The paperwork layer of running a UAE company — immigration filings, licence renewals, attestations, labour cards — handled on retainer or per task, with government fees at cost and our time as its own line.
PRO (Public Relations Officer) services are the government-paperwork layer of a UAE company: visa processing, Emirates ID, labour cards, trade-licence renewals and document attestation. We run them on a monthly retainer from AED 1,500 or per task — visa renewals from AED 750, licence renewals from AED 900, attestation from AED 350 — with every government fee invoiced at cost and receipts attached. We operate our own FZCO under the same rules, so the tracker that keeps our licences and visas current is the same one we point at yours.
"PRO" stands for Public Relations Officer — historically the person a UAE company sent to government counters to file, collect and stamp. Today it is a service: the recurring interface between your company and the federal and emirate authorities. It covers the full visa lifecycle (entry permit, medical, Emirates ID, stamping, renewal, cancellation), trade-licence renewals and amendments, establishment-card upkeep, labour-file management, and the long tail of small filings — NOCs, salary certificates, immigration letters — that consume founder time in inverse proportion to their difficulty.
The economics are simple: a PRO retainer costs less than a founder's day rate spent in queues, and far less than a missed licence-renewal fine. What separates an honest provider from a setup mill is transparency — government fees are fixed and public, so the only real variable is what the agent charges for their time. We publish per-task rates for exactly that reason, and pair PRO with company setup and bookkeeping so the same file feeds tax and audit downstream.
Most PRO work orbits residence visas. A UAE employment or investor visa is not one action but a chain, and each link has its own authority, fee and clock. Miss the medical window or let an entry permit lapse and the sequence resets. Here is the standard order for an in-country application:
| Step | Authority | Typical time |
|---|---|---|
| Entry permit | ICP / GDRFA | 2–5 working days |
| Status change / medical booking | Approved centres | 1–3 days |
| Emirates ID biometrics | ICP | same day–2 days |
| Medical fitness result | DHA / MOHAP | 2–4 days |
| Visa stamping | ICP / GDRFA | 3–7 days |
| Emirates ID card issued | ICP | 5–10 days |
Timelines assume a clean file and no security referral. Family sponsorship runs the same chain per dependant, against an income threshold and with attested marriage or birth certificates. Our breakdown of each visa type — employment, investor, freelance, golden — lives on the visas page.
Before a company can sponsor anyone it needs an establishment card (immigration) and, for mainland staff, a labour establishment file with the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (MOHRE). These are the containers every employee visa hangs from; letting the establishment card expire blocks new permits and renewals across the whole company, so it sits at the top of the tracker.
Salaries for mainland employees run through the Wages Protection System (WPS) — an electronic transfer register the ministry monitors. Persistent WPS gaps can freeze new work permits, so payroll timing is a PRO concern, not only an accounting one. Free-zone employment rules vary by authority; we map which regime your licence sits under before the first hire, and keep the WPS status on the same calendar as everything else.
Every UAE licence is annual. Renewal usually needs a current lease or flexi-desk, sometimes a renewed establishment card, and the fee paid before the expiry date — after which penalties accrue daily and, left long enough, the licence is suspended and the visas linked to it fall into irregular status. Amendments are separate filings with their own approvals: adding a business activity, changing shareholders or the manager, increasing the visa quota, or moving to a larger office. We handle both renewals and amendments, and we quote the realistic range before starting rather than after.
Foreign corporate and personal documents — a parent company's certificate of incorporation, a power of attorney, a degree used for a visa — usually need legalising before a UAE authority will accept them. The chain is fixed: notarisation in the origin country, then that country's foreign ministry, then UAE embassy legalisation abroad, then final attestation by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs on arrival. For countries in the Apostille Convention the middle steps compress, but the UAE-side step still applies. Timelines depend entirely on the origin country, so we quote per document rather than promising a blanket turnaround.
Ending an employment is as procedural as starting one. A visa cancellation must be filed before the person leaves or transfers, the labour contract closed, and end-of-service gratuity paid — broadly 21 days' basic pay per year for the first five years and 30 days' per year thereafter, pro-rated, under the federal labour law. Skipping the cancellation leaves an active sponsorship on your file that blocks quota and surfaces at the worst moment. We run offboarding on the same checklist as onboarding, so nothing is left half-open on the immigration or labour side.
A shared tracker lists every document with its expiry and renewal date — trade licence, establishment card, each visa and Emirates ID, insurance, WPS status. Nothing expires silently; you approve renewals from a calendar, not from a penalty notice. It is the same tracker we run on our own FZCO — we operate a real entity under the same rules, so this is housekeeping we already do for ourselves.
Government fees are always invoiced at cost with receipts attached. That single habit removes most of the industry's margin games in one move: you see the authority's fee and our line separately, never blended into one opaque number.
Below roughly ten government interactions a year, per-task pricing is cheaper — pay for the filing you need and nothing else. Above that, or the moment you sponsor staff, a monthly retainer wins on both cost and the value of never thinking about expiry dates: renewals, WPS, gratuity and quota all sit inside one relationship instead of a scramble each quarter. Businesses moving a whole team usually start on a retainer from day one; we cover that path, sequenced with banking and books, on the relocation page.
We reply with numbers — a line-by-line setup estimate for your case. Not a call script, not a brochure.