2026-07-24
On 2026-07-23 Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, approved the National Programme for Developing the Statistics System, a full overhaul of how the country measures its own economy. The programme resets the base year for national accounts to 2024 and rebuilds the entire gross domestic product time series from 2010 to 2026 on that base, while wiring official statistics directly into tax and administrative records held by the Federal Tax Authority, the Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance and other federal bodies. For anyone running or planning a business in the Emirates, this is not a dry statistical footnote. It changes what the government can see, and a government that can see the non oil economy more precisely tends to build policy around it.
What Sheikh Mohammed approved
The programme is led by the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre and delivered in partnership with the local statistics centres of each emirate and a set of federal entities: the Central Bank of the UAE, the Ministry of Finance, the Federal Tax Authority, the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, the Emirates Investment Authority and Etihad Water and Electricity. Three decisions sit at its core. First, 2024 becomes the unified national base year for GDP, replacing the older reference point. Second, the GDP series for 2010 to 2026 is reconstructed on that base so the historical record is consistent and internationally comparable. Third, the methodology is aligned with the United Nations System of National Accounts, the global standard that lets investors and multilateral lenders compare the UAE directly against other economies.
Dr Thani Al Zeyoudi, Minister of State for Foreign Trade, said the reforms will enhance the country’s ability to monitor emerging economic trends and measure the impact of new initiatives in real time. The programme also commits the UAE to updating its base year regularly rather than letting it drift for a decade, which is how modern statistical agencies keep pace with fast changing economies.
Why the base year matters
A base year is the reference point against which real growth is measured. When it is fixed too far in the past, the numbers quietly distort: sectors that barely existed at the time are under weighted, and the economy looks more like its old self than its current self. The UAE of the previous base year was still read heavily through oil. The UAE of 2024 is dominated by non oil activity, and the fastest moving parts of it, the digital economy, artificial intelligence, financial services and investment, have grown up almost entirely inside the gap between the old base year and today. Rebasing to 2024 lets those sectors show their true weight in the headline figure instead of being buried in an outdated structure.
This is the same shift that made Dubai’s own GDP prints increasingly a story about services, trade and technology rather than hydrocarbons. The national statistics overhaul brings the federal picture into line with that reality.
Tax and administrative data now feed the numbers
The most consequential part of the reform for a private company is quieter than the base year headline. By integrating administrative data, the value added tax and corporate tax records held by the Federal Tax Authority, payroll and workforce data from MoHRE, banking data from the Central Bank, the statistics system will increasingly measure the economy from the actual paperwork of businesses rather than from surveys alone. Administrative data is harder to under report and far more granular. It captures the formal economy transaction by transaction.
The practical read is straightforward. The formal, correctly registered, tax compliant economy is becoming more visible to the state, and the informal or loosely structured part is becoming relatively less so. Companies that are properly set up, VAT and corporate tax registered, and clean on their MoHRE filings are exactly the entities these datasets capture well. This reinforces a direction the UAE has been travelling since it introduced corporate tax: formality is now the baseline, not an optional upgrade.
What it means for investors and business owners
More accurate national accounts feed directly into investor confidence. Sovereign wealth funds, multilateral lenders and foreign direct investors price a country partly on the credibility of its statistics, and a UAE GDP series that is UN compliant and rebased to 2024 is easier to underwrite and easier to compare against Singapore, Ireland or Saudi Arabia. The parallel with the IMF’s improving read on the UAE economy is not accidental: better data and better external assessments reinforce each other.
For an operating business, the effects are second order but real. Clearer sector data means government support, incentives and free zone strategy get targeted at the activities that are actually growing, which is useful intelligence when you are choosing what to license and where. And because the tax authority’s records are now part of the national measurement apparatus, the cost of being casual about compliance rises while the value of being properly structured goes up.
Checklist for a company reading this
- Treat tax registration as structural, not optional. VAT and corporate tax records now feed national statistics, so gaps and mismatches are more visible than ever.
- Keep your MoHRE and payroll filings clean and current, since workforce data is one of the administrative feeds into the new system.
- Match your trade licence activities to what you actually do, so your company reads correctly in the datasets that increasingly define the formal economy.
- Watch the rebased sector figures when they publish, they will show where the UAE is genuinely growing and where incentives are likely to follow.
- If you are raising capital or courting foreign partners, use UN compliant UAE data in your case, it now stands up to direct international comparison.
How Atlant Capital can help
A statistics reform that runs on tax and administrative records rewards companies that are built correctly and penalises the ones that are not. We handle company setup in the mainland and free zones with an activity list and structure that match your real operations, and we make sure the tax and regulatory side is right from the start, VAT and corporate tax registration, MoHRE and payroll compliance, so your business sits cleanly inside the formal economy the state is now measuring in detail. When residency and hiring are part of the plan, we run work visas and residency end to end so the workforce data behind your company is accurate too.
The bottom line
On 2026-07-23 the UAE approved a rebuild of its statistics system: a 2024 base year, a GDP series reconstructed from 2010 to 2026, alignment with UN standards, and tax and administrative data from the FTA, Central Bank, MoHRE and Ministry of Finance wired into the official numbers. The headline effect is a more honest picture of a non oil, digital economy and stronger investor confidence. The quieter effect is the one that touches every company directly: the formal, compliant, correctly structured economy is now the part the state sees most clearly, and being inside it is worth more than it was a week ago.
Source: National Programme for Developing the Statistics System, approved 2026-07-23, as reported by The National, Gulf News and the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre. Event date 2026-07-23; published 2026-07-24.
