Saudi Commercial Registration Without an Expiry Date

A seller opens the new commercial registration certificate, looks for the line the accountant always asked about, and finds it is not there. The page shows the activity, the registration date, the date of the last annual confirmation and a code to scan for everything else, and nowhere on it is the expiry date that used to be copied into a calendar and waited on every year. The obvious first reading is that a field was dropped in a redesign and that renewal still sits somewhere in the account. It was not dropped. It went because the procedure it was counting down to no longer exists.

That distinction is not pedantry, because the two readings produce different behaviour. Read the missing date as a relaxation and you stop tracking anything at all. Read it as the date moving off the paper and into your own records and you notice that one deadline now governs both the register and every licence issued against it, and that overrunning it runs through three stages in sequence, none of which appears on the certificate.

One decree, two laws, and neither is the Companies Law

Royal Decree M/83, dated 19/3/1446H and corresponding to 22 September 2024, approves two laws: the Commercial Register Law and the Trade Names Law. It replaced the old Commercial Register Law of 1416H, and it has nothing to do with companies. The Companies Law is a separate instrument, M/132, published on 22 July 2022 and in force since 19 January 2023, and its two-year conformity window closed at the start of 2025. Anything written today about companies still adjusting to a new corporate law is describing a year that has already passed.

The Commercial Register Law was published in the official gazette on 4 October 2024, and Article 29 sets entry into force 180 days after publication, which lands on 3 April 2025. The Ministry of Commerce announced it that day, together with the Trade Names Law and both implementing regulations. The five-year sub-register window counts from that day. The annual confirmation does not, since it runs from the date each register was issued rather than from the day the law came into force.

One register for the whole Kingdom

An establishment now holds a single commercial register nationwide, covering all of its activities, in place of a separate entry in each city it operates in. Article 1 defines the register as a central electronic database, Article 8 puts the procedures on it electronically, and Article 9 drops the requirement that activities be homogeneous, so one entry can carry two businesses that have nothing in common. The redesigned single-page certificate is accepted by government bodies, private entities and banks.

Two obligations travel with the entry and are easy to miss. The law requires a bank account tied to the commercial establishment, and it requires the operating licences for the registered activity to be obtained within 90 days, unless the licensing authority allows longer. Both clocks start at the registration date, well before a first order arrives.

Sub-registers stopped being issued, not abolished

Plenty of what circulates says the law abolished branch sub-registers. The official wording is narrower: it abolished the issuing of sub-registers for sole establishments and companies. Issuance is what ended. Existing sub-registers survive, and clause Third of the decree gives their holders five years from the effective date to correct their status, after which all of them are struck off. That window runs from 3 April 2025 to roughly 3 April 2030, it is open today, and about three and a half years of it are left.

The gap between "abolished" and "no longer issued" is measured in what the holder of a live sub-register does next. Someone who believes the first version stops filing the annual confirmation for it, watches it suspend, and then loses it while assuming it was gone a year ago. Someone who reads the second version has a few years to wind it down deliberately, and knows that a live sub-register carries the same annual duty the main entry does.

Renewal ended, the payment did not

Article 11 puts an annual electronic confirmation of the register's data in place of renewal, filed every 12 months from the date of issue. Once that requirement came in, the expiry field was removed from the certificate, which is why the only dates printed on it now are dates that have already happened: when the entry was registered, and when it was last confirmed.

The confirmation is often described as free. It is not, and the fees are published on the service page itself. They run from 500 riyals for a sole establishment to 1,600 riyals for a joint-stock or simplified joint-stock company, with a general or limited partnership at 1,000 riyals and a limited liability company at 1,200 riyals. The periodic payment survived intact. What changed is its name, and what follows from filing it late.

Article 15 supplies that part. The register is suspended if the confirmation is not filed within 90 days of its due date, and suspension reaches every licence issued against the register, since a licence is a branch of the entry rather than a document standing on its own. One full year after the suspension begins, the entry is cancelled automatically, unless the holder applies to lift the suspension and files what was missed. Three consecutive deadlines, the first of them twelve months long, and no prompt on the paper for any of them.

Trader, practitioner, and no riyal line between them

Article 5 makes registration mandatory for every trader and allows the Ministry to exempt categories of trader under controls set in the implementing regulation. The question sellers actually ask sits one step earlier: at what point does someone selling printed pieces online become a trader in that sense?

The E-Commerce Law, issued by Royal Decree M/126 of 7/11/1440H and published on 24 July 2019, answers by status rather than by turnover. A trader is a person entered in the commercial register who carries on e-commerce; a practitioner is a person not entered in it who carries on e-commerce. Both are service providers, and the law's duties toward the buyer apply to both. No instrument in this set states a revenue figure that separates them, which is worth saying plainly, because the figures that circulate in agency guides are not drawn from any text.

The two statuses show up at the first government touchpoint a store has. The e-commerce documentation service accepts either a valid commercial registration or a valid freelance document, together with a bank account linked to whichever the applicant holds. None of it transfers to whoever prints and ships for you. The entry is in your name, and the law's duties stay with you no matter how long the production line behind the store gets.

What an online store owes after the register

Registration is the first piece of paper rather than the last. E-commerce documentation is free, takes five to seven working days, and ends in a documentation certificate. It asks for a valid commercial registration or freelance document, a bank account linked to it, and a working store link that does not impersonate anyone else and is not a social media page. It is filed through منصة الأعمال, the government business platform, now run by the body Cabinet Decision 662 created when it merged the Saudi Business Center with the National Competitiveness Center into المركز السعودي للتنافسية والأعمال. The merged centre has no settled English name yet, which is reason enough to search for the Arabic one.

The route changed earlier than the law did. Since 29 March 2023 the Ministry of Commerce has directed online store owners to document their stores on that business platform instead of Maroof, and stated it would be the only approved platform in the Kingdom for documenting online stores. Anyone whose store was documented before that date should read the sentence twice.

Disclosure duties then come from the E-Commerce Law itself. Article 6 requires the store to disclose its name or a distinguishing identifier and its address, unless it is registered with one of the licensed e-store documentation bodies, along with a means of contact and the name and number of the register it is entered in, where it is entered in one. Article 7 requires the contract terms to be shown before the contract is concluded, including the total price inclusive of all fees, taxes and delivery-related amounts, so that no new number appears at the last step.

The Ministry also looks at what is published. In September 2025 it announced the results of the first wave of store evaluations, covering 100 online stores against ten criteria, among them a secure and high-quality site, easy customer service contact channels, an exchange, return and refund policy, and a consumer data protection and privacy policy. We gave the return policy an article of its own, because it is the criterion that bites hardest on anyone selling a piece that is made after the customer pays.

VAT is a separate obligation with its own thresholds. Registration becomes mandatory once taxable supplies pass SAR 375,000 over a rolling 12 months, and is available voluntarily above SAR 187,500, which the VAT article takes apart properly.

Where Tamm fits

Tamm is a factory and a warehouse in Saudi Arabia, and the print-on-demand service provider behind your store. You keep selling on the platform you already use; when an order arrives we print the piece on our own line and ship it to your customer under your brand. It is not a store platform and it does not compete with Salla, Zid or Shopify. How to start a clothing brand from Saudi Arabia

Who is holding the date now

The expiry date did one small job that had nothing to do with the law: it reminded the person holding the paper. When it left the certificate, that job moved to the only other place it could go, which is whatever the owner writes down. The count starts at the date of issue, runs 12 months to the confirmation, then 90 days to suspension, then a year to cancellation. The certificate in your hand records what you have already done and leaves all three deadlines off the page. In a store busy with orders, who is watching the first one?