A customer asks whether you have the page in Arabic, a competitor launches an Arabic site, or your accountant says invoices should be in Arabic. Now you are wondering whether your English-only website breaks a rule, and what adding Arabic would cost.
If you sell online, UAE law already decides part of this for you. If you do not, the law still reaches your prices, offers and contracts, and the rest is a decision about your customers.
Note: This article is general information, not legal advice. The English texts linked here are translations published on the Ministry of Economy and Tourism's website, and three of the documents are available there only in Arabic, so ask a UAE lawyer to check the Arabic originals against your business.
Does UAE law require your website to be in Arabic?
Partly, and more clearly for online sellers than for anyone else. Federal Law No. 15 of 2020 on Consumer Protection requires Arabic on consumer invoices, on the product and contract information that online sellers give, and on all consumer "data, advertisements, and contracts". It never says that every website must be in Arabic.
The four articles that matter, from the Ministry's English text:
- Article 3, scope. The law covers "all Goods and Services within the State, including free zones", and online sales "if the Supplier is registered inside the State".
- Article 8, invoices. "The Invoice shall be in Arabic, and the Supplier may add any other language he specifies."
- Article 25, online sellers. They must give consumers and the authorities "their names, legal status, addresses and licensing bodies, as well as adequate information in Arabic about the product or Service provided, its specifications, and the terms of contract, payment, and Warranty".
- Article 26, everyone. "The data, advertisements, and contracts related to the Consumer shall be made in Arabic, and other languages may be used in addition to Arabic."
The government portal (updated 2 September 2026) summarises the invoice and e-commerce rules the same way.
| Your situation | Arabic required for | Articles |
|---|---|---|
| UAE-registered online seller | Product information, specifications, contract, payment and warranty terms, advertisements and invoices | 8, 25, 26 |
| Consumer business that does not sell online | Consumer data, advertisements, contracts and invoices | 8, 26 |
| Free zone company selling to consumers | The same as above: the law applies "including free zones" | 3 |
| Seller registered abroad | No Arabic rule found: the consumer law covers online sales only "if the Supplier is registered inside the State", though the other duties of the 2023 online trading law reach activity "received from outside" the UAE (Decree-Law 14 of 2023, Article 2) | 3 |
Does selling only to other businesses take you outside the rule?
Not automatically. The law defines a consumer as "every physical or juristic person who obtains a Good or Service" for "his personal needs or the needs of others", so a company can count as one. Ask your adviser before relying on English only.
What changed in September 2026, and what did not?
The e-commerce article of the 2023 executive regulation was rewritten; the Arabic rules in the law itself were not. On 24 September 2026 the Cabinet signed Cabinet Resolution No. 166 of 2026 (published by the Ministry in Arabic only), which replaces Articles 9, 40 and 41 of Cabinet Resolution No. 66 of 2023, the law's executive regulation.
Before. The old Article 40 of Resolution 66 of 2023 listed what online sellers had to show "clearly and legibly", including a detailed statement of each product's ingredients and specifications "in its original language in addition to Arabic language". Its penalty table set an AED 100,000 fine for leaving those particulars out.
After. In our translation from the Arabic, the new Article 40 says the regulation applies to goods and services traded through modern technological means, not only traditional sales channels, and that a supplier is responsible for what third parties offer or sell through its platform. The new Article 41 promises a fresh penalty table and keeps the existing one, where it does not conflict, until then. The resolution takes effect the day after it appears in the Official Gazette, a date we could not confirm.
Unchanged. Articles 8, 25 and 26 of the law still stand. The amendment to the law listed on the Ministry's site, Federal Decree-Law No. 5 of 2023, replaced Articles 5, 16, 22 and 35, none of which concerns language. Law firm notes and agency guides written before September 2026 describe the old Article 40, so check them against the current texts.
What must a UAE website show, and in which language? The October 2026 checklist
If you sell online to UAE consumers, your site must show who you are, what you sell, the price and terms of sale, and an invoice, with consumer-facing parts in Arabic. Every other consumer business needs Arabic for its offers, advertising and contracts.
