This species has been reported as present within the United Arab Emirates marine territorial waters (Gasperetti 1988, Soorae et al. 2006, Egan 2007, Castilla et al. 2017), however, there are no known confirmed records from UAE waters in the Arabian Gulf. There is a single known museum specimen collected in UAE waters, from near Sir Abu Nu'ayr (Arabian Gulf, Emirate of Abu Dhabi, UAE) by the crew of the HMS Dalrymple (British Royal Navy) around 1963 (Gasperetti 1988), however, the identity of this record requires confirmation. It is possible that the species occurs only in the northern parts of the Arabian Gulf, but Rezaie-Atagholipour et al. (2016) reported no records from Iranian waters. There are no records from the east coast of the UAE (Géczy et al. 2017, Buzás et al. 2018), although the species is recorded from adjacent waters near Muscat in Oman (Rezaie-Atagholipour et al. 2016). The first museum specimen from the region was collected in Muscat, Oman by A.S.G. Jayakar and is the type specimen of the Hydrophis jayakari (Boulenger, 1887), a synonym of H. viperinus.Globally, this species is known from the Arabian Gulf of Pakistan, around India and Sri Lanka, south to Indonesia (including Borneo) and east to Bangladesh, southeast Asia and southern China (Culotta and Pickwell 1993, Heatwole 1999). There are no records from the Philippines (Rasmussen et al. 2010).