VAT on your UAE online store: thresholds, price display, and the invoice fields

"Do I need to charge VAT on my website in the UAE" is three questions wearing one coat. Whether you are within the registration rules is a question about your turnover and your place of residence. Whether the price on the product page may be shown without tax is a question about who is looking at it. Whether the PDF your shop emails after checkout is a tax invoice is a question about twelve named fields. The three have different answers, they sit in different instruments, and a shop can get the first one right and still fail the other two in the checkout code.

Where the text below comes from

Every legal statement here was read in a primary text on 27 and 28 August 2026, with the article number next to it. The VAT sources are the ones the Federal Tax Authority and the Ministry of Finance publish on their own sites: the consolidated Decree-Law, the consolidated Executive Regulation, the administrative-penalties decision, the e-invoicing decisions, and the FTA's own guidance.

The two consumer-protection instruments are not on those sites and are not official English. Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 on Consumer Protection and Cabinet Decision No. 66 of 2023 sit with the Ministry of Economy and Tourism, and the English PDFs the Ministry publishes for both are LexisMiddleEast translations. The wording quoted from them below is a translator's wording, and the Arabic text governs. That matters most where a clause number is involved, so where the translation does not number a clause, this article does not invent one.

This is a summary of published legislation and of the build decisions that follow from it. It is not tax advice. Whether any of it applies to your business is a question for a UAE tax adviser, and nothing here says that you must register for anything.

The two thresholds, from the source

The FTA publishes both numbers on one page, and both are repeated in the Executive Regulation with the same figures.

• Mandatory registration threshold: AED 375,000. Registration is mandatory where the total value of a business's taxable supplies and imports exceeded that figure over the previous 12 months, or where it anticipates exceeding it in the next 30 days. Article 7(1) of the VAT Executive Regulation fixes the number; Article 13(1) of the VAT Decree-Law carries the two limbs.
• Voluntary registration threshold: AED 187,500. Same two limbs, and taxable expenses count towards this one, not only supplies. Article 8(1) of the Executive Regulation fixes the number; Article 17 of the Decree-Law is the provision that lets expenses count.

Three mechanics in Article 7 of the Executive Regulation matter more than the numbers. Clause 2 gives 30 days from the moment the obligation arises to file the application. Clause 3 lets the Authority register a person from the date they first became liable anyway, and impose penalties. Clause 7 makes a late registrant liable for the tax on everything supplied before registering. Separately, the standard rate is in Article 3 of the Decree-Law: 5%, subject to the zero-rated and exempt categories in Title Six.

The threshold is a rolling 12-month figure, not a financial-year figure. For a shop that means the number has to be visible in the order data continuously, not reconstructed once a year by an accountant. If your reporting can only produce revenue per calendar year, it cannot answer the question the law actually asks.

The sentence that removes the threshold for non-residents

The FTA page states the mandatory threshold and then adds one sentence:

The mandatory registration threshold is AED 375,000. This threshold is not applicable to foreign businesses.

That is not an aside. It is the statutory position in Article 13(2) of the Decree-Law, which requires registration of every person without a place of residence in the State or an Implementing State who makes supplies of goods or services, where no other person is obligated to pay the due tax on those supplies in the State.

The FTA's E-Commerce VAT Guide says the same thing in plainer words, and this is the point to say what that guide is, because the rest of this article leans on it. It is VATGEC1, dated August 2020, and the copy on the FTA site on 28 August 2026 is still that August 2020 edition. August 2020 is before Federal Decree-Law No. 18 of 2022 amended the VAT law and before the 2024 and 2025 amendments to the Executive Regulation. The guide is issued under Article 73 of the Executive Regulation as general guidance, and it describes its own limits in one sentence: "This guide does not deal with all the legal details associated with VAT and is not intended for legal reference." Every provision the guide points at in the passages quoted below was opened in the current consolidated legislation before it was used here, and each one still reads the way the guide describes it.

With that caveat attached, the guide's sentence is: "for non-resident suppliers, the registration threshold is, in effect, nil."

For a shop that sells into the UAE from outside it, the whole question becomes that final clause in Article 13(2): is there someone else who accounts for the tax. There usually is when the buyer is a UAE business, and there usually is not when the buyer is a consumer.

