Dubai Metro Timings & Map

Dubai Metro Timings by Day

The RTA sets one timetable for the whole metro: the Red Line and the Green Line open and close together. There are only four patterns to learn, and the two that catch people out are Friday, when the metro runs an hour later into the night, and Sunday, when it starts three hours later in the morning.

Two warnings hidden in that table. First, “stations close at midnight” does not mean trains run until midnight: the last trains leave the end stations from 10:44 PM onwards, as the next section shows, and intermediate stations see their final train when it passes through. Second, the Sunday start is 8:00 AM, not 5:00 AM. Every week, travellers heading for an early Sunday flight stand at a locked station at 6 AM, because most summaries simply repeat the weekday hours.

First and Last Trains: The Exact RTA Times

These are the trains that actually matter, taken from the RTA’s detailed timetable: the first and last departures from each end of each line. If your journey starts mid-line, your first train is a few minutes after the terminal departure and your last train is a few minutes before the opposite terminal’s last departure reaches you; the pattern below is the frame everything hangs on.

Red Line — from Centrepoint (R11)

Red Line — towards Centrepoint

Green Line — both directions

One more thing the tables reveal: the first train is not a single departure. In the early morning, trains enter service from several points along each line, including Al Furjan, Equiti, DMCC and Emirates Towers on the Red Line and Stadium and Union on the Green Line, so a mid-line station’s first train can be earlier than the terminal-to-your-station run would suggest. The RTA’s S’hail app shows the exact first train for your own station on the day.

How Often Do Trains Run?

Honesty first: the RTA does not publish an official train frequency, and websites that quote one precise number are guessing. What follows are the typical intervals you can expect, drawn from how the service actually runs across the week.

The practical translation: at peak hour on the Red Line between Union and Mall of the Emirates, you rarely wait longer than it takes to walk down the escalator. The wait that surprises people is on the Red Line’s two southern branches in the evening, where an 8-minute gap is normal, and on Sunday mornings, when the whole network runs a gentler service after the 8 AM start.

Dubai Metro Stations: Full Lists for Both Lines

The network has 53 separate stations: 35 stops on the Red Line (including its Expo branch) and 20 on the Green Line, with Union and BurJuman counted on both lines, which is where the often-quoted figure of 55 comes from. Every station below carries its current official name and code, plus its fare zone, because the zone decides what your journey costs.

Red Line stations (Centrepoint to Life Pharmacy, plus the Expo 2020 branch)

You may notice the codes jump: there is no R27, R28 or R30, numbers reserved for stations that were never built along the long viaduct south of Business Bay. And south of National Paints the Red Line forks: check the destination board before boarding, because Expo 2020 trains and Life Pharmacy trains share the same platform edge.

Green Line stations (e& to Creek)

Renamed stations: why your old map is wrong

Dubai sells metro station naming rights, so the map changes under your feet: 17 stations have carried at least one earlier name. The renames that trip people up most: Rashidiya is now Centrepoint, UAE Exchange is now Life Pharmacy, GGICO is now Al Garhoud, Al Jafiliya is now max, DAMAC Properties is now Sobha Realty, Mashreq is now InsuranceMarket, Al Khail is now Al Fardan Exchange, Jebel Ali is now National Paints, ONPASSIVE became Garmin, and Etisalat is now branded e&. If an old hotel email or printed guide gives you one of the old names, the code and the line have not changed; match it against the tables above.

Dubai Metro Map and Fare Zones

For the map itself, use the RTA’s own: it is the only version guaranteed to carry the latest station names.

How the network reads on that map: the Red Line runs like a spine from Centrepoint in the north-east, through the airport stations and Deira, across the Creek at BurJuman’s side of the old town, down Sheikh Zayed Road past Dubai Mall, DIFC and Mall of the Emirates, forking at the far south into the Expo 2020 branch and the Life Pharmacy branch. The Green Line loops the old city: from e& in Al Qusais down through Deira’s souks, under the Creek, through Bur Dubai to Healthcare City and Al Jadaf, ending at Creek. The two lines cross at exactly two stations, Union and BurJuman, and those are your only change points.

Fare zones sit underneath the map. Dubai is divided into seven transport zones, but the metro only passes through five of them (1, 2, 3, 5 and 6), and you are charged by how many zones your journey crosses: one zone, two zones, or three or more. The boundary worth memorising is the Creek: Deira stations are Zone 5 and Bur Dubai stations are Zone 6, so even a one-stop hop from Baniyas Square to Al Ghubaiba crosses a boundary and costs the two-zone fare.

