This study examines the effect of corporate governance on the financial performance of listed companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) financial exchange market. The governance mechanisms employed in this study are Board size (BS), Board independence (BI) and four audit committee’s (AC) characteristics which include AC independence, financial experts in the committee, number of AC meetings held during the year, and the incentives received by the AC members. This Study uses all the public listed companies in the UAE financial exchange markets including Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) and Dubai Financial Market (DFM). The secondary data for five years are used starting from 2016 to 2020. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation and multiple regression analysis (MRA) with the aid of SPSS V26.0. The result shows that BI has been found to negatively affect firms’ performance. AC meetings and financial experts’ did not affect a firm’s performance, while AC incentives and AC independence negatively affected firms’ performance. This study is supposed to fill the gap of the lack of CG studies based on the fast-growing economy of the UAE. Besides, this research investigates the AC’s characters’ effect on firms’ performance which was rarely covered in the literature