What does it cost to register a trademark in the UAE in 2026?
AED 6,500 for one mark in one class, paid to the Ministry of Economy and Tourism in three instalments: AED 750 to examine the application, AED 750 to publish it in the trademark bulletin, and AED 5,000 once the objection window has closed. There is no fourth government line, and no lawyer is required unless the owner is outside the country.
That total is easy to find. What surrounds it is not: the fee multiplies by the number of classes, the ten years start before the certificate exists, and two 30-day payment windows carry penalties that, run for a year, come to AED 11,000 — more than the registration they are attached to. Every number below carries the page it came from, all read on 11 November 2026.
| Step | Standard | One-day examination |
|---|---|---|
| Examination of the application | AED 750 | AED 2,250 |
| Publication in the trademark bulletin | AED 750 | AED 750 |
| Final registration fee (trademark) | AED 5,000 | AED 5,000 |
| Total per class | AED 6,500 | AED 8,000 |
| Final registration fee (quality mark) | AED 7,500 | AED 7,500 |
Ministry of Economy and Tourism service pages, read 11 November 2026.
What are you paying for at each of the three steps?
Three payments, three different things.
AED 750 — examination
The filing fee. The registry checks the mark against the register and against the absolute grounds for refusal. Grieving a refusal costs a separate AED 5,000, six and a half times what you paid to be examined. A mark accepted with conditions gives you 30 days to respond, or the application is treated as waived.
AED 750 — publication
An accepted mark is published in the official trademark bulletin, issued twice a month, at the applicant’s expense. This is the first of the two late-payment clocks below.
AED 5,000 — final registration
Due after the objection period closes; the certificate follows within 30 days. A quality mark pays AED 7,500 instead. One detail worth noticing: the ministry page whose only job is to take this payment lists the AED 7,500 quality-mark figure and no AED 5,000 standard figure at all. Arrive through that page and the only number in front of you is the wrong one.
Why does one application produce three invoices?
Because the fee is charged per class, not per application. Article 8 of Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021 lets a single application cover one or more categories, and the Executive Regulations — Cabinet Decision No. 57 of 2022, Article 2 — close the loop in one sentence: “Registration fees shall be several for the application on several classes.” One form, one filing date, and as many AED 6,500 bills as there are classes.
Classes are not a formality: a coffee brand that sells beans and runs a café needs the goods class and the services class. And Article 8 of the same Regulations forbids amending an application once it is published — including the class. A class list chosen wrongly is not fixed later for free; you file again.
| What you are registering | Standard | With one-day examination | SME programme member |
|---|---|---|---|
| One mark, one class | AED 6,500 | AED 8,000 | AED 3,250 |
| One mark, two classes | AED 13,000 | AED 16,000 | AED 6,500 |
| One mark, three classes | AED 19,500 | AED 24,000 | AED 9,750 |
Our arithmetic, from the published per-class fees and the 50% SME reduction.
What does the one-day examination actually buy for AED 2,250?
One day of examination, and nothing else in the chain. The ministry publishes an expedited examination at AED 2,250 against AED 750 — three times the price — with a decision “within just one day”. It shortens neither the publication step, nor the 30-day objection window, nor the 30 days the registry then takes to issue the certificate.
The premium is AED 1,500 a class, AED 4,500 on three. Measured against what it buys back — days of a ten-year term that, at AED 6,500, works out at about AED 1.78 a day — the 19 to 89 days it saves are worth AED 34 to AED 158. The premium is nine to forty-four times the protection it recovers. Which is not an argument against paying it: a decision in a day is worth real money if a launch is waiting on it. It is an argument against paying it to get the certificate faster, because it does not.
How late can you be before the fine costs more than the mark?
Eleven months on the final fee alone. Two published penalties run on this file, both on 30-day clocks, and both are stated per month with an annual ceiling. Any part of a month counts as a whole month.
| Clock | Starts | You have | Then | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Publication fee | Acceptance decision | 30 days | AED 100 a month | AED 1,000 a year |
| Final registration fee | End of the objection period | 30 days | AED 1,000 a month | AED 10,000 a year |
| Both, at their ceiling | — | — | — | AED 11,000 a year |
Ministry pages read 11 November 2026; the AED 11,000 line is the sum of the two published ceilings.
