route needs are separate transactions with their own charges, and a skilled professional route that turns on a bachelor's degree cannot skip them. None of these are hidden, exactly. They are simply not anybody's job to publish alongside a visa fee.

• Medical fitness: set by the health authority of the emirate you test in, not by ICP.
• Health insurance: mandatory for the residence file, priced by the insurer, in no government table.
• Attestation and translation: charged per document, by the attesting body.
• Equivalency certificate: required where the route turns on a foreign qualification.
• Typing centre or service centre handling: charged separately again.

We have deliberately not put figures on these lines for Abu Dhabi. We could not verify an Abu Dhabi medical fitness price list published in the way Dubai Health Authority publishes its screening catalogue, and quoting a range we cannot source would be the exact problem this article is about.

The nomination is free; the handling fee is where quotes differ

The Abu Dhabi route has one step Dubai's does not: a nomination. Both ADDED and ADRO direct UAE residents to apply for Golden Visa nomination through the Abu Dhabi Residents Office on TAMM, and non-residents to contact ADIO by email. TAMM's own service page for the nomination states that it carries no additional cost, and that on approval you are directed to finalise the application with ICP.

That matters for reading a quote. A step that a government charges nothing for is a step a provider can still bill you for, and there is nothing improper about that as long as it is visible. What is not acceptable is a single bundled number that lets a handling fee sit inside what looks like a government total, on a file where no government total has ever been published.

So the ask is simple and it is the same ask this site makes on every route: one line per authority, one line per person, and the provider's own margin shown as its own line. On an Abu Dhabi application you have no published schedule to argue with, which makes the itemisation the only leverage you have.