Spiders in arid and semi-arid regions represent up to 50% of arthropod communities. Their richness can be affected by environmental variables such as vegetation, precipitation, temperature and latitude. Because there is no consensus on the relative importance of environmental variables on spider richness, there is a clear need for a comprehensive quantitative synthesis of the relationship between environmental variables and spider richness in these regions. The objective of our study was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigated specific relationship between vegetation variables, precipitation and spider species richness in the arid and semiarid regions of the world. Additionally, we analyzed the correlation between temperature, latitude and spider richness. Forty-five articles were reviewed, of which only 20 met the inclusion criteria for meta-analysis. Effect sizes were extracted as partial correlation coefficients of the relationship between vegetation variables and precipitation and spider richness. Random effects models were chosen, and the tau2, Q e I2 statistics were used as measures of variability among the meta-analyzed studies. We found a total of 2637 species in our analyses. This represents 4.90% of global spider taxa. Our global meta-analysis showed a positive and significant correlation between vegetation variables, precipitation and spider richness.