Read the second row again. The registration costs AED 6,500; the ceiling on being late with the last AED 5,000 of it is AED 10,000, and the two ceilings together are AED 11,000 — AED 4,500 more than the whole registration. At AED 1,000 a month the penalty passes the price of the mark in the seventh month, and the clock starts at the end of an objection window you have to be watching to notice. Civil Defence runs the same kind of monthly penalty, and a trade licence has its own renewal window: cheap on time, expensive late.
When do your ten years of protection actually start?
On the day you file, not on the day the certificate is issued. Article 21 of Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021 sets protection at “(10) ten years commencing from the date of submitting the application”, and Article 17 makes registration take legal effect “from the date of submitting the application”.
Both halves matter. The good one: protection is backdated, so the examination months are covered, not a gap. The expensive one: those months sit inside the ten years you bought. On the ministry’s slowest published chain — 90 days to decide, 30 to publish, 30 of objection, 30 to issue — 180 days of a 3,650-day term are gone before the certificate exists, about 5% of it, roughly AED 320 of the AED 6,500. On its fastest chain, 110 days.
How long does registration take, and why are there four answers?
Between 110 and 180 days to the certificate, and the uncertainty is the ministry’s own. Three of its service pages, all updated in late October 2026, publish four different figures for the same examination step.
| Ministry page, read 11 Nov 2026 | What it says about the decision |
|---|---|
| Trademark Registration — service summary | 45 working days, average |
| Trademark Registration — steps section | “within 90 days from the date of filing” |
| Register Trademark — steps section | “within 20 days from the date of submission” |
| Register Trademark — service summary | 20 working days, average |
| Objection to the Acceptance of a Trademark | 60 working days, average |
All five figures, same ministry, pages updated 24 to 27 October 2026.
Four advisory guides we read the same day each picked a different number and built a timeline on it: “about four months”, “approximately four to six months”, “~6–9 months” in the body of a page whose own table says “4–6 months”, and one that lists the stages and declines to add them up. None of them is careless. They are each quoting the ministry accurately; the ministry is the one giving four answers. Plan on the range, not a date: budget the money on day one and treat anything under four months as a good outcome.
What happens between acceptance and the certificate?
Three consecutive 30-day periods, each defined in the Executive Regulations. The ministry publishes the accepted mark within 30 days of notifying acceptance, in an online bulletin issued twice a month at the applicant’s expense, and the notice must carry the classes and the last date for objection. Any interested party then has 30 days from publication to object; the ministry serves it within 30 days, the applicant replies within 30, and a grievance is due within 30 days of notice.
Objecting is not cheap, and this is the number that surprises people: the ministry charges AED 7,500 to object to someone else’s trademark — AED 1,000 more than it costs to register your own — and takes 60 working days over it.
| Other published trademark fees | AED |
|---|---|
| Enquiry about a registration (the official search) | 350 |
| Converting a national mark to an international one | 400 |
| Cancelling a trademark (publication fee) | 750 |
| Filing an infringement complaint | 2,250 |
| Grievance against a refusal, or against a cancellation | 5,000 |
| Registering a geographical indication | 6,500 |
| Objecting to someone else’s trademark | 7,500 |
Ministry service pages and its fee announcement of 21 October 2025.
The AED 350 line at the top of that table is the cheapest insurance on it: the official register enquiry, returned immediately, 5.4% of a filing. Running it first is the difference between a refusal and a renamed product.
What does renewal cost, and what happens if you miss it?