Dubai Metro Fares and Nol Cards

There is no cash on the Dubai Metro: every journey is paid with a Nol card or a Red Ticket, and the fare depends only on how many zones you cross.

Children aged five and under travel free, and People of Determination travel free with the right card. The cards themselves cost: Silver Nol AED 25 (including AED 19 of credit), Gold Nol AED 25 (including AED 19 of credit), Blue/personal Nol AED 70 (including AED 20), and the paper Red Ticket AED 2 on top of the fare. Keep at least AED 7.50 loaded on a Silver card: the gates will not let you in with less, because the system must be able to charge the maximum possible fare for your journey.

Three rules shape every fare. A transfer between metro, tram and bus within 30 minutes counts as the same journey, so a feeder bus plus a metro ride is one fare, not two. The daily cap on a Silver card is AED 20: once you have spent that, further travel that day is free. And fares are checked at both ends, so always tag out; an unclosed journey is charged at the maximum rate.

One myth to retire while we are here: you will still read on older websites that Silver cards stop charging after a set number of trips or that a mysterious “5-trip discount” exists. That was an old promotion and it is gone; the AED 20 daily cap is the real mechanism, and it is better.

Travel Passes and the 1-Day Pass

If you ride daily, the zone-based travel passes on a Nol card beat single fares quickly. Prices below are for the all-zones version, with the cheaper one-zone price in brackets where it differs.

Two fine-print points that matter. An anonymous (unregistered) Silver or Gold card can only hold the 7-day pass; the 30, 90 and 365-day passes need a registered or personal card. And a pass starts the first time you tag in, not when you buy it, so you can load one ahead of the day you need it.

Cabins, Luggage and the Rules That Matter

Every Dubai Metro train is driverless and divided into three cabin types. Gold Class, at one end of the train, has wider leather seats and double fares. The women and children cabin is reserved for women and children only; men travelling in it by mistake are fined, and at peak hours it is actively policed. The rest of the train is the standard Silver cabin, and you can walk between Silver sections freely.

Luggage is allowed and designed for: each passenger may bring two suitcases, one large (up to 81 × 58 × 30 cm) and one small (up to 55 × 38 × 20 cm), which is why the airport stations have wide gates and lifts at platform level. Foldable e-scooters are permitted; non-foldable ones and full-size bicycles are not. Eating and drinking on board are not allowed, and the fines across the system, for everything from putting feet on seats to interfering with safety equipment, are real and collected.

Feeder Buses, Parking and the Tram

The metro is built to be reached, not just ridden. Feeder buses link most stations to the surrounding neighbourhoods, run roughly in step with metro hours, and the bus leg is free when it joins a metro journey within the 30-minute transfer window. Park-and-ride car parks at the big terminal stations, Centrepoint, e& and National Paints among them, are free for metro users: tag in with the same Nol card you park with and the barrier logic handles the rest.

At Sobha Realty and DMCC stations the Red Line also meets the Dubai Tram, which loops Dubai Marina and Al Sufouh to the Palm Jumeirah monorail; the tram runs 6:00 AM to 1:00 AM Monday to Saturday and 9:00 AM to 1:00 AM on Sundays. For anything longer than the station-to-station view, a specific bus route, a journey across town, the official S’hail app is the official journey planner and the same data the station screens use. Our UAE Weather page is worth a glance before a long walk to a station in summer, and if a journey is timed around a prayer break, the UAE Prayer Times page has today’s times for every emirate.

Ramadan, Public Holidays and Special Events

The timetable in this page is the regular one. On the biggest nights of the year the RTA stretches it: during Ramadan the metro typically runs later into the night to match the city’s shifted rhythm, on Eid holidays Sunday-style hours often apply, and on New Year’s Eve the metro has historically run through the night around the Burj Khalifa celebrations, with the Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall station sometimes closing early for crowd control. None of that is guessable from the standard timetable; the RTA announces each special schedule a few days ahead, and the live panel at the top of this page follows the regular hours, so check the RTA channels before travelling on a holiday date.

Coming Next: The Blue Line

The network on this page is about to grow. Dubai has announced a third metro line, the Blue Line: about 30 km with 14 stations, linking the Red Line at Centrepoint with the Green Line at Creek through Mirdif, Al Warqaa, International City, Dubai Silicon Oasis and Academic City. It is scheduled to open on 9 September 2029, twenty years to the day after the Red Line carried its first passengers. When it opens, the station count on this page jumps from 53 to around 67, and journey planning in the city’s east changes completely; we will update this guide as the RTA publishes the operating details.

Frequently Asked Questions