Bayanat Labs Arabic Token-Tax Index
LLM APIs bill and limit by tokens, and the same content usually takes more tokens in Arabic than in English. This index measures how many more, tokeniser by tokeniser, on parallel Arabic–English text from the United Nations: the Arabic/English token ratio with a bootstrap confidence interval, tokens per thousand words, characters per token and a diacritics round trip, and the cost of a page at the vendors' list prices. Short everyday sentences from Tatoeba in Standard, Egyptian and Algerian Arabic are measured too. It comes as a dataset with per-segment token counts, a leaderboard, and a harness that counts the tokens of any text and re-runs the measurement from the public sources.
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 (index data and documentation); Apache-2.0 (harness code and leaderboard); UN sentence pairs under the United Nations Parallel Corpus disclaimer |
|---|---|
| Version | v0.1.0 · Index data, harness and leaderboard v0.1.0, measured on 16 October 2026 (UTC); the harness is tagged on GitHub and not on PyPI yet. |
| Published | |
| Updated | |
| Who it is for | Teams that budget for, compare or choose LLMs for Arabic products and need the token overhead of Arabic against English, per tokeniser, with its uncertainty. |
| Level | Beginner |
Key numbers
Counted by script from the released files. Each key number is read from a file in the Hugging Face dataset (meta/summary.json, meta/tokenisers.json, meta/slices.csv and meta/costs.csv) and pinned to its SHA-256; MANIFEST.json lists every file with its SHA-256.
Downloads and identifiers
| Where | What |
|---|---|
| Hugging Face | Dataset on Hugging Face |
| Hugging Face | Leaderboard on Hugging Face Spaces |
| GitHub | Harness and index files on GitHub |
| GitHub | Method |
| bayanatlabs.com | Count the tokens of your own Arabic text |
Get started
Load the results with the datasets library, or install the harness from GitHub at the v0.1.0 tag to count the tokens of your own text; pip install arabic-token-tax-index will work once it is published on PyPI.
# Python
from datasets import load_dataset
results = load_dataset("Bayanat-Labs/arabic-token-tax-index", "results", split="train")
# Harness
pip install "git+https://github.com/Bayanat-Labs/arabic-token-tax-index@v0.1.0"
arabic-token-tax count "تقرير الأمين العام عن أعمال المنظمة"
What is released
| Part | Licence | In this release |
|---|---|---|
| Index results, tokeniser metadata, costs, prices and diacritics probe | CC BY 4.0 | Yes |
| Cleaned UN sentence pairs with per-segment token counts | United Nations Parallel Corpus disclaimer, reproduced in full in the dataset NOTICE; credit the United Nations as the source | Yes |
| Harness: Python package and command line | Apache-2.0 | Yes |
| Leaderboard on Hugging Face Spaces | Apache-2.0 | Yes |
Attribution: Arabic Token-Tax Index by Bayanat Labs, CC BY 4.0. UN text: source, the United Nations. https://huggingface.co/datasets/Bayanat-Labs/arabic-token-tax-index
Intended uses
- Estimate how many more tokens, and how much more money, Arabic content takes than the same content in English with a given tokeniser.
- Compare tokenisers on the same parallel text, with a confidence interval for every ratio.
- Count the tokens of your own Arabic text with every tokeniser in the index, or re-run the measurement from the public sources.
Out of scope
- Judging model quality: fewer tokens means lower cost and more text per context window, not a better model.
- Exact invoices: costs use the list prices shown on each vendor's page on the retrieval date (one of them is marked there as a promotional price), without batch, cache or other discounts.
Rights at a glance
Training, display, redistribution and synthetic-voice use are separate permissions.
| Use | Status | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Training | Allowed | Index data under CC BY 4.0 with attribution; the UN sentence pairs under the United Nations Parallel Corpus disclaimer, crediting the United Nations. |
| Display | Allowed | CC BY 4.0, with attribution; credit the United Nations for UN text. |
| Redistribution | Allowed | Index data under CC BY 4.0; harness code under Apache-2.0; UN text with the corpus disclaimer kept in full. The Tatoeba configuration holds sentence ids, counts and hashes. |
| Synthetic voice | Not applicable | Text only; no audio. |
Limitations
- Tokenisers whose files are not public, or sit behind an access request, are not measured in this version; the dataset lists each one with the reason.
- An API service may count tokens differently from the published tokenizer file, for example by adding special tokens or using another revision.
- Prices change; every price row records when and where it was read.
- The UN text is formal Modern Standard Arabic and the Tatoeba slices are short everyday sentences, so compare ratios within a slice.
- Install the harness from GitHub for now; it is not on PyPI yet.
Sources and licences
| Source | Licence | Redistributed here |
|---|---|---|
| United Nations Parallel Corpus v1.0, 2015 test and development sets | United Nations Parallel Corpus disclaimer (credit the United Nations) | Yes |
| Tatoeba (Standard, Egyptian and Algerian Arabic with English) | CC BY 2.0 FR (Tatoeba contributors) | No |
| Tokenizer files published by the model developers, at pinned revisions | Each file under its own licence (listed in the harness configuration) | No |
Token counts, ratios, intervals, costs and the diacritics probe are by Bayanat Labs. The cleaned UN sentence pairs are distributed with the full United Nations Parallel Corpus disclaimer (NOTICE in the dataset). Tatoeba sentences are identified by id and hash. Tokenizer files are fetched from their publishers at run time and are not part of the release. Prices are facts read from the vendors' official price pages at the time stated in each row. Source details
How to cite
Cite as:
Bayanat Labs (2026). Arabic Token-Tax Index, version 0.1.0 (run 2026-10-16). Bayanat Labs. https://huggingface.co/datasets/Bayanat-Labs/arabic-token-tax-index
No DOI. Cite the URL in the citation above and the date you read it.
@misc{bayanatlabs2026arabictokentaxindex,
author = {{Bayanat Labs}},
title = {Arabic Token-Tax Index, version 0.1.0 (run 2026-10-16)},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/Bayanat-Labs/arabic-token-tax-index}}
}
Changelog
| Date | Version | Change |
|---|---|---|
| v0.1.0 | Index data and per-segment token counts on Hugging Face, the leaderboard on Hugging Face Spaces, and the harness, configuration and method on GitHub. |
Corrections and removal requests
If something in this release should not be there, or is wrong, email hello@bayanatlabs.com. We handle removal requests within 30 days, and platform requests within 24 hours. How removal requests work
Related product: Bayanat Bench