Take services first, because a downloadable product, a subscription, an online course or a licence key is an electronic service, and electronic services have their own place-of-supply rule: the place of supply is in the UAE to the extent of use and enjoyment in the UAE, regardless of where the contract was concluded or paid (Article 31 of the Decree-Law). Where the supply lands in the UAE, Article 48(1) of the Decree-Law shifts the accounting to the recipient, and it does so only for a taxable person, which means someone registered or required to register. The guide draws the consequence for a shop that sells to both: the same product, sold from the same server on the same day, is the customer's obligation when the buyer is a taxable person and the seller's obligation when the buyer is not. A non-resident supplier selling to both "will be liable to register for VAT and to account for UAE VAT on its supplies to non-taxable persons." There is no first-dirham allowance hiding in that sentence.

Goods behave differently, and the difference is physical. Article 27 of the Decree-Law sets the place of supply of goods by location, and the guide states the practical half of it: goods located outside the UAE when they are supplied are supplied outside the UAE. UAE VAT does not apply to that supply even if the parcel is later imported. What does apply is import VAT at 5% on the customs value, and the obligation falls on the person named as importer on the customs declaration. That is a checkout decision disguised as a shipping decision. Sell delivered-duty-paid with your own company as importer of record and you have taken on a UAE tax position; ship with the buyer as importer and the charge lands on the buyer at customs, which is a conversion problem rather than a tax problem, and one your delivery page had better mention.

Once you hold stock in the UAE the picture changes again: goods already in the country when sold are a local supply, and the reverse charge that can rescue a non-resident seller is Article 48(3) of the Executive Regulation, which applies only where the recipient is a taxable person with a place of residence in the State. The guide is blunt about the evidence: the supplier should collect and retain information about the recipient's residency and registration status, and if it "cannot ascertain all of the details necessary for the application of the reverse charge mechanism to a supply, such as that the recipient is registered for VAT, then the supplier should register for VAT in the UAE and account for VAT to the FTA itself."

Read that as a system requirement rather than a tax opinion. The relief for cross-border B2B depends on a fact about the buyer that only the checkout can capture, at the moment of the order, in a form you can still produce during an audit years later. A shop that never asks, or asks and does not store the answer, has chosen the treatment that is worse for it.

Two provisions numbered 48

The Decree-Law and the Executive Regulation both have an Article 48 about reverse charge, and the clause numbers collide. Citing one when you mean the other changes the meaning completely.

Provision	What it actually covers
Decree-Law, Art. 48(1)	Import of concerned goods or services by a taxable person, treated as a supply to himself
Decree-Law, Art. 48(3)	Domestic sales of crude or refined oil, natural gas and pure hydrocarbons between two registrants
Executive Regulation, Art. 48(3)	Local supply by a non-resident supplier who charges no tax, to a taxable person resident in the State

The rule a cross-border shop needs is the last one. The FTA guide cites it that way, footnoting "Article 48(3) of the Executive Regulation" against the goods paragraphs and "Article 48(1) of the Decree-Law" against the services paragraphs. Article 48(3) of the Decree-Law has nothing to do with e-commerce.

Price display: inclusive by default, exclusive by exception

This is the rule that shows up on the page itself, which makes it the one a build gets wrong in public rather than in a filing.

Article 27 of the Executive Regulation, headed Price Excluding Tax, has four clauses that read as a decision tree:

1. In the case of a taxable supply, the published prices shall be inclusive of tax.
2. As an exception, the taxable person may declare prices exclusive of tax for supplies of goods or services for export, and where the customer is a registrant.
3. Where prices are declared exclusive of tax under clause 2, the price should be clearly identified as being exclusive of tax.
4. As a further exception, the price shall be declared exclusive of tax for a supply of concerned goods or concerned services under Article 48(1) of the Decree-Law, and for a supply of goods taxed under Article 48(3) of the Decree-Law.

Three consequences follow for the build. The default rendering of a price to an anonymous visitor is the gross price, because you do not yet know whether an exception applies. The exclusive rendering is legitimate but conditional, so the condition has to exist as data: an export destination, or a customer flagged as a registrant, not a checkbox someone once ticked in a theme setting. And "clearly" in clause 3 is not decoration. A gross number and a net number that differ by 5% and look identical in the layout are a support ticket at best.

