Which Dubai Metro cabin can I ride in?
Any standard cabin, with any valid card. Two kinds of cabin are reserved: one for women and children only, and Gold Class for Gold card holders only. Sitting in either without qualifying carries the same fixed RTA fine, and Gold Class costs double the Silver fare on every journey.
A Dubai Metro train is not one class of travel. Two kinds of cabin are reserved, and the rule for each is set by who you are or what card you hold — not by how full the train is. Getting it wrong is not a matter of etiquette: it is a line on RTA’s fine list.
Who can sit where
| Cabin | Who may use it | What you need |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | Everyone | Any valid card or ticket |
| Women and children | women and children only | Any valid card, if you are in that group |
| Gold Class | Gold Class ticket holders only | A Gold card, charged at Gold fares |
Using either reserved cabin without qualifying falls under RTA’s fine for “accessing or sitting in areas designated for specific categories”: AED 100. The wording is “accessing or sitting”, so standing in the cabin is covered as well as taking a seat.
Men travelling with women
The women’s cabin is women and children only. RTA’s wording makes no exception for men travelling with a wife, mother or daughter. A mixed couple or family rides together in a standard cabin, or splits up for the journey.
Children are included in the women’s cabin in RTA’s wording. The page does not give an age at which a boy stops counting as a child for this purpose, so this page does not give one either.
What Gold Class actually costs
Gold Class is not a one-off upgrade. The Gold card costs AED 25, the same as a Silver card at AED 25, but every journey is charged at the Gold fare:
| Journey | Silver | Gold | Extra per trip |
|---|---|---|---|
| Within one zone | AED 3 | AED 6 | AED 3 |
| Across two zones | AED 5 | AED 10 | AED 5 |
| Three zones or more | AED 7.5 | AED 15 | AED 7.50 |
On a trip with ten long journeys, that is
AED 75more than the same journeys on Silver. Whether that buys enough — RTA describes wide leather seats and panoramic views — is a question of how crowded your journeys will be, which only you can judge.
The card decides, not the ticket office
A Gold card pays the Gold fare. A Silver card in the Gold cabin falls under the fine above. There is no pay-the-difference option described on RTA’s page, so the choice of cabin is effectively made when you choose the card. Which nol card to buy sets out that choice against the length of your stay.
What this page does not tell you
It does not say which end of the train each reserved cabin is at, or how the cabins are marked on the platform. RTA’s page describes who may use them, not where they are, and we are not describing signage we have not read from a primary source.
Related questions
One email a week: what changed in Dubai’s fares, rules and airport operations — and what we re-checked and found unchanged.
No archive page, no reposting — the full text stays here on the site.
Change history for this page
No changes since publication.
Every number on this page comes from a primary source and was last read on or after 2026-09-14. Fares, opening hours and rules change between our checks — if your plan depends on an exact figure, open the source and read today’s number for yourself. Sources used here: RTA. the full changelog ·every source we track