R&D tax credits for cloud & SaaS.
UAE software companies are solving genuinely hard engineering problems at scale — isolation, sync, performance. That work often qualifies for the R&D Tax Credit, even when the product looks routine on the surface. The discipline is proving precisely which part.
How qualifying R&D shows up in software.
The UAE regime tests every project against the five OECD Frascati criteria. Here is what each looks like on a line, in a cell, or in a new process.
Novel
An architecture or method not readily available in the field.
Creative
Original engineering, not the assembly of known patterns.
Uncertain
Whether it performs at scale is genuinely uncertain.
Systematic
Planned benchmarks and iterations, properly documented.
Transferable
Results reproducible across tenants and environments.
The kind of work that qualifies.
Illustrative projects across upstream, downstream and the energy transition. Eligibility is always confirmed project by project.
Multi-tenant at scale
A multi-tenant architecture that must guarantee isolation and performance at a scale with no proven pattern.
Offline-first sync engine
A data-sync or conflict-resolution engine solving problems existing frameworks cannot.
Performance re-engineering
Re-engineering a core system to hit a performance target thought to be unreachable.
Elastic infrastructure
Auto-scaling or scheduling methods for workloads that break standard orchestration.
Query & search at volume
Query or search engineering achieving latency at data volumes with no off-the-shelf answer.
Consistency & resilience
Distributed-systems work to guarantee consistency or uptime beyond what known designs provide.
Genuine R&D, not routine engineering.
The value we add is drawing this line correctly — claiming what qualifies, and defending it, while leaving out what does not.
- Appreciable improvement to underlying technology, not just new features.
- Solving isolation, sync or performance problems with no established pattern.
- Distributed-systems work where the outcome is genuinely uncertain.
- Systematic benchmarking and iteration to resolve the uncertainty.
- Routine configuration, integration or feature development.
- Building standard UI, CRUD or reporting screens.
- Deploying managed services to their documented specification.
- Bug fixing and maintenance of a working system.
£50M+
claimed across 450+ UK companies with a 100% audit success record — including complex, engineering-heavy claims in energy and industrials. The same chartered method now applies to the UAE.
“A very small fee for a very big service. RDvault made the entire R&D claims process straightforward and stress-free.”
Avora — software client
A UAE SaaS case study will feature here as claims complete under the new regime.
Our product looks like standard SaaS. Can we claim?
Frequently the qualifying work is invisible in the UI — it sits in the architecture, data layer or performance engineering. If your team resolved a genuine technical uncertainty a competent professional could not readily deduce, it may qualify.
We use managed cloud services. Does that rule us out?
No. Using managed services is normal; the question is whether you did development beyond their documented capability to solve a problem with no established answer.
Does building new features count?
Routine features do not. But where delivering a feature required an appreciable, uncertain improvement to the underlying technology, that development work can qualify.
What evidence will we need?
Contemporaneous records: the technical uncertainty, the work done to resolve it, and project-level cost and staff-time allocation. We build this as the work happens — and pre-approval is mandatory before claiming.
Making things here? Let’s find what qualifies.
We assess your projects against the five criteria, handle pre-approval, and build the evidence — before a single figure is claimed.
