diff --git a/dev/release/rat_exclude_files.txt b/dev/release/rat_exclude_files.txt
index ff1d191e03ccf..46ddff37402eb 100644
--- a/dev/release/rat_exclude_files.txt
+++ b/dev/release/rat_exclude_files.txt
@@ -188,6 +188,7 @@ r/arrow.Rproj
 r/README.md
 r/README.Rmd
 r/man/*.Rd
+r/cran-comments.md
 .gitattributes
 ruby/red-arrow/.yardopts
 rust/arrow/test/data/*.csv
diff --git a/r/.Rbuildignore b/r/.Rbuildignore
index b51d7bc46abfa..9d39e74b51948 100644
--- a/r/.Rbuildignore
+++ b/r/.Rbuildignore
@@ -9,3 +9,4 @@ Dockerfile
 .*\.tar\.gz
 ^windows
 clang_format.sh
+^cran-comments\.md$
diff --git a/r/cran-comments.md b/r/cran-comments.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000..c99d06a2288fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/r/cran-comments.md
@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+## Test environments
+* local OS X install, R 3.5.3
+* win-builder (devel and release)
+
+## R CMD check results
+
+0 errors | 0 warnings | 1 note
+
+* This is a new release.
+
+## Platform support
+
+This package supports Windows and macOS but not Linux.
+
+The Arrow project is cross-language development platform
+for in-memory data, it spans several languages and
+their code base is quite large (about 150K lines of C
+sources and more than 600K lines across all languages).
+
+In the future, the Apache Arrow project will release
+binaries in the official Fedora and Debian repos;
+we're working on hard on this, but due to the size,
+this is likely to be implemented until next year.
+
+In the meantime, R users can install the Linux binaries
+from custom repos or build Arrow from source when using
+Linux.