The checklist below maps the main website-facing items to the federal texts on selling to UAE consumers: Law 15 of 2020, its executive regulation as amended in 2026, and the 2023 online trading law (Decree-Law 14 of 2023). Penalties under the decree come from Cabinet Resolution No. 200 of 2025, signed on 27 November 2025 (Arabic only; amounts below are our reading of its table). Copy it into your launch list and tick each line.
Online sellers (rows 1 to 6)
| # | Item on your site | Language | Legal basis | If it is missing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product or service description and specifications | Arabic, others may be added | Law 15 of 2020, Articles 25 and 26 | AED 100,000 in the regulation's table for consumer data not in Arabic; criminal penalties under Article 30 |
| 2 | Contract, payment and warranty terms, including returns and refunds | Arabic, others may be added | Articles 25 and 26 | As row 1 |
| 3 | Prices, delivery and payment fees, and the terms of each stage of the sale | Arabic (Article 26) | Decree-Law 14 of 2023, Article 5(5); Resolution 200 prices the breach under Article 6(1) | Written warning with up to 15 days to fix, then AED 1,000 to 5,000; a fourth breach brings AED 20,000 to 100,000 and 40 days' closure |
| 4 | Your licence from the competent authority, address, contact numbers and physical address | Not specified; add Arabic to be safe | Decree-Law 14 of 2023, Article 6(9); Law 15 of 2020, Article 25 | Not listed separately; Resolution 200's row for other breaches: warning, then AED 500 to 5,000, rising with repeats |
| 5 | Contact numbers and a complaints channel that tracks each complaint | Not specified; add Arabic to be safe | Decree-Law 14 of 2023, Article 6(7) and (8) | Warning, then AED 2,000 to 5,000; a fourth breach brings AED 10,000 to 20,000 and 20 days' closure |
| 6 | A detailed electronic invoice for each purchase | Arabic, others may be added | Law 15 of 2020, Article 8; Decree-Law 14 of 2023, Article 5(8) | Warning, then AED 500 to 5,000; a fourth breach brings AED 10,000 to 30,000 and closure of up to 90 days. AED 100,000 in the regulation's table for an invoice not in Arabic |
Every business that serves consumers (rows 7 and 8)
| # | Item on your site | Language | Legal basis | If it is missing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | Offers, promotions and advertising copy aimed at consumers | Arabic, others may be added | Law 15 of 2020, Article 26 | AED 100,000 in the regulation's table; criminal penalties under Article 30 |
| 8 | Contracts and booking terms consumers accept (memberships, treatment packages, service agreements) | Arabic, others may be added | Article 26 | As row 7 |
Sellers of goods, warranties or after-sales service (rows 9 and 10)
| # | Item on your site | Language | Legal basis | If it is missing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9 | Warranty, spare parts and maintenance terms, with postal address, phone and email | Arabic booklet "published on the website"; another language may be added | Resolution 66 of 2023, Article 16 | AED 100,000 in the regulation's table for having no written mechanism |
| 10 | Recall notice for a defective product, within 24 hours | Not specified for websites; one newspaper notice must be in Arabic | Resolution 66 of 2023, Article 22 | No separate row; failing to tell consumers and the authority about a defect (Article 20) is AED 500,000 |
Under Article 30 of the law, breaking Article 26 or the Arabic invoice rule can bring up to six months' imprisonment, a fine of AED 3,000 to 200,000, or both, doubled for a repeat. The regulation's administrative sanctions run from a notice and a fine to closure for 24 hours to 90 days, suspension, and revocation of the licence. Where a breach is already priced in the consumer regulation's table, Article 2(3) of Resolution 200 says its own table does not apply.
Article 6 of the regulation also lists what a consumer invoice must contain, including the supplier's name, address and contact details, date, description, quantity, price in the local currency, warranty period, delivery date, commercial registration number and any tax number.
To use it: mark the rows that apply (an online shop selling goods should check all ten; a clinic, salon or gym with no online sales needs rows 7 and 8 plus Arabic invoices), find each item on the page, checkout, confirmation email and invoice, add the Arabic, and have a fluent speaker review it. Check again when the new penalty table promised in Resolution 166 of 2026 appears. For the payment side of an online shop, see our comparison of UAE payment gateway fees.
