How It Works

Assess Your Eligibility and Plan Your Credit

We start by understanding your business and your R&D activities. Our specialists review each of your projects against the five legislative criteria — novel, creative, uncertain, systematic, and transferable or reproducible — as assessed with regard to the OECD Frascati Manual.

We map your team structure against the 2-6-14 staffing thresholds to determine which credit band you can access: 15% (2+ R&D staff), 35% (6+ staff), or 50% (14+ staff). We confirm each project meets the AED 500,000 minimum qualifying expenditure threshold (calculated before the 30% staff cost uplift). By the end of this step, you will know your estimated credit value and exactly which projects qualify.

Want to understand the legislative claiming process before engaging us? See our How to Claim the UAE R&D Tax Credit guide for the full five-step breakdown.

Connect Your Systems and Build Your Evidence Base

We integrate your accounting, payroll, and timesheet tools — Xero, QuickBooks, SAP, or your existing systems — to automatically capture R&D costs and staff time as they happen. The legislation requires contemporaneous evidence: records created at the time the work is done, not reconstructed later.

Our platform allocates expenditure at the project level across the four qualifying categories: staff costs (with the 30% statutory overhead uplift under Article 8 of Ministerial Decision No. 24 of 2026), consumables, subcontracting fees paid to UAE-based third parties, and Cost Contribution Arrangement payments. We also flag whether you need to arrange audited financial statements — these are mandatory for every R&D Tax Credit claim, with no exemption for smaller entities.

Pre-Approval — We Handle It End to End

This is the step most businesses do not know about — and it is the most important one. Pre-approval from the Emirates R&D Council is mandatory under Article 4 of Ministerial Decision No. 24 of 2026. Every R&D project must be individually approved before the credit can be included in your Corporate Tax return. No pre-approval means no credit, regardless of how much you have spent.

We appraise each of your projects against the five Frascati Manual criteria, write the full pre-approval application — describing the R&D activities, demonstrating how they qualify, and setting out the expenditure — and liaise directly with the Emirates R&D Council on your behalf to get your projects approved. This is a full turnkey exercise: you focus on the R&D, we get it approved.

We Prepare Your R&D Report and Submit Your Claim

With pre-approval confirmed and your evidence base in place, we calculate your credit across all qualifying projects using the banded rate structure: 15% on the first AED 1 million, 35% on AED 1–2 million, and 50% on AED 2–5 million, with a maximum credit of AED 2 million.

We prepare the complete R&D report — pre-approval confirmation, expenditure breakdown, audited financial statements, and a signed management declaration — and submit it to the FTA and Emirates R&D Council with your Corporate Tax return. The credit is non-refundable: it offsets your Corporate Tax liability first, then any Top-up Tax. Any excess carries forward with no stated time limit. See our full breakdown of Ministerial Decision No. 24 of 2026.

Stay Compliant — The 7-Year Obligation

Your R&D Tax Credit claim does not end at submission. Under Article 12 of Ministerial Decision No. 24 of 2026, all records supporting your claim must be retained for seven years following the end of the tax period. For a credit claimed for 2026, that means records must be kept until at least 2033.

The legislation also contains a five-year claw-back window — if your business undergoes certain changes (such as electing Small Business Relief, entering liquidation, or redomiciling outside the UAE), credits already used can be clawed back. We help you maintain your documentation, monitor compliance triggers, and ensure you remain audit-ready throughout the retention period. See our full legislation walkthrough for detailed rules.