A truck leaves Jebel Ali at 05:40 with a delivery booked into Deira for 07:30. On paper it is a forty-minute run. In practice the driver reaches Sheikh Zayed Road at 06:05, and from 06:00 he is not allowed on it — so he waits, or he takes a route that adds an hour, or he drives it anyway and the company collects a AED 3,000 fine.
None of that is visible in a distance calculation. Every mapping tool will tell you the trip takes forty minutes, because every mapping tool is answering a different question from the one that matters: not how far, but when is this vehicle allowed to be there.
This is the reference we maintain for our own routing. It covers the six GCC states, with the times, the issuing authority and the fine where each is published.
Need the answer for right now? The free truck ban checker tells you which roads are closed to trucks at this moment in Dubai, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and the rest of the GCC, and the GCC road restrictions map shows every restriction on a map.
Read these three things first, or the tables will mislead you
The working week is not the same everywhere, and the bans follow it. Many restrictions run Sunday to Thursday and lift entirely at the weekend — Abu Dhabi Island, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Jeddah, Bahrain and Muscat all work this way. Others apply every day of the week, weekend included: most of the Dubai network does, and so does Riyadh. Assuming a Friday is clear because a Sunday was is one of the most common ways to collect a fine.
Some of these are not time windows at all. A handful of roads and tunnels are closed to heavy vehicles 24 hours a day, permanently. No early start avoids them and no late run gets round them — the only answer is a different route. They are listed separately below for that reason.
Ramadan changes the timings, and it changes them differently per country. Muscat and Doha both publish adjusted Ramadan windows that do not simply shift the normal ones. Plan against the Ramadan timing during Ramadan rather than assuming a uniform shift.
United Arab Emirates
Fines are AED 3,000 for most emirates, and AED 1,000 for the Sharjah SRTA restrictions.
Dubai (RTA)
Dubai's restrictions apply all seven days unless stated otherwise — this is the single most important difference from Abu Dhabi and the Northern Emirates.
- Sheikh Zayed Road (E11) — 06:00 to 22:00. Not a morning peak: a sixteen-hour window, daily.
- Ras Al Khor Road (D62) — 06:00 to 22:00, daily.
- Al Mizhar / Muhaisnah / Oud Al Muteena (residential) — 06:00 to 22:00, daily.
- Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road (E311), Dubai section — 06:30 to 08:30.
- Al Khail Road (D68) — 06:30 to 08:30.
- Damascus Street (D72), International City — 06:30 to 08:30.
- Airport Street / Omar bin Al Khattab Road (D89) — 06:30 to 08:30.
- Emirates Road (E611), Al Awir to Sharjah — 17:30 to 20:00. An evening ban, which catches operators who have planned only around the morning.
Abu Dhabi (ITC)
Abu Dhabi's peak bans run Sunday to Thursday, 06:30 to 09:00, and cover Abu Dhabi Island, Airport Road (E20), Al Corniche Road, Al Rawdah Road / Musaffah (E30) and the Mussafah Bridge approach.
Sharjah (SRTA)
- E311 Sharjah section (SMBZ Road) — 06:30 to 08:30, daily.
- Emirates Transit Road, Sharjah section — 17:30 to 20:00, daily.
- Al Dhaid Road (Intersection 7 to Al Dhaid) and the Al Dhaid transit ban — 06:30 to 20:00, daily. A thirteen-and-a-half-hour window, and the fine here is AED 1,000 rather than 3,000.
Northern Emirates
- Ajman, city approach roads — Sun–Thu, 05:30 to 09:00.
- Umm Al Quwain, E11/E18 approaches — 05:30 to 09:30, daily. The earliest start in the country.
- Ras Al Khaimah, main and internal roads — Sun–Thu, 06:30 to 08:30.
- Fujairah, city internal roads — Sun–Thu, 06:30 to 08:30.
Permanent 24/7 bans in the UAE
No timing gets you through these:
- Airport Tunnel, Dubai
- Shindagha Tunnel, Dubai
- Al Ittihad Road, Deira
- Meydan Street / Nad Al Sheba
- Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Road (E11), Abu Dhabi
- Al Raha Beach Road (E10), Abu Dhabi
Saudi Arabia
Saudi restrictions are the longest in the region, and the fines the highest. Standard fine SAR 3,000; Makkah SAR 10,000.