AED 6,500 — exactly what the first registration cost. The renewal fee is AED 5,750 in the tenth and final year of protection, plus the same AED 750 publication fee. The two lines add to the same number as a brand-new registration, for a process that Article 21 says happens “without any new examination”, that the ministry’s own page says runs without “allowing others to object”, and that it completes in one working day.
| Transaction | Fee | Publication | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| First registration, one class | AED 750 + 5,000 | AED 750 | AED 6,500 |
| Renewal, in the tenth year | AED 5,750 | AED 750 | AED 6,500 |
| Renewal, within six months of expiry | AED 6,500 | AED 750 | AED 7,250 |
| Monitoring or inspection mark, tenth year | AED 8,250 | AED 750 | AED 9,000 |
| Monitoring or inspection mark, within six months of expiry | AED 9,750 | AED 750 | AED 10,500 |
Ministry renewal page, read 11 November 2026; the totals are ours.
Article 11 of the Executive Regulations sets the window: the last year of protection, and six months after it. Renewing inside the grace period costs AED 750 more, 11.5% — mild next to the registration penalties above.
Missing it entirely is not mild. Article 22 removes the mark “as of the expiry date of the protection period” — backdated to expiry, not to the day the registry notices — and Article 27 then lets a third party register it after three years. Article 24 separately lets anyone ask for deregistration of a mark “not been used for (5) five consecutive years”. A UAE trademark is not a deed; it is a subscription with a use requirement.
What can a registered mark do that an unregistered one cannot?
It can be enforced, and the enforcement numbers are an order of magnitude above the filing fee. Article 49 punishes counterfeiting a registered mark, imitating it so as to mislead the public, using a counterfeit commercially, holding the tools to make one, or importing goods bearing one, with imprisonment and/or a fine of AED 100,000 to AED 1,000,000. Article 50 covers selling such goods, and using an unregistered mark so as to suggest it is registered, with up to a year inside and/or AED 50,000 to AED 200,000.
The floor of Article 49 is more than fifteen times the AED 6,500 it costs to be on the register. Note the second limb of Article 50 too: presenting an unregistered mark as registered is itself an offence. The ® symbol on a UAE product is not decoration.
Registration is also the only part of a brand that is federal. A trade licence names your company in one emirate, the signboard on your door is a municipal permit, an e-commerce licence governs what you sell online — and none of them stops a competitor in another emirate using your name. Only the mark does, ten years at a time.
Who pays less than AED 6,500, and who pays nothing?
Members of the National Programme for Small and Medium Enterprises pay half; People of Determination are exempt entirely. Both were announced by the ministry on 21 October 2025, in the decision that set the fees for 28 trademark services, and both apply to the published fees. At 50%, one class costs AED 3,250 and three cost AED 9,750 — less than two classes at the standard rate.
Two conditions push the bill the other way. A company filing in its own name must attach a copy of its commercial licence; an individual UAE-based owner does not. And an owner based outside the country must file through a registered agent, with a power of attorney the ministry requires to be legal, notarised and translated into Arabic — a cost that sits on top of every figure here and that nobody publishes, because it is a market price, not a government one.
If the licence is the missing piece, that is our part of it: a Virtual Office with Ejari is a registered Dubai address for a mainland trade licence at AED 8,000 a year, and the paperwork comes with it. To hand the filing itself to someone, a PRO does exactly this counter work, and attestation of foreign documents is the errand that usually arrives with it.
Where do these numbers come from, and what could not be read?
Every dirham above comes from a Ministry of Economy and Tourism page or from the law, read on 11 November 2026: the service pages for registration, the publication fee, the final fee, renewal, objection, enquiry and cancellation; the fee announcement of 21 October 2025; Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021, in force since 2 January 2022; and Cabinet Decision No. 57 of 2022 for the deadlines.
Three sources are named here because we could not read them, not because we ignored them. The ministry’s own PDF of the decree-law returned a server error; the International Trademark Registration (Madrid Protocol) page would not load, which is why no Madrid fee appears above beyond the AED 400 conversion line; and the federal portal’s intellectual-property page, which we did read, is missing from the links because it answered 404 to a second check. It earns a sentence anyway: it gives the protection term for patents (20 years), utility certificates (10 years) and industrial designs (20 years), and no term at all for trademarks — the one right of the four that most businesses own.
Two figures here are ours, not the ministry’s: the AED 11,000 line, the sum of two published annual ceilings, and the per-class multiples. Fees change; the dates are there so you can tell how old this page is when you find it.
