The line on my statement read 26.25. Not 25, not 26. Twenty-six dirhams and twenty-five fils, for a transfer that had been free the month before.

The odd number is the tell. Emirates NBD introduced a Dh26.25 charge on international transfers including DirectRemit from 1 September 2025, and Gulf News reported the bank’s own wording: the fee is inclusive of VAT. So the bank set a 25 dirham fee, the Federal Tax Authority took 5 percent of it, and 26.25 landed on the statement. Every fee ending in .25, .50 or .75 in this country is telling the same story.

Once that pattern is visible, the rest of the fee map is readable too.

What bank fees do UAE banks actually charge?

Four categories, and they behave differently.

Balance fees. Most retail accounts carry an average balance requirement, commonly AED 3,000 for a basic account and AED 5,000 upward for packaged ones, with a fall-below charge in the range of AED 25 to AED 150 per month before VAT. This is the only fee category charged for doing nothing, and the easiest to eliminate, because it responds to one number rather than to behaviour.

Transaction fees. Non-network ATM withdrawals, teller transactions on accounts sold as digital, cheque returns, standing order failures, international transfers. Small individually, and they cluster in the week after payday.

Document fees. Liability letters, no-liability certificates, salary and balance letters, statement copies going back beyond the online window. These land at moments of leverage, when a car loan, a visa file or a new bank needs the paper, and price accordingly. At several banks a liability letter addressed to another financial institution costs multiples of the same letter addressed to a government department.

Currency markups. Covered below, because they are not on the statement.

Why do UAE bank fees end in .25 and .75?

Financial services in the UAE split cleanly for VAT. Where the bank earns through an implicit margin, the interest spread on a loan, the return on a deposit, the service is exempt. Where the bank charges an explicit fee, commission or charge, it is taxable at the standard 5 percent.

That gives an arithmetic test that needs no tariff sheet. Divide the charge by 1.05. If the result is a round number, the headline fee is that round number and the remainder is tax. 26.25 becomes 25.00. 105.00 becomes 100.00. 31.50 becomes 30.00. What looks like a bank being oddly precise is a bank passing through a tax it collects on the government’s behalf.

This matters for one practical reason: the 5 percent is not negotiable and not waivable. When a relationship manager waives a charge, the whole 26.25 comes off, because the tax follows the fee. Anything short of that is a partial waiver.

When can a UAE bank raise its fees?

Banks in the UAE cannot change retail fees whenever they like, and this is the most useful thing in this article. Under the amendments to Appendix 2 of Regulation No. 29/2011, a bank or finance company that wants to introduce a new fee, or raise an existing uncapped fee by more than 5 percent, has to notify and seek approval from the Central Bank, and the submissions can only be made during the first five business days of April and October in any given year. Separately, consumers must be given a minimum of 60 calendar days notice before a change to the terms of a product or service, fees included, takes effect.

Fee changes in this country run on a calendar, and the notice arrives before the charge does. Read those two rules together and the practical consequence is clear. Approved changes filed in the April window surface on statements roughly from June, and October filings surface from around December. The 60 day notice is real, it arrives, and it arrives as an email or an insert nobody opens. The DirectRemit change was announced in advance and reported in the press weeks before the first charge posted.

At the trading company where I work, nobody would let a supplier change payment terms without reading the notice. The same notice arrives from the bank twice a year and gets deleted.

The bank fee that never appears as a fee

Card spending in a foreign currency carries a markup that is not billed as a line item. It is baked into the exchange rate applied to the purchase, and the standard foreign transaction load on UAE cards now sits around 3.1 percent, blended from the network’s own margin and the issuer’s addition.

A fee that arrives as an exchange rate is still a fee.

Because it never prints, it never gets counted. AED 4,000 a month of foreign-currency spending, on subscriptions billed in dollars, a flight, a hotel abroad, carries roughly AED 125 of markup a month. That is larger than most fall-below charges and it never shows up in a category called fees.

The honest way to see the full picture is to tag every explicit charge on twelve months of statements into one category and add the currency markup as an estimate on top. Pulling fee lines out of statement PDFs is the exact job the statement importer in Masrofna does, though a spreadsheet and an afternoon works too.

The total is usually somewhere between AED 900 and AED 3,000 a year for an ordinary salaried account. Banks are entitled to charge for services, and a bank that publishes a tariff, files its changes in the April window and gives 60 days notice has done nothing wrong. The asymmetry is not that the fees exist. It is that the bank knows the annual total and the customer does not.