- Riyadh, weekdays — Sun–Thu, 08:00 to midnight. Effectively a daytime exclusion rather than a peak window.
- Riyadh, weekend — Fri–Sat, 15:00 to midnight.
- King Fahad Road, Riyadh — 08:00 to midnight, daily.
- Makkah Road / Khurais Road, Riyadh — 08:00 to midnight, daily.
- Jeddah city — Sun–Thu, 09:00 to 19:00.
- Makkah city entry — 17:00 to 21:00, daily. SAR 10,000.
- Dammam / Khobar / Dhahran (Eastern Province) — 09:00 to 11:00, daily.
Riyadh is the one that reshapes a schedule. With a ban from 08:00 to midnight on weekdays, urban delivery is a night operation, and a plan built around daytime running does not survive its first week.
Qatar
Fines QAR 6,000.
- Doha city — 07:30 to 10:00, daily.
- Doha, Ramadan timing — 06:00 to 08:00.
- 22 February Street, Doha — 24/7 ban.
- Doha permit requirement — year-round, in addition to the timing above. A permit is not an exemption from the ban; it is a separate requirement.
Bahrain
Fines BHD 100. All Sun–Thu, 06:30 to 08:00 — the shortest windows in the GCC.
- Manama peak-hour ban
- King Hamad Highway, Alba Interchange to Durrat Al Bahrain
- Dry Rock Highway / Khalifa Bin Salman Port
Kuwait
Fines KWD 100.
- Kuwait City — 06:30 to 15:00, daily. An eight-and-a-half-hour window.
- Highways, 5th to 6th Ring Road — 06:30 to 09:00, daily.
- Summer midday ban, June to August — 12:30 to 15:30, daily. Seasonal, and easy to miss because it does not exist for nine months of the year.
Oman
Fines OMR 100. Oman has the most unusual pattern in the region — two of its restrictions are tied to specific days rather than to a working week.
- Muscat Governorate — Sun–Thu, 06:00 to 09:00.
- Muscat, Ramadan — Sun–Thu, 06:30 to 09:00.
- Muscat, Saturday evening — Saturdays only, 16:00 to 22:00.
- Sultan Qaboos Road / Al Batinah Highway — Thursdays and Saturdays, 12:00 to 16:00.
- Sultan Thuwayni Road, Muscat to Bidbid — Thursdays and Saturdays, 12:00 to 16:00.
A weekly planner that thinks in terms of “weekday” and “weekend” will not catch a Thursday-and-Saturday midday ban. This is the clearest example in the region of why these rules cannot be approximated.
What this does to a schedule, and what to do about it
Three consequences follow, and they are all about planning rather than driving.
An ETA that ignores a ban is not an ETA. If the routing engine does not know that a truck cannot be on Sheikh Zayed Road between 06:00 and 22:00, it will promise a delivery time the vehicle cannot legally meet — and the customer will be told a time that was never possible. The failure surfaces as a service problem long before anyone traces it to a routing assumption.
The expensive ones are the long windows, not the peaks. A 06:30–08:30 ban costs you two hours. Riyadh's 08:00-to-midnight, Kuwait City's 06:30–15:00 and Dubai's 06:00–22:00 corridors do not have a workaround inside the day; they determine what shift pattern the operation runs. Companies discover this after hiring for a day shift.
Cross-border runs cross rule sets as well as borders. A truck from Dubai to Riyadh leaves a network of morning peaks and arrives in one where the city is closed to it for sixteen hours. The plan has to change at the border, and the driver is the wrong person to be working that out at 2 a.m.
Check a specific road and time
We publish this catalogue as a free map — every restriction above, plotted, with its window, authority and fine. No sign-up.
Open the GCC road restrictions map →
These timings are the catalogue our own routing and ETAs run on, and they are maintained because our customers move trucks through these windows every week. Authorities do change them, sometimes with little notice: treat this as a working reference rather than a legal source, confirm anything you are planning a permanent operation around with the issuing authority, and if you find one that has moved, tell us — we would rather be corrected than confident.