Desk research against primary sources. Figures are traced to the issuing UAE authority and linked on the page.
Registering with the FTA is a separate step from actually owing tax, and the two get conflated. A business earning below AED 375,000 in taxable profit still has to register on EmaraTax and file a return declaring 0% liability; skipping registration because there is nothing to pay is itself a compliance failure, independent of whether any tax is actually due for the period.
Qualifying Free Zone Persons sit in a separate track: 0% applies only to income that meets the qualifying-income conditions, and income outside that definition, including most UAE-mainland-sourced revenue, is taxed at the standard 9% rate above the AED 375,000 threshold like any other business. Which category a given free zone company falls into is a documentation question, not an assumption you can make at setup.
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