The UAE tail spend benchmark 2026

The typical UAE company on Alaan has about 54 vendors per year, with 20 controlling about 95% of the spend. The remaining 34 share the remaining amount of less than 5% of spend, but account for about 1 in 5 transactions of the company.

That long tail is called tail spend. Each transaction in the tail spend needs a receipt, a category and often an approval, same as a large purchase, thus taking up a chunk of the finance team's time that is disproportionate to its share of the budget.

Most tail spend stats you'll find in this region are market estimates, based on about 2,500 companies and more than 3 million card transactions between September 2025 and August 2026.

‍

A few vendors get almost all the money

The typical company sends about 70% of its spend to its top 5 vendors. Its top 10 take about 85%, and its top 20 take about 95%.

So for most finance teams, the vendors that matter to the budget fit on one screen. Everything a CFO would want to negotiate, review or keep an eye on sits in a very short list.

The rest is where the work is.

The long list gets a fifth of the transactions

Outside its top 20, the typical company pays about 34 more vendors. Together they take under 5% of its spend and about 1 in 5 of its transactions.

Many of them barely register at all. About 4 in 10 of a company's vendors are paid exactly once in a whole year. And a typical transaction in the tail is about a third the size of one with a top-20 vendor.

None of that makes the paperwork smaller. A one-off AED 40 purchase from a vendor nobody will use again needs the same receipt, the same category and often the same approval as the monthly fuel bill.

Most transactions are small

About a third of a typical company's transactions are under AED 100. Together they add up to less than 3% of its spend.

Widen it to AED 500 and the picture gets sharper. About 3 in 4 transactions are under AED 500, and they still make up less than a fifth of spend.

The smallest companies lean on small transactions the most. At companies with 10 employees or fewer, more than 4 in 10 transactions are under AED 100.

Government sits at the top of the list

The vendors UAE companies pay most often aren't suppliers in the usual sense. By number of transactions, the top of the list is led by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, ADNOC, Meta, ICP and ENOC: visa and labour fees, fuel and advertising.

At the typical company, about 1 in 10 transactions and around 16% of spend go to government. Two of its top 10 vendors are government bodies.

That changes how the head of the curve should be read. A good part of the spend that matters to the budget can't be negotiated, consolidated or put out to tender. It's fees, and they get paid.

The shape is the same at every size

You'd expect the vendor list to grow steadily with headcount. It mostly doesn't. Companies with 10 employees or fewer pay about 40 vendors a year. From 11 employees up to 500, the number sits around 65 and barely moves. Only above 500 does it jump, to about 87.

The concentration barely changes either. At every size, the top 5 vendors take somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of spend, and the tail takes roughly a fifth of transactions.

The one thing that does change with size is government. At the smallest companies, about 1 in 20 transactions go to government. At companies with more than 500 employees, it's close to half, and 5 of their top 10 vendors are government bodies.

Actionable Insights

Tail spend usually gets pitched as a savings opportunity. With under 5% of spend in it, the savings are small. The time it takes is what's worth going after.

1. Set an approval threshold. A third of transactions are under AED 100 and they add up to under 3% of spend. In our State of expense automation report, approval was the slowest step, at about a week on median. Taking the smallest transactions out of the approval queue is the quickest way to shorten it.
2. Negotiate the top 20, and leave the rest alone. That's where 95% of the money is. Chasing better terms with a vendor you pay once a year rarely pays for the time it takes.
3. Give government fees their own line. They're predictable, they can't be negotiated, and at bigger companies they're close to half of all transactions. Treating them as their own budget line keeps them from crowding out the spend you can actually manage.
4. Make one-off purchases easy to document. If 4 in 10 vendors only appear once, nobody will remember the details a week later. A receipt photographed at the counter is the only reliable record.

Methodology

This analysis uses anonymized transaction data from Alaan customers. It describes vendors paid through Alaan, which for many companies, especially larger ones, is part of their spend rather than all of it.

• Sample: About 2,500 companies with at least 50 successful card purchases between September 1, 2025 and August 31, 2026. Declined, reversed and refunded transactions are excluded.
• Vendors: Each transaction is matched to a cleaned vendor name, so branches and spelling variants of the same brand count once. About 6% of transactions couldn't be matched and are left out of the vendor figures. Those are most likely obscure, one-off merchants, so the real tail is probably a little longer than we show.
• Typical company: Every figure is a median across companies, so a few very large customers don't skew the result.
• Tail: Vendors outside a company's top 20 by spend.
• Government: Transactions coded to government services by the card network.
• Currency: The small share of transactions billed in US dollars is converted at the dirham peg.
• What we don't claim: These are observed patterns, and all figures are rounded.

‍