Is my company an 'SME'? There's no single number that applies to everyone
Does my company officially count as a 'small or medium enterprise'?
The official reference is Cabinet Resolution No. 22 of 2016, which splits enterprises into three tiers — micro, small, and medium — using two criteria together: employee headcount and annual revenue, both of which shift depending on your sector. In trading, for instance, a small enterprise runs 6 to 50 employees or up to AED 50 million in annual revenue, while the services sector caps out lower and manufacturing allows a higher headcount. The word "small" ends up meaning very different numbers depending on which sector you're actually in.
Worth knowing: this is the same resolution the UAE Central Bank itself refers back to when classifying SME customers for its own market conduct rules — there's no separate banking-sector legal definition sitting alongside it. In practice, though, individual programs — a government tender's SME set-aside, a specific bank's commercial SME lending segment, or a free zone's startup package — can layer their own extra eligibility conditions on top of the official classification. So your formal SME tier is one question, and whether you qualify for a specific program is a separate one you still need to check on its own terms. RASEEKH confirms the classification that actually applies to your activity before you assume it carries over everywhere.