Typing Centres in Dubai

Ask anyone in Dubai where to get a visa application typed up and you will be pointed at a typing centre. The phrase is a habit rather than a licence category: no authority keeps a register of typing centres, and nothing stops a shop from calling itself one. For residency and immigration work there is a network that does exist on paper, and it is called Amer. The General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs publishes the centres it has authorised, and this page is that list, read from GDRFA on 8 August 2026.

Typing centre, Amer, Tasheel, Tawjeeh: what the four words mean

These are not four names for one thing. Three of them describe who authorised the counter, and one of them describes nothing at all.

Which counter takes your task

Most wasted trips come from one mistake: treating Dubai immigration and federal labour as if they were the same queue. They are separate authorities with separate networks.

One errand on that table is not filed at a counter at all. The medical fitness test is taken at an approved health centre, and our guide lists where the medical fitness test is done.

The 87 Amer centres GDRFA publishes

One quirk of the official list trips up everybody who reads it for the first time. GDRFA files every centre under one of two administrative sides of the creek, Bur Dubai or Deira, and puts the real neighbourhood after it. That is why a centre in Mirdif, International City or Al Qusais is filed under Deira. The first word is the side, not the address. On 8 August 2026 the list held 39 centres on the Bur Dubai side, 46 on the Deira side and 2 filed with a plain street address instead. The Filed under column below keeps GDRFA’s own location wording, punctuation aside, so you can match a row against the official list.

The areas that follow are the ones people look up by name. Everything else is in a single table underneath them.

Al Qusais

4 centres on the GDRFA list.

Al Karama

4 centres on the GDRFA list.

International City

1 centre on the GDRFA list.

Al Barsha

2 centres on the GDRFA list.

Al Twar

3 centres on the GDRFA list.

Business Bay

2 centres on the GDRFA list.

Jebel Ali and Al Yalayis

3 centres on the GDRFA list.

Al Manara

1 centre on the GDRFA list.

Mirdif

1 centre on the GDRFA list.

Every other area

The remaining 66 centres, in the same format.

GDRFA’s own counters, and the partner desks

Separate from the Amer network, GDRFA runs 9 customer service counters of its own and staffs 7 partner desks inside large employers, free zones and government buildings. These are the entries where GDRFA does publish opening hours.

The partner desks are not walk-in centres for the general public in the way the Amer network is; they sit inside the organisation they serve.

What it costs, and why this page does not print a fee table

You pay two separate amounts and only one of them is fixed. The government fee for the transaction is set by the authority and is the same wherever you file it. The centre’s own service charge is set by the centre, and it is not published anywhere centrally, which is precisely why quotes for the same job differ between two shops on the same street.

Neither GDRFA nor the labour ministry published a readable fee table for these transactions that we could pull on 8 August 2026, so this page does not print one. Numbers circulating on setup blogs are not sourced to either authority and we are not going to repeat them as though they were. Ask the counter for the two amounts separately, the government fee and their own charge, before you hand over any documents.

Where this page stops

Four things this page deliberately does not do.

It does not reproduce the labour ministry’s list of approved centres. The ministry maintains that list itself and changes it, and its site did not respond to us on 8 August 2026, so copying a stale version onto this page would help nobody.

It does not give opening hours for the 87 Amer centres. GDRFA leaves that field empty for every one of them. It fills it in for its own nine counters, which is why those have hours above and the Amer table does not.

It does not rank or rate the centres. GDRFA authorises all 87 on the same basis, we have not visited them, and a star rating we invented would be worth nothing to you.

It does not list private typing shops that are not on the GDRFA list. There is no register of them to work from, so any such list would be somebody’s pick rather than a fact. If a shop tells you it can file a Dubai residency transaction, the honest check is whether its name is in the table above. You can also see what our own directory records for Dubai.

Immigration offices, and how they differ from an Amer centre

“Immigration office” is the other everyday phrase for the same errand, and it points at something slightly different from an Amer centre. Worth separating, because the two are not interchangeable and the wrong one costs a trip.

The immigration authority for Dubai is the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs. It is the body that decides your residency file. Its own counters are the nine listed above under GDRFA’s own counters, including the headquarters at Al Jafiliya, and those are what the phrase “the immigration office” usually means when somebody says it about Dubai.

An Amer centre is not GDRFA. It is a private centre GDRFA has authorised to take its work, which is why there are 87 of them and only nine of the other kind. For the ordinary transactions, and that is most of them, the Amer centre is the faster answer precisely because there are 87 of them and one is probably closer to you.

The practical rule is short. Start at an Amer centre. Go to a GDRFA counter when the Amer centre tells you to, when the matter is not a routine filing, or when you have been given an appointment there. Turning up at the headquarters for something an Amer centre could have done is the single most common wasted morning in this whole process.