Dubai rules and laws: what is published, and what is only repeated
This is the part of Dubai travel writing where confident, specific rules circulate with no published source behind them — and where genuinely published rules, some carrying six-figure fines, go unmentioned. Two things cause it. The UAE reissued its penal code and its cybercrime law in 2021, so a great deal of what is quoted online is repealed numbering. And several of the rules that matter most are administered without ever being published at all. Every page below quotes the instrument or the authority page it comes from, names the date, and says plainly where nothing is published.
What you can be fined for, with the figure
Rules that carry a published penalty, quoted from the instrument that sets it.
- Photography & filmingAED 150,000–500,000, and no public-place exception
- Driving as a visitorNo published speed buffer; three country lists
- E-scooters & cyclingFree permit, AED 200 without it, three area lists
- Drone rulesResidency required, cameras banned, suspension live
Rules that are administered but not published
Where the regime plainly exists and the instrument does not.
- Alcohol rulesNo published law, no age, no penalty, no register
- Dress codeTwo official versions, and neither says knees
- RamadanOne portal, two answers, one of them undated
Formalities
The two that decide what you may carry and when the city stops.
- Customs allowances200 or 400 cigarettes, on two live pages
- Public holidaysSeven holidays, published in Hijri only
Also in Rules & laws
The rest of this section, each page carrying its own sources and its own verification date.
- Medication — The controlled medicines list is a 2022 PDF you must read by hand; the free permit needs UAE PASS, which a tourist has no published route to
- Smoking & vaping — Eleven prohibited places are published; e-cigarettes appear nowhere in the instrument and no authority publishes that vaping is banned where smoking is
How to use these pages
Three habits will keep you right, and they are the same ones we apply. Check what instrument a claim cites, because a great deal of Dubai legal content quotes the 1987 penal code or the 2012 cybercrime law, both repealed on 2 January 2022. Distinguish a rule from guidance: “might feel more comfortable” and “shall be punished by” are not the same sentence, and the authorities use both. And treat an unpublished rule as unpublished rather than as an absence of a rule — several regimes here plainly operate without a public text, which is a reason for care, not comfort.
Where an authority contradicts itself we print both versions with attribution. There is a running catalogue of the obsolete official documents we keep finding, and a public log of what we have got wrong.
Every page in this section transcribes a published instrument and says where none exists. None of it is legal advice, and several of the fines below are quoted from documents whose own English text is defective — we print the defect rather than correcting a government document on your behalf.