Getting this wrong has a price, and it is one of the few figures here that is a penalty rather than a threshold. Table No. 3 of Cabinet Decision No. 40 of 2017 on administrative penalties, in the version amended by Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025, opens with: "Failure of the Taxable Person to display prices inclusive of Tax. 5,000." The same table charges AED 2,500 for each detected case of failing to issue a tax invoice in time, and AED 2,500 for each detected case of not complying with the conditions and procedures for issuing tax invoices and tax credit notes electronically. The consolidated text carries a footnote against the table: amended by Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025, effective from 14 April 2026.

A separate obligation, from a different law, lands on the same screen: Article 6(1)(f) of Cabinet Decision No. 66 of 2023 requires the consumer invoice to state the price of the commodity or service in the local currency. A USD-only shop that ships to Dubai has a problem that has nothing to do with VAT. We wrote that instrument up in the article on when your UAE site and invoice have to be in Arabic.

The tax invoice, field by field

The fields are in Article 59(1) of the Executive Regulation. A tax invoice shall contain all of the following particulars.

#	Article 59(1) requires	In the template
a	The words "Tax Invoice" clearly displayed	Literal label, not "Receipt"
b	Supplier name, address, TRN	Printed, not admin-only
c	Recipient name, address, TRN where registrant	Captured before render
d	Sequential or unique invoice number	Gapless, per legal entity
e	Date of issue	Own field
f	Date of supply, if different	Second date field
g	Description of goods or services	Per line
h	Per item: unit price, quantity, tax rate, amount in AED	Line level, in AED
i	Amount of any discount	Own line, not netted off
j	Gross amount payable in AED	In AED
k	Tax amount in AED, plus exchange rate if converted	Rate is a printed field
l	Reverse charge: statement plus reference to the provision	Conditional block, cites the article

Simplified tax invoices are shorter, and their conditions are precise. Article 59(2) reduces the list to the words "Tax Invoice", the supplier's name, address and TRN, the date of issue, a description, and the total consideration and tax amount charged expressed in AED. Article 59(5) allows that shorter form in two situations only: where the recipient is not a registrant, or where the recipient is a registrant and the consideration does not exceed AED 10,000. The same clause carves out reverse-charge cases entirely, in the words "in cases other than where the reverse charge mechanism applies in accordance with Article 48 of the Decree-Law". Article 59 as a whole is footnoted in the consolidated text as amended by Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2024 and Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2025.

Four rules on timing, currency and storage complete the picture. Article 67 of the Decree-Law gives 14 days from the date of supply to issue the invoice, which for a shop means the document is a scheduled job with a retry, not a manual export. Article 69 requires amounts in a currency other than the dirham to be converted at the exchange rate approved by the Central Bank at the date of supply, so the rate has to be stored with the order rather than fetched again at print time. Article 78 of the Decree-Law lists the records the taxable person keeps, including all tax invoices and tax credit notes issued and received. And Article 59(8) of the Executive Regulation puts two conditions on issuing invoices electronically at all: the registrant must be capable of securely storing a copy in compliance with the record-keeping requirements, and the authenticity of origin and integrity of content must be guaranteed. Article 78 and Article 59(8) together rule out an invoice that exists only as a signed URL that expires.

If you accept crypto, a directive from July 2026 applies. FTA Directive on Tax Transactions No. 3 of 2026, issued 14 July 2026, requires a taxable person receiving consideration in a digital currency to convert it into dirhams by selecting three platforms from the Authority's published list of centralised public digital currency exchange platforms, using the same three for every transaction in a calendar year, taking the numerical average of their rates at the date and time of supply or of receipt, and retaining the records that prove each of the three rates. The list published with the directive names Binance FZE, Bybit Fintech FZE, Deribit FZE, Bitget and Payward FZCO. That is a storage requirement per order, not a spreadsheet at year end.

Three field lists, one document

The document your shop emails may have to satisfy three separate instruments at once, and only one of them is tax law.

• The tax fields come from Article 59 of the Executive Regulation above, and they apply only if you are registered and the supply is taxable.
• The consumer fields come from Article 6(1) of Cabinet Decision No. 66 of 2023, which lists eleven: (a) name, address and contact information of the supplier; (b) date of invoice; (c) description of commodity or service; (d) unit of sale, quantity or number of sold units; (e) condition of the commodity, if it is used; (f) price in the local currency; (g) warranty period; (h) date of delivery or of provision of the service; (i) serial number of commodities and the contained parts, as per the nature of each commodity; (j) commercial registration number; (k) tax number, if any.
• The language comes from Article 8 of Federal Law No. 15 of 2020, whose published English translation reads: "The Invoice shall be in Arabic, and the Supplier may add any other language he specifies." The translation does not number that clause, so this article does not cite a clause number for it.

