More than a third of the world's population lives in drylands and is disproportionally at risk of hydrometeorological hazards such as drought and flooding. While existing studies have widely explored weather systems governing precipitation formation in humid regions, our understanding of the atmospheric processes generating precipitation in arid regions remains fragmented at best. Here we show, using a variety of precipitation datasets, that Rossby wave breaking is a key atmospheric driver of precipitation in arid regions worldwide. Rossby wave breaking contributes up to 90% of daily precipitation extremes and up to 80% of total precipitation amounts in arid regions equatorward and downstream of the midlatitude storm tracks. The relevance of Rossby wave breaking for precipitation increases with increasing land aridity. Contributions of wave breaking to precipitation dominate in the poleward and westward portions of arid subtropical regions during the cool season. Given the projected precipitation decline and the large uncertainty in projections of precipitation extremes in these regions, our findings imply that Rossby wave breaking plays a crucial role in projections and uncertainties of future precipitation changes in societally vulnerable regions that are exposed to both freshwater shortages and flood hazards.