The rule
A Corporate Tax return must be filed, and any tax paid, within nine months of the end of the relevant tax period. There is one deadline covering both — unlike VAT, there is no separate payment date to track.
What that means for the common year ends
- Financial year ending 31 December 2025 — return due 30 September 2026
- Financial year ending 31 March 2026 — return due 31 December 2026
- Financial year ending 30 June 2026 — return due 31 March 2027
- Financial year ending 30 September 2026 — return due 30 June 2027
Your tax period follows your financial year as recorded for the business. If you are not certain which year end is on record, that is worth establishing before anything else — every date downstream depends on it.
Registration is a separate obligation
Registering for Corporate Tax and filing a Corporate Tax return are two different things, and the first does not wait for the second. Taxable persons are required to register regardless of whether they expect to pay anything, and a business sitting comfortably under the AED 375,000 threshold still registers and still files.
Nor does a loss excuse a return. If you are within the regime, the return is filed whether the result is a profit, a loss, or nil.
The deadline that actually binds you
A Corporate Tax return is prepared from a closed set of accounts. Taxable income starts as accounting profit and is then adjusted — for exempt income, non-deductible expenses, interest limitation, related-party dealings. None of that can be done against a ledger that is still open.
So the real deadline is the one for finishing your books, and it sits several months ahead of the filing date. A business that starts thinking about a 30 September filing in September has left itself the wrong problem: not a filing problem, a bookkeeping one.
What to have ready
- Financial statements for the tax period, closed and reconciled
- A fixed asset register with depreciation
- Schedules for related-party and connected-person transactions
- Details of any exempt income and of interest expenditure
- Your Corporate Tax registration details and confirmed tax period
Last reviewed: 20 September 2026. This article is general guidance on published UAE tax rules as at the review date above. It is not advice for your specific circumstances, and the rules change. Confirm your own position with us before acting on anything here.