The RAK ICC Permitted Activities List: What Your Company Can — and Can’t — Do

RAK ICC permitted activities decide what your offshore company is allowed to be — and getting them wrong is one of the fastest ways to stall an incorporation, confuse a bank, or discover too late that your business model was never available at the registry at all. RAK International Corporate Centre selects activities from a standardised approved list, caps the initial selection at five, and maintains a restricted list that rules out entire sectors under its AML/CFT policy. This guide covers what a RAK ICC company can and cannot do, every restricted sector, why activity approval must come before the incorporation filing, and how the UAE company incorporation team at Fastlane scopes activities so the structure works for the registry, the bank and the tax file at the same time.

What activities can a RAK ICC company actually carry out?

A RAK ICC company is an International Business Company on a company registry — not a licensed onshore or free zone business — so its natural activity set is the offshore classics: holding shares in other companies, owning assets such as real estate interests and intellectual property, international trading and invoicing conducted outside the UAE, investment activities for the owner’s account, and consultancy or services delivered to overseas clients. These map onto the registry’s approved classifications and cover the overwhelming majority of legitimate structures agents incorporate.

The registry formalised this by moving activity selection onto the portal: instead of free-typing a business description, your Registered Agent picks from a list of approved activities based on standardised industry classifications. That change did two things at once — it made approvals faster and more predictable, and it made the boundary visible: if an activity is not on the list, or sits on the restricted list in the next section, it is not available at RAK ICC, and the honest answer is a different vehicle, not creative wording.

Activity choice is also a compliance statement. The classifications you select frame your KYC file, your bank’s expectations of account flows, and the registry’s risk assessment of the company under the framework covered in our guide to the RAK ICC regulations — which is why the selection deserves more thought than ticking the first five boxes that look plausible.

How does the RAK ICC permitted activities list work?

Three mechanics matter. First, selection is from the standardised list only — the portal presents approved classifications and the agent chooses among them. Second, there is an initial allowance of five activities per company; further activities can be added, but at an additional cost per activity, so the five slots are worth planning rather than spending casually. Third — and this is the step that trips up impatient incorporations — the company name and the chosen activities are approved before the incorporation service request is submitted.

The registry has been explicit about what happens when that order is ignored. Submitting a new incorporation request before name and activity approval — or updating the portal with unapproved details — forces the system to regenerate the incorporation documents, and regenerated documents need re-signing by the shareholders and directors. The same applies to couriering original signed document sets before the service request is completed and approved: signatures executed against a draft that later changes are signatures wasted. Add the registry’s other practical notes — count deadline days correctly, use a monitored generic email rather than one individual’s inbox, and file from official agent addresses — and the pattern is the same one behind the errors in our RAK ICC portal mistakes guide: the portal generates your legal documents from what is entered, in the order the registry defines.

Which activities are restricted or high-risk at RAK ICC?

The registry’s AML/CFT policy carves out sectors that are either unavailable outright or treated as high-risk and considered only case by case. The published list runs to sixteen entries:

Two reading notes. The list is the registry’s to revise — it has been trimmed and adjusted before — so treat this as the policy’s established shape and confirm the current version through your agent before committing to a structure near the boundary. And “high-risk” is not always “never”: some entries are assessed case by case under enhanced due diligence, which is where the next section picks up.

Why are these sectors restricted?

The list is not arbitrary — it is the visible edge of the UAE’s federal AML architecture. Cabinet Decision No. 10 of 2019, implementing Federal Decree-Law 20 of 2018, classifies company formation agents as DNFBPs (Designated Non-Financial Businesses and Professions) and obliges them to run a risk-based approach: rating every relationship for sanctions exposure, high-risk territories, high-risk activities, politically exposed persons, delivery channels, new technologies and the complexity of the services and structures requested — with an independent audit function testing that the controls actually work.

Restricted activities are simply the sectors where that risk calculus lands at “no” or “only with enhanced due diligence”. The same machinery explains what owners experience in practice: more EDD requests, more source-of-wealth and residency evidence, and screening tied to high-risk country lists that move with FATF listings rather than staying fixed. The registry itself told agents not to be surprised by EDD — the policy states plainly what triggers it. The full owner-side picture of these duties, from UBO registers to sanctions screening, is in our 2026 RAK ICC compliance checklist.

The practical takeaway: if your model brushes against a restricted sector — say, brokering rather than underwriting insurance, or holding mining shares rather than mining — the distinction is decided by the registry’s policy and your evidence, not by wording on a form. Declare the substance of the business accurately and let the classification follow; a structure incorporated on a soft description and operated in a restricted sector is a file waiting to be frozen.

What can’t a RAK ICC company do — even with an approved activity?

An approved activity is a registry classification, not a licence. Three hard limits follow. First, a RAK ICC company cannot trade onshore in the UAE: it holds a Certificate of Incorporation, not a commercial licence, so mainland or free zone operations need a licensed vehicle. Second, an approved classification never substitutes for sectoral regulation elsewhere — a “consultancy” activity does not authorise investment advice in a regulated market, and no RAK ICC classification authorises virtual-asset business anywhere. Third — the one that surprises the most owners — an offshore company cannot obtain a UAE Tax Residency Certificate, because it has no licence, premises or establishment to evidence residence with; the certificate regime (now administered by the FTA) is built for entities with real UAE substance.

