BackgroundSelf-perceived temporal perspectives has been shown to vary across cultures. Although cross-cultural differences may be blurred by the globalization, accelerated pace-of-life worldwide and spread of multitasking; the way Arab individuals deal with time has its specificities. However, research in this area is scant in the Arab world. One of the main reasons for this scarcity of research is the lack of psychometrically sound and convenient-to-use measures. We aimed to examine the psychometric properties of an Arabic translation of the briefest version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZPTI-15).MethodsA sample of community Arabic-speaking Adults from Lebanon (N = 423, 68.6% females, mean age 29.19 ± 12.54 years) were administered the Arabic ZPTI-15. The forward and backward translation method was adopted.ResultsConfirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) revealed that the five-factor model exhibited a good fit to the data. The five ZTPI-15 subscales yielded a McDonald’s omega ranging from 0.43 to 0.84. Multi-group CFA ascertained the invariance of the Arabic ZTPI-15 across gender at the configural, metric, and scalar levels. Our findings support divergent validity of the scale by showing positive correlations between past negative, present fatalistic, present hedonistic dimensions, and psychological distress; as well as negative correlations between past positive, future focused dimensions, and distress.ConclusionThe Arabic ZTPI-15 is easy-to-use, valid, reliable, and will hopefully enable the conduction of future research in the field to purposively provide comprehensive insight into the time perspective patterns and correlates in Arab countries, and the broad Arabic-speaking community globally.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12888-023-04815-8.