Two of those eleven have no counterpart in a standard e-commerce data model: (e) the condition of a used item, and (i) a serial number per item and per contained part. Both come from consumer-protection law rather than tax law, so no VAT setting in a shop system will produce them, and neither appears on the Article 59 list.

Whether all three lists apply to a given order depends on who bought and what was sold, which is why the invoice should be generated from one template with conditional blocks rather than assembled by hand. The e-commerce build list that produces the rest of these elements, page by page and article by article, is in UAE e-commerce website requirements.

What the checkout has to capture

Working backwards from the fields, the order record needs at minimum:

• A buyer type that is a stored value, not an inference from whether a company name field was filled in.
• The buyer's TRN and address where the buyer is a registrant. The FTA site carries a TRN verification tool whose input field states that the value must be 15 characters long, which gives you the length to validate against before the order completes.
• Evidence of the buyer's place of residence and registration status where a reverse-charge treatment was applied, retained with the order.
• The price mode that was displayed, gross or net, stored per order rather than read from current settings, so a template change next year does not rewrite last year's documents.
• Date of supply and date of issue as separate fields.
• Currency, the Central Bank rate used, and the date it was taken. For digital currencies, the three platforms and their three rates.
• An invoice number from a gapless sequence, allocated when the invoice is issued rather than when the cart is created.
• A stored copy of the rendered document, re-downloadable from the order record.
• For physical goods: item condition where the item is used, and serial numbers where the goods have them.

Your own TRN is required on the invoice by Article 59(1)(b) of the Executive Regulation, and Article 79 of the Decree-Law requires it on every tax return, tax invoice, tax credit note and related document. No VAT provision requires it in your website footer. Publishing it there is a trust decision, and a reasonable one, since a buyer can verify it in seconds. The licence details that do have to appear on the pages come from the e-commerce decree-law, not from tax law, and they are covered in the article linked above.

E-invoicing, with dates and a caveat

The UAE electronic invoicing system is real, dated, and not the same thing as emailing a PDF. As at 28 August 2026, from the Ministry of Finance texts:

• Pilot programme from 1 July 2026, for a taxpayer working group that the Ministry notifies and that joins only on written agreement, and voluntary implementation open to any person from the same date (Ministerial Decision No. 244 of 2025, Articles 3 and 4).
• Revenue of AED 50,000,000 or more: appoint an accredited service provider by 30 October 2026 and implement by 1 January 2027. The original date in Article 5(1)(a) was 31 July 2026 and was replaced by Ministerial Decision No. 66 of 2026.
• Revenue below AED 50,000,000: appoint an accredited service provider by 31 March 2027, implement by 1 July 2027 (Article 5(1)(b)).
• Government entities: appoint by 31 March 2027, implement by 1 October 2027 (Article 5(1)(c)).
• After those phases, Article 5(1)(d) requires any remaining person or government entity subject to the system to appoint a provider and implement.
• Business-to-consumer transactions are not subject to the system, and a person engaged exclusively in such transactions is not subject to it, until a time determined by a decision of the Minister (Article 5(2)). For a pure consumer shop, this is the sentence that decides the whole question for now.

One deadline in that list has already moved once, by three months. Treat every date above as read on 28 August 2026 and verifiable at the source, not as settled.

We do not implement e-invoicing and we are not an accredited service provider, and we do not connect shops to accounting or ERP systems. Where a client needs the exchange layer, that is a job for an accredited provider from the Ministry's published list and for their accountant. What we do build is the document a shop produces and the order data behind it, which is the part that has to be correct before any exchange layer can carry it anywhere. The build scope is on what we build, and the fixed website package, with the things we state up front that we do not do, is on the website package page.

Not in this article

Corporate tax. A separate law with its own registration and its own filings, and no overlap with anything above beyond the word "tax". We do not write about it and we do not advise on it. Ask your tax adviser.

Your specific position. Nothing here tells you whether you have to register. It tells you what the published thresholds are, which sentence removes the threshold for non-residents, and which fields the Executive Regulation puts on an invoice. The step from those facts to your business runs through a tax adviser, and the step from your answer to your codebase is where we are useful.

Designated zones. Free zones designated for VAT purposes have their own treatment for goods, and the e-commerce guide quoted above says in terms that it does not consider supplies of goods to, from or within designated zones, pointing instead to the Designated Zones VAT Guide, VATGDZ1. If your stock sits in one, none of the goods paragraphs above can be applied without that guide.