And our own search data shows zero impressions on trademark, patent and copyright across two consecutive 28-day periods, so the questions below are not drawn from our traffic. They come from the six keywords in this family measured in the UAE market on 11 November 2026, led by trademark registration uae at 1,000 searches a month, with patent registration uae at 590 and trademark search uae at 390.
FAQ: 10 quick answers
1. How much does trademark registration cost in the UAE? AED 6,500 for one mark in one class: AED 750 to examine, AED 750 to publish in the trademark bulletin and AED 5,000 as the final registration fee. Those are the government fees published by the Ministry of Economy and Tourism, read on 11 November 2026. An agent’s fee, compulsory only for owners based outside the UAE, sits on top and is published nowhere.
2. Is the fee charged per class or per application? Per class. Article 2 of Cabinet Decision No. 57 of 2022 says registration fees are several when an application covers several classes, so one form covering three classes costs AED 19,500. The class list also cannot be amended once the mark is published in the bulletin, so a class chosen wrongly means filing again.
3. How long does a UAE trademark last? Ten years, counted from the filing date rather than the date on the certificate. Article 21 of Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021 sets the term and Article 17 backdates the legal effect to filing, so the examination months are protected — and are also inside the ten years you paid for.
4. What happens if I pay the registration fee late? The published penalty is AED 1,000 a month, capped at AED 10,000 a year, starting 30 days after the objection period ends. A separate AED 100 a month, capped at AED 1,000 a year, applies to the publication fee. Any part of a month counts as a full month, and at the ceilings the two come to AED 11,000 — more than the registration itself.
5. How long does the whole registration take? Between about 110 and 180 days to the certificate, on the ministry’s own published figures. The uncertainty is the examination step, for which it publishes 20 days, 20 working days, 45 working days and 90 days on three different service pages. Publication, the 30-day objection window and the 30 days to issue the certificate are fixed.
6. Does the one-day examination make the certificate arrive faster? Only by the days it saves on examination. It costs AED 2,250 instead of AED 750 and returns a decision in one working day, but it does not shorten publication, the 30-day objection window or the 30 days the registry then takes to issue the certificate.
7. What does it cost to renew a UAE trademark? AED 6,500 — AED 5,750 plus the AED 750 publication fee — if you renew during the tenth year, and AED 7,250 within the six months after expiry. That is the same total as a first registration, for a renewal the law says happens without a new examination and which the ministry completes in one working day.
8. What happens if I let a trademark lapse? Article 22 treats the mark as removed from the register as of the expiry date of the protection period, not from the day the lapse is noticed, and Article 27 then lets a third party register it three years later. Separately, a mark unused for five consecutive years can be struck off at a third party’s request.
9. Can I search the UAE trademark register before filing? Yes. The ministry publishes an enquiry service about registrations at AED 350, returned immediately — 5.4% of a filing fee, and the cheapest step in the process. Running it first is how you learn the name is taken before paying AED 6,500 to be told so.
10. Are there any discounts? Two, both announced by the ministry on 21 October 2025. Members of the National Programme for Small and Medium Enterprises pay 50% of the published fees, bringing one class to AED 3,250, and People of Determination are fully exempt. Neither discount changes the deadlines or the late-payment penalties.
What to do next
Three things, in this order, and the first costs AED 350. Run the official register enquiry on the exact wording you intend to use. Decide the class list before you file, because you cannot change it after publication. Then, on the day the mark is accepted, put two dates in the calendar: 30 days for the publication fee, and 30 days after the objection window for the AED 5,000. Those two diary entries are worth AED 11,000 a year.
If the trade licence behind the mark still needs an address, that is our part of it: a Virtual Office with Ejari is AED 8,000 a year, Ejari works the way this guide explains, and a flexi desk is the cheaper licence-bearing option when a desk will do. For the people behind the brand, a hot desk is AED 950 a month, a dedicated desk AED 1,500 in Downtown and a private office from AED 6,000 — all inclusive, members in at any hour, reception Monday to Friday 9am to 6pm. Book a free tour at Downtown, Business Bay or Dubai Design District.