If you do not sell online, does your site still need Arabic?
Some of it, on a cautious reading. Article 26 covers "data, advertisements, and contracts related to the Consumer" for every supplier, and much of a service business's website is exactly that: prices, packages, offers and booking terms. The law does not mention brochure websites, and we found no Ministry guidance applying Article 26 to them, so the defensible minimum is Arabic for those items and an informed choice for the rest.
For a clinic, salon, gym, cafe or cleaning company, that minimum usually means:
- the price list and packages
- current offers and promotions
- booking, cancellation and refund terms
- membership or service contracts, including any you send as a link
- invoices, which Article 8 already requires in Arabic
The same thinking applies to the WhatsApp messages that carry prices and terms. Our guide to WhatsApp bookings and reminders in Arabic and English shows how salons and clinics handle both languages in the chat.
How do you decide whether customers need a full Arabic site?
Use your own enquiry data. We found no reliable public figure for the share of UAE searches made in Arabic, so your enquiries are the best evidence.
- Count your last 100 enquiries by language across WhatsApp, calls, forms and social media messages.
- Check Google Search Console for Arabic-script queries that already bring you impressions.
- Count the Arabic reviews on your Google profile, and ask your front desk how often they switch to Arabic.
- Name the customers you want more of, such as Emirati families or visitors from elsewhere in the Gulf, who may matter more than today's count shows.
Treat the count as a floor: people who could not read an English-only site comfortably and left never became an enquiry.
Made-up example. A family dental clinic counts 100 enquiries: 60 on WhatsApp (18 in Arabic), 25 calls (6 in Arabic) and 15 forms (1 in Arabic). That is 25 in Arabic, a quarter of the total, before counting anyone who gave up on the site.
| Arabic share of your enquiries | A sensible next step |
|---|---|
| Under 5% | The legal minimum only: the checklist rows that apply to you (rows 7 and 8 and invoices if you do not sell online); English for the rest |
| 5% to 20% | Arabic versions of the pages that bring enquiries: home, your main services, prices, and contact or booking |
| Over 20%, or Arabic-speaking customers are the ones you want to grow | A full Arabic site, every page on its own URL |
These cut-offs are our editorial judgement, not a rule or a study. On the example above, the clinic would build a full Arabic site.
Does Arabic help you get found on Google and in AI answers?
It helps people who search in Arabic find a page written for them, and far fewer websites worldwide are written in Arabic than in English. On W3Techs' count, as of 28 October 2026, Arabic is the content language of 0.6% of the websites it can classify, against 49.5% for English.
An English-only site is not invisible to Arabic searchers. Arabic is one of 21 languages into which Google may translate the title link and snippet of a result written in another language, and a click then opens "a page that's been machine translated". You do not control the quality of that translation, and your prices and terms are shown in wording you never checked.
Google decides a page's language from "the visible content of your page", not from code-level markers such as the lang attribute or the URL (Google Search Central). An Arabic menu over English text is still an English page.
AI search works in Arabic too. Google began rolling out AI Mode in Modern Standard Arabic on 8 October 2025; the announcement does not mention Gulf or other dialects. For the wider picture of how ChatGPT and Google's AI choose local businesses, see our guide to getting recommended by ChatGPT in Dubai, and for the map listing itself, how to rank higher on Google Maps in Dubai.
How should the Arabic version be built?
Give each language its own URL, link the versions with hreflang, translate the whole page rather than the menus, and mirror the layout right to left. Google's multilingual guidance sets out most of this:
- One URL per language. Google "recommends using different URLs for each language version of a page". A subfolder such as
/ar/works well; Google lists subdirectories as "Easy to set up" with "Low maintenance (same host)". - hreflang on every version. Use an ISO 639-1 language code with an optional region, such as
ar-AEanden-AE, plusx-defaultas the fallback. "Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions", and if two pages do not point to each other, "the tags will be ignored" (Google, updated 21 September 2026). - No side-by-side translations or automatic redirects. Keep "a single language for content and navigation on each page". Google says "don't redirect based on what you think the user's language may be"; put a visible link to the other language on every page instead.
