Many Free Zone companies in the UAE assume that once they qualify as a Qualifying Free Zone Person (QFZP), all their income is automatically taxed at 0%. That is not how the law works. A specific list of activities, known as Excluded Activities, is always taxed at the standard 9% Corporate Tax rate, no matter how qualifying the rest of your business looks.
Excluded Activities include banking, insurance (other than reinsurance), finance and leasing (other than qualifying aircraft financing/leasing), owning or exploiting immovable property (with a narrow Free Zone Commercial Property carve-out), owning or exploiting intellectual property, and most transactions with natural persons. If this income exceeds a de minimis threshold, the lower of AED 5 million or 5% of total revenue, a company can lose Qualifying Free Zone Person status entirely, not just on that income.
Read the full breakdown, including the Excluded Activities table, a worked de minimis example, and a compliance checklist, on Qaspro Global: https://qasproglobal.com/uae-free-zone-excluded-activities-2026/
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