One planning aside while on hard limits: shares in a RAK ICC company are assets that pass on death, and non-Muslim owners commonly pair the structure with a DIFC-registered will — a service the registry itself facilitates through DIFC-registered draftsmen — so succession over the company does not default to regimes the family never intended. It costs little to arrange at incorporation and a great deal to litigate later.

What if you need UAE operations, visas or treaty access?

The registry’s own answer is the Premium Product: keep the RAK ICC IBC as the holding company (“Holdco”) and open a subsidiary in RAKEZ, the Ras Al Khaimah free zone (“Opco”). The Opco takes a commercial or service licence from the free zone authority, leases anything from a flexi-desk to a standard or executive office, hires staff, and unlocks residence visas scaled to the facility — packages historically ranged from one or two visas on flexi arrangements to four or six on standard and executive offices. The Holdco keeps the offshore features; the Opco supplies the operations, and dual bank accounts can sit across the pair.

This is also the honest route to the treaty network. With a licence, premises, staff and management in the UAE, the operating layer can evidence residence and pursue a Tax Residency Certificate — the document that actually switches on double-tax-treaty relief — while the bare offshore layer never could. Package pricing and facility options are set by the zone and revised over time, so treat any figures you find in circulation as historical and take a current quotation through your agent; what has stayed constant is the architecture and what each layer is for.

Here is what ignoring that architecture typically costs, in the scenario we see most often — a holding company entitled to treaty relief it cannot claim:

Rates and outcomes vary by treaty and structure — the point is the shape: when treaty relief is part of the economics, substance is not overhead, it is the revenue line.

How do activities interact with the transparency registers?

Whatever activities you choose, the company now exists inside a transparency framework that did not exist when offshore structures earned their reputation for opacity. To meet FATF requirements, the basic company information of every UAE entity — RAK ICC companies included — is published on the National Economic Register (NER), and that publication includes director details. Shareholder and ultimate-beneficial-owner information is collected and held by the authorities, but not made public. The registry’s systems, meanwhile, record every relationship around the company in standardised form:

Note the third UBO limb: control through the right to appoint or remove a majority of directors counts even without a 25% shareholding — which is precisely how control sits in many family and nominee arrangements. The full UBO regime, update windows and penalties are covered in our RAK ICC compliance checklist; the message for activity planning is simpler: choose classifications you are happy to stand behind on a register your bank, and any counterparty, can read.

Do your chosen activities change the company’s tax position?

No — and it is worth killing two ghosts at once. The old Economic Substance Regulations (Cabinet Resolution 31 of 2019), which made activity choice matter enormously for a few years — holding company, IP, headquarters and other “relevant activities” each carried their own tests — were abolished for financial years ending after 31 December 2022. There are no annual ESR filings tied to your activity list anymore. And in the other direction, no activity selection makes a RAK ICC company “tax exempt”: as a UAE-incorporated juridical person it is within the scope of corporate tax, must register with the FTA and file annual returns whatever its activities, with 0% up to AED 375,000 of taxable income and 9% above — and an AED 10,000 penalty for registering late. Fastlane handles the registration for AED 199.

Where activities do still matter for tax is evidence, not classification. A holding company whose declared activities, account flows and registers all tell the same story files clean returns and clears bank reviews quickly; a company whose declared consultancy activity produces trading-desk flows invites exactly the questions offshore owners least enjoy. Pick the activities that describe the real business, then make the books match — that is the entire trick.

How do you choose your RAK ICC permitted activities?

Treat the five slots as a portfolio. Anchor with the core purpose — usually a holding or investment classification. Add the revenue-generating activities the company will actually invoice: international trading, consultancy, IP licensing. Reserve a slot for the adjacent activity you can realistically foresee within two or three years, because adding later costs an extra fee per activity and a filing cycle. Then stop — padding the list with speculative classifications widens your risk profile for no benefit and puzzles every compliance officer who reads it.

How does Fastlane set up RAK ICC activities correctly?

Our incorporation routine is built around the registry’s own sequence:

1. Define the real business — what the company holds, invoices and owns, now and within three years.
2. Map it to the standardised classifications — core purpose, revenue lines and one foreseeable addition across the five slots.
3. Screen against the restricted list — and against the current AML policy where the model sits near a boundary.
4. Clear the name and activities first — approvals in hand before the incorporation SR, so documents generate once and originals are signed once.
5. Align the compliance stack — UBO register, KYC pack and FTA corporate tax registration at AED 199 set up alongside the incorporation, not after it.

The result is a company whose registry file, bank file and tax file agree — incorporated once, signed once, and explainable in one paragraph. That is the standard we run across all RAK ICC and UAE company incorporation work. The glossary below decodes the terms this guide leans on.