Is there any tax beyond VAT on what you buy in Dubai?

Dubai is widely described as tax-free, and for most of a holiday that is close enough. VAT is 5% and it is already inside the price on the shelf. But a second tax exists, it is much larger than VAT, and it lands on a specific published list of goods. If a can of something or a packet of something costs roughly double what you expected, this is usually why.

The list is short and it is published

The rates come from Cabinet Decision No. 52 of 2019.

Read those numbers next to the VAT rate to see the size of the difference. Excise on tobacco is 20 times the VAT rate. On a carbonated drink it is 10 times.

What a rate of 100 per cent actually means

Excise is charged as a percentage of the excise price of the goods, so a 100% rate means the tax equals that price. The taxed amount is the price again, not a slice of it.

This is the part travellers misread. A rate expressed the way VAT is expressed invites you to imagine a small addition. Here the addition is the whole thing over again.

What is not on the list

Everything absent from the table above carries VAT and nothing else. That covers almost all of a holiday: meals, hotel nights, taxis, clothes, electronics, souvenirs, and plain still water.

Two exclusions inside the list are worth naming because they are easy to trip over.

• Sparkling water is excluded from the carbonated drinks line. Carbonation alone is not the test.
• Added sugar is the test for the sweetened line — not sweetness. A drink sweetened at the factory is in scope; fruit that is naturally sweet is not a manufactured product with sweeteners added to it.

Even the lower band is not a small tax. A 50% rate is 10 times the VAT rate, so a soft drink carries a tax burden of an entirely different order from the shirt sold in the next aisle. Shoppers who have read that the emirate is tax-free tend to assume the opposite.

Why the same item costs different amounts in different places

Excise is a federal tax on the goods, so the rate does not change between emirates or between a shop and an airport terminal. What changes is the retailer’s own price before tax. A bottle that costs more in an airport concourse than in a supermarket is not more heavily taxed there; it is more expensive there, and the same percentage is applied to a larger number.

That distinction matters if you are comparing prices, because it tells you where to look. The variation you can shop around is the pre-tax price. The tax is fixed.

The refund question

Excise is not part of the tourist refund scheme. The VAT refund returns a share of the VAT you paid on goods you carry out of the country — the arithmetic of that is set out in what you actually get back. Excise has no equivalent.

So for an excise good, the amount you can ever recover is the VAT portion, not the larger tax that sits underneath it.

What this page does not tell you

🔴 It does not tell you what you are allowed to bring into the country, or in what quantity. A tax rate proves that something is taxed. It proves nothing about whether you may carry it through customs, and treating a tax table as permission would be a serious mistake. Allowances and restrictions are a different question with a different authority behind it — see what you can take through DXB.

It also does not tell you the shelf price of any particular product. Retail prices are set by retailers and move constantly; the rates above are set by Cabinet Decision and do not.