UAE Rates 179 Government Service Channels, With One Seven-Star Winner

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, has announced the results of the sixth cycle of the Global Star Rating System for Government Services, an assessment that put 179 service channels under review in 2026.

The channels belong to 27 federal government entities. The mix was 107 physical service centres, 49 digital channels and 23 call centres, spanning face-to-face desks, online platforms and phone lines.

One channel reached the top of the scale. The Fujairah Traffic and Licensing Services Center, operated by the Ministry of Interior, was awarded seven stars. Eight other channels received six stars, 67 were given five stars, 70 took four and 33 received three. The tally accounts for every channel assessed.

Assessors weighed service quality, operational efficiency and customer experience. They also examined how far each entity had simplified its procedures, made services easier to reach and responded to the needs of users. The criteria target friction as much as courtesy: a service can be staffed by attentive people and still fail if the steps around it are slow or confusing.

Sheikh Mohammed said the vision behind the ratings had been set down years earlier, and he described the benchmarks it rests on. Government service channels, he said, should match top hotels for hospitality and the standard of welcome, top banks for procedural accuracy and reliability, and airlines for speed and round-the-clock operation. The comparison sets a high bar. Hotels, banks and airlines are judged by customers in seconds and lose them when the experience falls short.

What the government is after, he said, is an administration that anticipates people's needs rather than waiting for them to complain, exceeds expectations, and makes daily life easier and better.

Scores rose across all three channel types. Physical service centres improved by 5% and digital channels by 4%. Call centres posted the largest gain, at 13%.

The system is built to keep institutions moving. Independent assessments and feedback collected from customers generate performance indicators for each channel, and those indicators produce the star classification. Launched in 2011, the framework grades channels on a scale running from two to seven stars and measures speed, simplicity, accessibility and consistency. Each channel is judged against international best practice rather than against its neighbours in the federal government.

Announcing the results each cycle is the accountability mechanism. A rating that only circulated inside ministries would carry little weight; one released by the Prime Minister puts a number next to a named centre, and the next round will be read against this one.

The spread of results says something about where the remaining work sits. Most channels, 137 of the 179, landed at four or five stars. Nine sit at six stars or above, a small leading group. The top is thin and the bottom is small. Call centres made the biggest single jump, and they are usually the cheapest channel to run and the easiest to neglect, which suggests the gains now come as much from how a member of staff handles a query as from new buildings or new platforms.

For the wider modernization programme, which asks public institutions to adopt performance-driven practices and put technology into service delivery, the ratings act as a public scorecard. The stated payoff reaches beyond convenience: faster, more predictable dealings with the state are treated as part of what keeps the economy competitive over the long term.

The test comes in the seventh cycle, when call centres either hold their 13% gain or show that the easy fixes have already been made.