UAE Corporate Tax Calculator
Taxable income to tax payable, with Small Business Relief tested automatically.
Audit Fee Calculator
This audit fee calculator ignores revenue, because audit fees do not track revenue however they are quoted. Move the controls that actually matter and watch the number respond.
Volume-basedReconstruction priced separatelyPlanning figuresFree, no sign-up
What actually drives an audit fee
Notice what the inputs above do not include: your revenue, your profit, or how large your business feels. Firms that price on revenue are pricing on ability to pay, which is a commercial choice rather than a costing one.
The five things that genuinely move the number:
- Transaction volume. The biggest driver. Auditors test samples, and sample sizes scale with population. Nine hundred invoices is more work than sixty regardless of what they total.
- Record quality. The second biggest, and the one entirely within your control. Reconciled books mean the auditor verifies a position. Unreconciled books mean they establish one first — a different job at a different price.
- Inventory. Stock must be observed or reconstructed. Observed at a year-end count with the auditor present is cheap. Reconstructed in month four from purchase and sales records is expensive and less conclusive.
- Entity complexity. Multiple currencies, related-party arrangements, revenue recognised across periods, group consolidation. Each adds specific procedures.
- Responsiveness. Rarely mentioned and genuinely significant. Queries answered in two days keep an engagement on plan; queries answered in three weeks stretch it across months.
Why reconstruction is priced separately
Set the record quality to "significantly behind" and a second figure appears. That separation is deliberate and you should insist on it from any firm you engage.
Bringing historic periods up to date is project work with its own scope. A firm that folds it silently into an audit fee is either absorbing a loss or planning to revise the number later, and the second is far more common. Ask for the audit and any reconstruction quoted as two lines.
How to lower the fee legitimately
Every item here removes hours, and hours are what you are buying:
- Close the books monthly. The largest single lever — a year closed twelve times is a fraction of the work of a year closed once.
- Reconcile every bank account to the statement, including the one with three transactions in it.
- Keep the fixed asset register current rather than rebuilding it from invoices at year end.
- Count stock at year end with the auditor present. A diary entry that saves real money.
- Nominate one person to answer queries with authority to find things. Engagements stall on access, not difficulty.
Collectively these routinely move a fee by a third. The full picture is in what an audit costs in Dubai.
Before you rely on the audit fee calculator result
The arithmetic here is exact and has been checked against worked examples. What a calculator cannot do is know your situation — your contract, your licence category, the elections available to you, or the exceptions that might apply. It applies a formula to the figures you give it.
Use it to get a sense of scale, to sanity-check something you have been quoted, or to work a problem through for yourself. Where the number is going into a decision that matters, have the assumptions underneath it checked. That conversation is free and it usually takes twenty minutes.
UAE Tax & Compliance
Audit fee — common questions
The questions we are asked most about this calculation.
Something not covered? Ask us directly — there is no charge for a straight answer.
For a single entity with reconciled books, low transaction volume and no inventory, expect from around AED 6,500. A trading company with stock and several bank accounts typically starts around AED 12,000. Group consolidations are quoted individually. Where records need reconstructing first, that is separate project work and should be quoted separately.
Bigger by transaction volume, yes. Bigger by revenue, not necessarily. A company turning over AED 20 million on 60 invoices a month is less audit work than one turning over AED 2 million on 900. Fees follow what has to be tested, not the number at the top of the profit and loss.
Usually because the firms are quoting different scopes. One has assumed clean records and no inventory attendance; another has assumed it will need to fix things first. Ask each firm what it has assumed about the state of your books and what triggers a variation, then compare the assumptions before the prices.
Not necessarily — a genuinely simple entity should be cheap. But a quote materially below market for a complex entity usually means the scope has been understated, and the gap reappears as a variation later. The question worth asking is what happens to the fee if the records turn out worse than assumed.
Usually yes, because the audit draws on records the firm already understands and there is no second team learning your business from scratch. Independence safeguards apply and should be documented — different staff on each engagement, and an audit partner independent of the accounting work.
Want the assumptions checked by a chartered accountant?
Send us what the calculator gave you and we will tell you whether the figures underneath it hold up. Free, and genuinely no obligation.