Only 24% of UAE rear-seat passengers buckle up. That’s the finding from a January 2026 survey of 1,010 residents—and it’s not ignorance driving the problem.
Some 95% of respondents understand that seat belts protect people in front seats. Even rear-seat protection is widely recognised, with 82% acknowledging the life-saving potential. Yet when those same people slide into the back of a taxi or a friend’s car, three-quarters leave the belt dangling unused.
The consequences are measurable in morgues, not just statistics.
Abu Dhabi Police data reveals that 60% of road fatalities in the emirate stem from one decision: not wearing a seat belt. No federal figures exist for the UAE as a whole, but the pattern mirrors global trends. In the United States, 49% of road deaths involve unbelted occupants. The European Union sees rates between 25% and 50%, whilst the UK sits at 25%.
Since 1 July 2017, UAE law has required everyone in a vehicle to wear a seat belt—not just those up front. The survey, commissioned by RoadSafetyUAE and Al Wathba Insurance and conducted by research firm TGM, assessed how well that law has taken hold nearly nine years later.
The answer: partially, and unevenly.
Drivers perform best. Some 86% report always buckling up when behind the wheel—a figure that climbs to match the front-seat passenger rate of 86%. Both numbers represent progress from February 2017, before the holistic seat belt law took effect, when just 78% of drivers and 71% of front-seat passengers consistently used belts.
But the back seat tells a different story. In 2017, only 11% of rear passengers always buckled up. By January 2026, that figure had risen to 24%—a 13 percentage point improvement that still leaves compliance dismal. Another 17% never use rear seat belts at all, whilst 21% rarely do. A further 26% use them only sometimes.
“Yes, accidents do happen, but the consequences don’t need to be fatal or resulting in severe injuries. Studies show, that seat belts reduce fatalities in vehicle accidents between 45% and 60%, depending on the type of car and the type of impact. For kids, this value increases to up to 80%!” explained Thomas Edelmann, Managing Director of RoadSafetyUAE. “All stakeholders must focus on increasing the seat belt wearing rates, as this is the single biggest opportunity we have in order to reduce the number of fatalities on UAE’s roads! Despite the fact that the public understanding of the protective powers of the seat belt is reasonably high, the usage figures are not where the law mandates them to be. The focus must be on generating and publishing up-to-date figures about fatalities and injuries linked to on-wearing seat belts, strong awareness initiatives are needed, as well as ever increasing enforcement efforts by means of sophisticated radar installations and utilizing AI.”
The research drilled into why people who know better still don’t comply. Among those who don’t always wear seat belts or prompt passengers to do so, 55% said they feel safe enough without a belt when sitting in the back. Another 27% saw no need on short trips. Some 16% believe other safety features—airbags, primarily—offer equivalent protection, whilst 12% trust the driver’s skill to keep them safe.
Smaller segments cited inconvenience (10%), concern about wrinkled clothing (9%), religious reasons (5%), or cultural factors (4%). A handful—just 4%—claimed seat belts don’t increase safety at all, contradicting both their own survey responses about protection and decades of crash data.
Drivers themselves aren’t always enforcing the rules with passengers. Whilst 70% always ask occupants to buckle up—a significant jump from 56% in 2017—that still means three in ten drivers let passengers ride unrestrained without challenge.
Muralikrishnan Raman, Chief Financial Officer at Al Wathba Insurance, framed the issue as both a business and societal imperative. “On 1st July 2017, the UAE introduced the ‘holistic seat belt law’ and since then, everyone in a vehicle must wear a seat belt and not only the ones in the front row. Seat belts save lives and spare us from injuries in case of car accidents. Our mission is to protect our customers and our eco-system. We want to demonstrate in a credible and tangible manner how we at Al Wathba Insurance can contribute to safer roads and to better our society. Hence, it is just logical to have worked on this important research project jointly with RoadSafetyUAE, as just one proof point of our responsibility.”
The insurer, which has operated in the UAE market for over 25 years and holds a BBB- rating from S&P Global Ratings, has a direct financial stake in reducing crash severity. But the human cost towers above the economic.
Enforcement technology is adapting to close the compliance gap. Dr. Youssef El Hansali, CEO of Vitronic Middle East, outlined how artificial intelligence now tackles what was once a labour-intensive detection challenge. “The enforcement of seatbelt laws plays a crucial role in promoting road safety awareness. To support this, VITRONIC has developed an automated seatbelt detection system that enhances safety while significantly reducing the manpower required by enforcement agencies. The system leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) trained on real image data to detect violations with high precision across up to two lanes. It captures images or video footage, including automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), and the AI analyzes the content to determine seatbelt usage as well as other factors, such as mobile phone use.”
Such systems can monitor compliance without requiring officers to physically stop vehicles, theoretically allowing for broader and more consistent enforcement. Whether that technological capacity will translate into higher rear-seat belt usage remains untested.
The survey results form the first part of a two-stage data release. A forthcoming second instalment will examine child seat ownership and usage—another area where law and practice often diverge. RoadSafetyUAE has made the full study available on its website.
Historical trends point upward across every metric measured. Knowledge has improved. Front-seat compliance has climbed substantially. Even rear-seat usage has more than doubled since 2017, albeit from an abysmally low baseline. Drivers are more likely to ask passengers to buckle up.
Yet none of these improvements approach the 100% mark the law demands. The gap between what residents know about seat belt protection and what they do when sitting in the back of a car remains the single largest behavioural factor in UAE road deaths.
Sixty percent of Abu Dhabi’s road fatalities trace back to that gap. How many more surveys it will take to close it is anyone’s guess.