Dubai Visa on Arrival

It depends only on your passport and any other residence permits you hold. GCC citizens need nothing. Some nationalities get 90 days on arrival, others 30 days with a 10-day grace period. Indian passport holders with a valid US visa, green card, or UK or EU residence visa get 14 days. Check the current lists on the UAE government portal, u.ae, before you book.

At least six months. The UAE government states “Passports must be valid for at least 6 months from the date of entry into the UAE.” Airlines check this at check-in rather than on arrival, so a short-dated passport ends the trip before you board.

It depends which one. The 30-day route comes with “a 10-day grace period for extension”. Of the new fee-paying visas, the 14-day “may be extended once while the holder is in the UAE”, while the 60-day “is issued for a single stay and is not extendable”.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs states “An overstay fine of USD 16.35 / AED 60 per day will apply”. It is per person and accrues daily, so a family overstaying a week is a meaningful amount. Know whether your route has a grace period before you plan a long trip.

We checked the UAE government portal and it publishes no such rule and no cash-in-hand threshold. The figure circulates widely without a source. Immigration officers anywhere may ask how you will support yourself, and a return ticket plus a hotel booking answers that. If someone quotes you an exact amount, ask which government page it came from.

Not if you stay airside and never clear immigration. If you want to leave the airport and you are not eligible for visa on arrival, you need a 48 or 96-hour transit visa arranged through your airline before you fly.

If you are eligible, yes, clearly. It is longer, free or cheaper, and needs no arrangement before you fly. The transit visa exists for travellers who are not eligible for visa on arrival but still want to leave the airport on a connection.

Neither is stated as a formal requirement on the UAE government portal, but both are what you would show if asked how you intend to support yourself and when you intend to leave. Having them on your phone costs nothing and removes the question.

Yes. Entry is granted to the United Arab Emirates, not to one emirate, so a visa obtained at Dubai International lets you travel on to Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah and the rest without anything further.

The UAE Government portal at u.ae, and your airline. Those are the two that matter, and they are the only two we would rely on. Any travel site publishing a country list without a checked date, including this one if we published one, should be treated as out of date.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that ordinary passport holders from Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Kenya and South Africa may receive a visa on arrival if they hold a valid residence permit issued by the United States, a European Union member state, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, New Zealand or Canada. Two options are described, a fourteen-day visa costing one hundred dirhams that may be extended once inside the country, and a sixty-day visa costing two hundred and fifty dirhams that is not extendable (mofa.gov.ae).

Six. The UAE government portal states that passports must be valid for at least six months from the date of entry into the UAE (u.ae). The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office puts the same rule from the British side, saying your passport must have an expiry date at least six months after the date you arrive (gov.uk). flydubai repeats the six-month minimum measured from the date of travel (flydubai.com). Airlines apply this at check-in, so a passport with five months left can end a trip before it starts.

Sometimes, and the official sources are not identical here. The UAE government portal describes the thirty-day stamp as carrying a ten-day grace period for extension (u.ae), while Emirates states flatly that the thirty-day visa on arrival cannot be extended (emirates.com). We follow the government portal, because entry rules are set by the authorities rather than by carriers. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office says extensions are handled by the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs in Dubai and by the Federal Authority for Identity and Citizenship elsewhere (gov.uk).

Overstaying is charged by the day. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, announcing the newly eligible nationalities, states an overstay fine of fifty dirhams per day (mofa.gov.ae). The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office puts it more generally, warning that you could face fines for exceeding your authorised stay and that these may accumulate for each day of overstay (gov.uk). We publish no other figure, because published amounts change and only the immigration authority can confirm what you owe. Count your days from the entry stamp, not from your booking dates.