- Translate the body, not only the menus. Translating "only the boilerplate text" can "create a bad user experience". Write titles and headings in the Arabic words customers use, not a word-for-word translation of your English keywords.
- Have a person review machine translation. Google's spam policies list scraping "other content to generate many pages", including through "automated transformations like synonymizing, translating", "where little value is provided to users", as scaled content abuse. That targets copied content, not your own pages, but unreviewed output can still misstate prices and terms.
- Set the direction in the markup. Put
dir="rtl"andlang="ar"on thehtmlelement of each Arabic page. The W3C says "Never use CSS to apply the base direction" and recommends 'start' and 'end' values for margins, padding and alignment, so one stylesheet serves both languages. - Carry Arabic through the whole journey: forms, error messages, WhatsApp pre-filled messages, confirmation emails, invoices and checkout. Choose Western or Eastern Arabic digits for prices and phone numbers and use the same style everywhere.
Check your platform's right-to-left support
| Platform | What the vendor documents | What to test |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | On 2 October 2026, improved support for Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew "in both Admin and Storefronts, including checkout, customer accounts and the Horizon family of themes" | Older and third-party themes, and every app on the storefront |
| Wix | Text, media and apps can change direction per language, but "with some Wix applications (e.g. Stores), the writing direction applies to all languages" (Wix) | Wix recommends centred text alignment on sites with both directions; gallery order has to be reversed by hand |
| Custom code or other platforms | No single rule | Menus, arrows, sliders, forms, and prices and phone numbers inside Arabic sentences |
If you would rather not set this up yourself, Hoorax builds Arabic and English websites with right-to-left pages for UAE businesses. Whoever builds yours, ask to see the Arabic URLs and hreflang tags before you sign off.
What does adding Arabic cost?
The one published percentage we found is a vendor's estimate of 15 to 30% on top of an English-only build, plus translation. Hoorax, which publishes this guide, sells bilingual builds, so weigh these third-party figures alongside any quote, including ours.
- The build. Kolonell, a web studio with its team in Senegal, gave that 15 to 30% estimate for Dubai sites in September 2026. It prices right-to-left development at USD 1,600 to 5,000 (about AED 5,876 to 18,363) and bilingual SEO at USD 800 to 2,800 (about AED 2,938 to 10,283).
- Translation. Kolonell puts native translation and proofreading at USD 1,000 to 3,300 (about AED 3,673 to 12,119). Lingo, a Dubai agency, published per-word rates for English to Arabic in April 2024: AED 0.40 a word up to 5,000 words, AED 0.35 from 5,000 to 10,000, AED 0.32 above 10,000 and AED 0.30 above 20,000. It does not say whether VAT is included.
USD figures are converted at the dirham's peg of AED 3.6725 to USD 1, which Gulf News reports has held since November 1997.
| Worked example: translating a 10-page site | Amount |
|---|---|
| Body text across 10 pages | 4,000 words |
| Translation at Lingo's April 2024 rate of AED 0.40 a word | AED 1,600 |
| 5% VAT, if the translator is VAT registered (u.ae) | AED 80 |
| Translation total | AED 1,680 |
That covers words only. Right-to-left layout, a fluent review, hreflang and testing are separate lines, and every later change to prices, offers or pages has to be made twice. Our breakdown of what a website costs in Dubai has a three-year sheet to add these lines to, and our guide on hiring a web design company in Dubai lists what to ask before you sign; add who writes and checks the Arabic to that list.
Can someone build the Arabic version for you?
Yes. Hoorax is a web studio in Al Barsha 1, Dubai, that builds websites for UAE businesses and adds an Arabic version with right-to-left pages, so the items from the checklist above, such as prices, offers and terms, can sit in both languages. The same team builds WhatsApp assistants that reply to customers in Arabic and English.
An Arabic version is listed as an extra on our pricing, and you can add it in the website cost calculator to see the total. We are not lawyers, so have your adviser confirm the legal points. Send us a WhatsApp message with your current site and the pages you want in Arabic.