The True Cost of Putting Someone on Your Visa

The number you were quoted is one line of a bill with about a dozen lines on it.

"Two-year employment visa, AED X" usually refers to a subset of the government charges and nothing else. It rarely includes the work permit, which is a different authority. It almost never includes health insurance, which has been a precondition of issuing a residence permit since January 2025. It does not include the medical, the Emirates ID or whichever of the two routes into the country your candidate takes, and those routes cost different amounts.

This article sets out every line, in three groups, so you can build a figure for your own company rather than accepting somebody else's.

The three groups, and why they must stay separate

Government charges are set and published by the relevant authority. They are the same whoever files the application. You can look every one of them up.

Mandatory third-party costs are not government fees, but you cannot complete the process without them. Health insurance is the clearest example.

Service fees are what a provider charges for doing the work. They are commercial, they vary, and they are the only part that is negotiable.

Any quotation that merges the three is hiding which part you are actually paying for. Ask for them as separate lines. A provider who will not separate them is telling you something.

Group one: government charges

The work permit, with MOHRE

This is the labour side, and it is priced by your establishment's classification rather than by the employee.

MOHRE publishes a business centre commission cap of AED 72 on both its recruitment service page and its employment contracts issuance and renewal page. On the latter it also states that the fees shown do not include tax and collection charges, and that the service is free through its website and smart app.

That spread of AED 250 to AED 3,450 is the single biggest variable in the whole exercise, and it has nothing to do with the person you are hiring. It is a function of your company's classification.

The entry permit or status change, with GDRFA in Dubai

There are two routes in, and they cost differently.

Route A, the candidate is outside the UAE. GDRFA publishes a work visa fee of AED 200 plus VAT at 5 per cent.

Route B, the candidate is already in the UAE and moving onto your visa from another status. GDRFA publishes the same AED 200 plus VAT, with additional in-country charges: a knowledge dirham of AED 10, an innovation dirham of AED 10, and a fee inside the country of AED 500. A status amendment through GDRFA is published at AED 500, plus the same knowledge and innovation dirhams, with an individual fee of AED 15 and an establishment fee of AED 50.

Route B carries additional published charges, so on the government fees alone it is the more expensive of the two. Whether it is also the better choice is case-dependent and is not something the published figures answer: no comparative timeline for the two routes appears on the GDRFA or ICP pages we reviewed on 11 September 2026. Convenience for the candidate, the cost of a trip out and back, and notice periods all belong in that decision, and they are yours to weigh rather than ours to assert.

The residence permit, with ICP

ICP publishes its residency permit fees as an application fee of AED 100, an issuance fee of AED 100 for each year of residence, smart service fees of AED 100, a status adjustment fee of AED 500 where applicable, and a financial security deposit fee of AED 20. Service completion duration is published as two days.

The Emirates ID

ICP publishes renewal at AED 100 for each year of residence plus AED 100 smart application fees, with a service duration of five days.

ICP now publishes an Emirates ID issuance fee of AED 100 for each year of residence, plus an AED 100 smart-services fee. These are authority charges; delivery, urgent service or provider charges may be separate. Check the current ICP service card when you apply because the residence term determines the issuance component.

A company-level cost that is not per employee

Before you can hire anyone, the company needs its files open. MOHRE publishes a Ta'qeem fee of AED 406 for establishment card issuance. ICP publishes an establishment card application fee of AED 100, issuance at AED 100 per year, smart services at AED 100, and a subscription to its electronic system for establishments at AED 2,000.

These are not part of a per-employee calculation, but they belong in a first-hire budget, because a first hire triggers all of them.

Group two: mandatory third-party costs

Health insurance

Since 1 January 2025 employers are required to purchase a health insurance policy as a prerequisite for applying for the issuance or renewal of residence permits. This is no longer optional and it no longer sits outside the visa cost.

The basic package is published at AED 320 per year. That figure is the floor, not the likely cost. Cover above basic is priced by the insurer and by the employee's age, and the published basic package covers ages 1 to 64, with those over 64 requiring medical disclosure forms.

