With this post, I hope to document the process and my understanding of the visa process here in UAE. “Remote work visa”, is often referred to as “Virtual work visa” in different online portals.
If your visa sponsor is already “Dummy sponsor for virtual work”, you can proceed with renewing it. If not, then you would be forced to cancel first and do a fresh application, since you must switch to this new sponsor label. I had to do this last year.
As of January 2025, it’s not entirely possible to finish the renewal online. Moreover, I have had quite the luck in running into edge cases with my applications done online, that I prefer to not even bother doing them online as I always end up wasting more time & money.
Essentially, there are three steps involved in obtaining a visa in UAE:
First, you need a medical fitness certificate. This can be done independently of any other application & is valid for 3 months. For visa renewals, X-ray requirement is waived off and its just the blood test.
Second, get your Emirates ID application done. It’s unintuitive to do the ID application before the visa, but the way this works is, once applied, it waits for the issuance of residency and would move past that step on its own. The delivery address is often wrongly printed on the application, so don’t worry.
Lastly, get your residency application done, which is called “Visa stamping” though there is no actual physical visa that’s stamped anymore. This is what requires the documents as it’s the main application for “visa” itself.
Documents required list varies from center to center, but generally it’s your passport, work contract, bank statements showing the credits in the past 3 months & health insurance valid for about a year. Two Amer centers that I recommend going are:
I have been treated courteously at both the centers, unlike the one that’s always downright confusing & humiliating (we all know which one this is).
If you were to optimize the process for time/money, get medical fitness certificate weeks prior to the actual day you wish to renew, whenever you happened to be out of the house. Then, close to the expiry (or expiry of grace period), you can get both EID application and visa stamping application done, in a single visit. If you are able to do applications yourself online, you will save some typing fees (~50-100 AED / application) but only if you are feeling lucky.
I paid 322.5 AED for my medical fitness certificate (24hrs regular option). 287.85 AED for EID application and 450.91 AED for residency application. So, a total of 1061.26 AED. You often pay 1% extra when paying with a domestic card & possibly more if it’s an international card.
My residency application (visa stamping – really hoping to drill this in your brain at this point) was approved few minutes of applying.
Grace period after expiry of remote work visa is just 30 days, not 60 days. You can check your file status for this information. It might say, for example, valid until 7th Feb 2025 but read it as last day to leave the country is 6th Feb 2025. As soon as the clock strikes 00:00, welcome to your first day of fine. You are fined for both not having a residency beyond your grace period and not having Emirates ID, which is ~ 75-100 AED / day. 50 AED for residency and 25 AED for EID per day, but I have paid fines as per 100 AED / day, so ¯\_(?)_/¯.
This year, I literally did the renewal on last day of my 30 day grace period, hoping to move the visa expiration date a bit forward, but turns out the visa is renewed as per previous visa’s expiry and not the actual date its done on, unless you are renewing your visa early, then you get an early date. Nowadays, it can be renewed 90 days early as opposed to only letting you do it in the last 30 days.
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