Yao or YAO may refer to:
- Yao people, ethnic group in China and Southeast Asia
- Yao people (East Africa), people of south-central Africa
- The name of the demiurge in Gnostic scripture
- Yao, Chad, a town in Chad
- Yao language, a Bantu language spoken by the waYao people in Africa
- Yao languages, or Mien, of China
- Yao, Osaka, a city in Japan
- Related: Yao Airport
- Yao (ruler), a mythical Chinese ruler and emperor
- Yao (surname), the transliteration of Chinese family names 姚, 銚, and 么
- Yao (要, Yo) is Japanese's surname
- Yao (爻), the term for the marks used in the preparation of trigrams and hexagrams in I Ching that is also the basis for Kangxi radical 89
- Yao, a character in Mulan media
- Yao graph, a subgraph that guarantees connectivity
- Yo, or Yao, an American English interjection
- Mount Xiao, or Mount Yao, in Henan, China
- Mount Yao (Lushan County), in Henan, China
- YAO
- Yaoundé Airport, IATA code YAO
- Yunnan Astronomical Observatory, in east suburb of Kunming, Yunnan, China