The published co-payment structure on the basic package is worth knowing when you compare policies, because it is what your employees will actually feel. Inpatient care carries 20 per cent, capped at AED 500 a visit and AED 1,000 a year including medications. Outpatient visits carry 25 per cent, capped at AED 100 a visit. Medications carry 30 per cent, capped at AED 1,500 a year. Follow-up visits within 7 days carry nothing.

In Dubai the split is specific: employers are required to provide cover for their employees, and sponsors are required to cover their resident dependants. So the employee's family is not your cost unless you choose to make it part of the package.

The medical fitness test

Every residence applicant aged 18 and over must pass a medical fitness test. Screening covers communicable diseases, with additional screening for specified worker categories.

We did not find a published fee for it on the pages we reviewed on 11 September 2026: the UAE Government Portal, the ICP service cards, the GDRFA service pages, and the Dubai Health Authority's public pages. Medical fitness centres are operated by DHA in Dubai and MOHAP in the northern emirates, so pricing may be published by an individual centre rather than centrally. It is a real cost and it belongs in your worksheet as a line, but we are not going to put a number next to it. Get the current figure from the approved centre you use.

Unemployment insurance, which is not your cost

Worth stating because it is regularly misunderstood and occasionally mis-billed to employers. The Involuntary Loss of Employment scheme is the employee's own subscription. MOHRE describes it as supporting employees "at no additional cost to employers."

Published premiums are AED 5 per month, or AED 60 annually, for a basic salary of AED 16,000 or less, and AED 10 per month, or AED 120 annually, above that. The scheme flyer states these as plus VAT.

Put it in your onboarding communication, not your cost model.

Group three: service fees

This is where we stop giving numbers, and the reason is straightforward.

RINJAZ service fees are not published in this article because they depend on transaction mix, volume, emirate and whether the work is per file or under a retainer. Publishing an indicative figure would be less useful than publishing none, because you would anchor on it and then be quoted something else.

What you should expect from any provider, us included, is a written fee schedule that sits alongside the government charges rather than absorbing them.

The variables that move the total

Six things change the answer, and three of them have nothing to do with the employee.

Practical asset: the per-employee cost worksheet. Build three column groups: Government, Mandatory third-party, Service. Under Government, list the work permit for your own classification, the entry permit or status change for the route you will use, the residence permit issuance per year, and the Emirates ID. Under Mandatory third-party, list health insurance for the actual product you will buy and the medical fitness fee from your chosen centre. Under Service, put the provider's written fee. Then add a fourth line at the bottom for company-level first-hire costs and only apply it once. Total the three groups separately before you total them together, so you can see which part you can actually influence.

Two notes on using these figures

They are dated. Every figure above was checked on 11 September 2026 on the authority's own page. Government fees change, and several of these pages are updated frequently. Before you commit to a budget, re-check the specific service card.

There is no single fee schedule. MOHRE, ICP, GDRFA and Dubai Economy all publish fees per service rather than in one table. The UAE Government Portal states plainly that visa charges are stated on each service card on the ICP and GDRFA websites. Anyone offering you a consolidated official price list has built it themselves.

If you are working out the cost of the function rather than the cost of one hire, the in-house versus outsourced comparison is the better starting point. If the employee is bringing family, that cost sits with the sponsor and is calculated separately. For the full picture of which authority charges what, see the transaction map.

Get the figure for your own classification. Send us your MOHRE establishment category, the emirate you hire into, and whether your candidates are typically already in the country. We will return a written per-employee estimate with government charges, mandatory third-party costs and our service fee as three separate columns, each government figure carrying its source and the date we checked it. If a cost is not officially published, the estimate will say so rather than guess.

One boundary belongs with the costs. Paying every fee on this list does not buy an approval. MOHRE decides the work permit and ICP or GDRFA decides the residence permit, each on its own assessment and its own timetable. A service provider's role, within whatever its licensed activity covers, is to prepare the file, submit it, coordinate the steps and track it. It decides none of them, and neither the fees nor the provider can shorten a process the authority controls.