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Australians are eligible for a 30 day, multi-entry fee free visa on arrival in the UAE. Do not get sucked into any of the web sites on-line that want to charge upwards of $70 to get you this otherwise free visa.
An extract of the visa conditions for regular Australian passport holders:
It was dot point 3 above that caught my eye once I started thinking about visa issues after the great Omani e-visa debacle of 2024. This is, in my experience, a bit unusual, as genuine long departures from a country usually re-set the tourist visa when you return to the original country. But not in the UAE. And despite many trips there, I had not previously clocked this wrinkle. So I am putting this here to alert others who may plan similar trips.
So, we arrived on 24 November. Planned to stay with Seat Son until 5 December, when we left the UAE to travel to Europe for a further part of or trip. We returned to the UAE on 21 December (so 28 days after the first arrival), and according to the rules above that now gave us 2 days to leave the UAE with 10 days of grace. As originally planned, we expected to leave the UAE on 4 January which was actually 42 days after our original arrival and would therefore have been a visa overstay.
Now as the holiday progressed, we did add in some other exits from the UAE.
Bottom line, this is a very complicated system and if you mistime your day trip to Oman, or other side trips genuinely taken for tourism purposes, you have a very real risk of accidentally overstaying your UAE tourist visa.
Take care!
An extract of the visa conditions for regular Australian passport holders:
It was dot point 3 above that caught my eye once I started thinking about visa issues after the great Omani e-visa debacle of 2024. This is, in my experience, a bit unusual, as genuine long departures from a country usually re-set the tourist visa when you return to the original country. But not in the UAE. And despite many trips there, I had not previously clocked this wrinkle. So I am putting this here to alert others who may plan similar trips.
So, we arrived on 24 November. Planned to stay with Seat Son until 5 December, when we left the UAE to travel to Europe for a further part of or trip. We returned to the UAE on 21 December (so 28 days after the first arrival), and according to the rules above that now gave us 2 days to leave the UAE with 10 days of grace. As originally planned, we expected to leave the UAE on 4 January which was actually 42 days after our original arrival and would therefore have been a visa overstay.
Now as the holiday progressed, we did add in some other exits from the UAE.
- we went to Oman for a day trip on 23 December. That date was randomly selected but turns out to have probably been good enough to re-set the visa as we were given a new 30 day entry stamp at that border crossing.
- we also went to Sri Lanka on 26 December, so that would have been 33 days from original entry, and thus part of the 10 days of grace.
Bottom line, this is a very complicated system and if you mistime your day trip to Oman, or other side trips genuinely taken for tourism purposes, you have a very real risk of accidentally overstaying your UAE tourist visa.
Take care!
