United Arab Emirates · Business & founder
Golden Residence — Entrepreneurs
5-year permit. Requires an economic/technical project of at least AED 500,000 approved by an accredited business incubator or the competent emirate authority.
The cheapest headline entry to a Golden Visa, but the endorsement gate is real and discretionary — this is not a AED 500k cheque that buys a visa. For genuine founders it is excellent; for capital looking for a shortcut it is slower and less certain than the AED 2m deposit.
Qualifying routes
Project must be innovative or technical in nature, with approval from an accredited UAE business incubator, an auditor's letter, or endorsement from the emirate's economic department
Founders who have previously established and sold a project for at least AED 7m have historically qualified; verify current treatment with ICP before relying on this route
The facts
- Minimum investment
- 500k AED
- Total landed cost
- AED 500k project value plus licence, incubator and government fees; realistically AED 40–80k in setup and advisory costs on top of the project itself
- Timeline
- 2–6 months — The binding constraint is obtaining the incubator or economic-department endorsement, not the visa itself
- Physical presence
- None once granted
- Family
- spousechildrenparentsbusiness partners may qualify separately
- Permanent residency
- None — 5-year renewable
- Citizenship
- None by right — nomination only
- Language test
- Not applicable
- Dual citizenship
- Permitted
- Requirements
- project value of at least AED 500,000approval from accredited incubator or competent emirate authorityclean criminal recordmedical and health insurance
- 5 years, not 10 — a materially weaker permit than the investor and talent categories.
- Approval is discretionary and depends on an accredited incubator's endorsement. There is no published objective test you can rely on in advance.
- The AED 7m 'sold a startup' route is widely quoted by agents but is poorly documented on ICP's own materials — confirm directly before structuring around it.
- Running the venture creates UAE corporate tax exposure at 9% above AED 375k, and natural-person CT applies where business turnover exceeds AED 1m.