Check your own shop

• Can your system produce a rolling 12-month taxable-supply figure today, without an export to a spreadsheet?
• Does an anonymous visitor see a tax-inclusive price, and is any net price labelled as excluding tax? (Executive Regulation, Art. 27(1) and 27(3))
• Does your invoice template carry the literal words "Tax Invoice"? (Executive Regulation, Art. 59(1)(a))
• Are there separate fields for date of supply and date of issue? (Art. 59(1)(e), (f))
• Are per-line amounts, the total and the tax amount expressed in AED, with the exchange rate printed when the order was in another currency? (Art. 59(1)(h), (j), (k), Decree-Law Art. 69)
• Is the buyer's TRN captured at checkout and printed when the buyer is a registrant? (Art. 59(1)(c))
• Does a reverse-charge order print the statement and cite the provision, and does it cite the right instrument? (Art. 59(1)(l))
• Is the invoice number sequence gapless, and allocated at issue rather than at cart creation? (Art. 59(1)(d))
• Is every invoice stored as a copy you control, rather than a link that expires? (Executive Regulation, Art. 59(8); Decree-Law Art. 78)
• Is the invoice produced within 14 days of the date of supply by a job that retries? (Decree-Law Art. 67)
• For used goods and serialised goods, do the consumer fields (e) and (i) exist in the template at all? (Cabinet Decision No. 66 of 2023, Art. 6(1))

Every line you cannot answer is a task with a known address in the code. Before we quote for any of them we show the work first, and what that looks like is set out here.

Sources

• Federal Tax Authority, Registration For VAT, thresholds and the sentence on foreign businesses: tax.gov.ae, Registration For VAT. Page states "Page last updated: Apr 06, 2026". Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Cabinet Decision No. 52 of 2017 on the Executive Regulation of Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 on VAT, consolidated with amendments up to Cabinet Decision No. 100 of 2025: mof.gov.ae, Executive Regulation and its amendments (PDF). Articles 7, 8, 27, 48 and 59 were read in this file. Retrieved 27 August 2026, re-read 28 August 2026.
• Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 on VAT and its amendments, as published by the Ministry of Finance: tax.gov.ae, Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 and amendments (PDF). Articles 3, 13, 17, 27, 31, 48, 65, 67, 69, 78 and 79 were read in this file. Retrieved 27 August 2026, re-read 28 August 2026.
• Federal Tax Authority, E-Commerce VAT Guide, VATGEC1, August 2020: tax.gov.ae, E-Commerce VAT Guide (PDF). Guidance issued under Article 73 of the Executive Regulation; it states of itself that it "does not deal with all the legal details associated with VAT and is not intended for legal reference". Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Cabinet Decision No. 40 of 2017 on administrative penalties and its amendments, consolidated version, Table No. 3 as amended by Cabinet Decision No. 129 of 2025 with effect from 14 April 2026: mof.gov.ae, Cabinet Decision No. 40 of 2017 and its amendments (PDF). Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Ministerial Decision No. 244 of 2025 on the Implementation of the Electronic Invoicing System, Articles 3, 4 and 5: mof.gov.ae (PDF). Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Ministerial Decision No. 66 of 2026 amending paragraph (a) of Clause (1) of Article 5 of Ministerial Decision No. 244 of 2025, moving the service-provider date to 30 October 2026: mof.gov.ae (PDF). Both decisions are listed on the Ministry's eInvoicing page. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• FTA Directive on Tax Transactions No. 3 of 2026 on the method of converting the value of digital currencies into UAE dirham, issued 14 July 2026, with the list of centralised public digital currency exchange platforms: tax.gov.ae (PDF). Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Cabinet Decision No. 66 of 2023, Executive Regulation of Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 on Consumer Protection, Article 6(1): moet.gov.ae (PDF). Published by the Ministry of Economy and Tourism. The English PDF is a LexisMiddleEast translation, not an official English text. Retrieved 27 August 2026.
• Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 on Consumer Protection, Article 8: moet.gov.ae (PDF). Also a LexisMiddleEast translation. That translation renders Article 8 as four unnumbered paragraphs, which is why no clause number is cited above. Retrieved 28 August 2026.

Reviewed 28 August 2026. The part of this article most likely to age is the e-invoicing timetable, where one deadline has already moved by three months.