Foreign ownership in Oman: what you can own outright, and the 123 activities you cannot

These are what people mean by the restricted activities in Oman, and what the negative list actually contains. They cluster into recognisable groups rather than scattering across the economy, and the pattern behind them is consistent: they are small-scale Omani livelihoods, traditional crafts and neighbourhood services, not sectors where foreign capital was wanted and then withdrawn. Reading them as groups is the fastest way to see whether your plan is anywhere near the line.

What is not on the list is just as informative. Wholesale and general trading, import and export, manufacturing, contracting, engineering, consultancy, software and IT services, logistics, hospitality development, healthcare, education and financial services are all open to 100% foreign ownership. The carve-outs are narrow and specific; the open economy is the rule, not the exception.

Two practical rules travel with the list. Investment projects already existing when an amendment took effect were excluded from it, so a business registered before August 2024 in a newly added activity was not forced to close. Those grandfathered positions are reported as not transferable without written Ministerial approval, which matters if you are buying an existing Omani company rather than registering a new one.

Here is how that resolves for the activities people actually ask us about.

This is the single most common misreading of the Omani regime. People search for a rule aimed at their own passport, and there is not one. The Foreign Capital Investment Law draws its line around activities, not around countries: the prohibited list annexed to Ministerial Decision 209/2020 names activities, and names no nationality at all. If the activity is open, the investor is eligible regardless of where the passport was issued; if the activity is reserved, no foreign investor of any nationality can register it.

So when an Indian investor asks whether Indians can own 100% of an Omani company, and a Pakistani investor asks the same about Pakistanis, they get the same answer for the same reason, and it is not a diplomatic courtesy. It is that the question the law asks is about the business, not the owner. The only place nationality shows up in practice is document handling: a passport, a corporate certificate or a power of attorney issued outside Oman has to be attested in the country of issue and then legalised for use in Oman, and the route and the timeline for that differ from country to country. That is an administrative difference measured in days and fees, not an ownership difference.

Whether the shareholder is a person or a company matters more than where they come from. Under the Commercial Companies Law (Royal Decree 18/2019) a one-person company may be owned by a single natural person or a single juristic person. An overseas parent company can therefore hold an Omani SPC directly, with no Omani co-shareholder and no local holding vehicle in between. A natural person may hold only one SPC, and an SPC may not incorporate another SPC. An LLC may have up to 50 shareholders.

A corporate shareholder changes the evidence, not the entitlement. Instead of one attested passport you are producing the parent’s incorporation certificate, its constitutive documents, a board resolution authorising the Omani company, and an ownership chart running up to the real people behind it, each attested in the country of issue. Our document checklist sets out what that looks like in practice, and the LLC, SPC or branch comparison covers which form to use.

The practical consequence is a sequencing one. For these activities the approval usually has to be obtained before or alongside registration rather than afterwards, and it usually carries its own capital, premises, staffing or qualification conditions that the general company rules never mention. Budget the regulator’s timeline separately from the formation timeline.

None of this changes your ownership position. A foreign investor can own 100% of an Omani insurance broker or a private clinic. The sector licence decides whether that company may trade, not who may own it.

A worked example makes it concrete. A wholly foreign-owned consultancy is straightforward. Add property management to the same registration and you have added an activity reserved for Omani nationals, which does not merely fail on its own, it blocks the file. The fix is almost never to force the combination. It is to drop the activity, or to structure it separately and lawfully.

Regulated activities create a softer version of the same problem. A trading company that adds a training institute now answers to the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation for part of its business, and the whole registration waits on that approval. Premises conflict in the same way: an activity that requires a warehouse or an inspected facility cannot be satisfied by the office that suited the consultancy.

The sensible order is to decide the revenue-generating activity first, confirm it is open, register it, and treat further activities as deliberate additions that get their own check. Adding an activity later is a normal amendment, not a failure of planning. Where those additions sit in the wider sequence of registration, licensing and post-formation steps is set out on our Oman company formation route.

The OMR 150,000 figure needs naming directly, because it is still quoted on advisory websites, in forum answers and by AI assistants. It was the foreign-investment minimum under Royal Decree 102/94. Royal Decree 50/2019 repealed that law with effect from 2 January 2020. It is not a current requirement, and neither is the old OMR 20,000 domestic figure, which the Commercial Companies Law (Royal Decree 18/2019) did not carry over.

That does not make capital a formality. Three things still shape the number you declare, and together they are why a token capital figure is a bad idea even where nothing forbids it.

• The sufficiency test. If the declared capital is not plausible for the activity, expect the Ministry to question it.
• Regulated activities set their own capital floors. Banking, insurance, manpower supply and others are licensed against a figure their regulator sets, not against the company law.
• Investor residence and banking. A realistic capital figure supports the investor visa route and the corporate bank account, where a nominal company invites questions.

It is worth being precise about what the sufficiency test is and is not. It is not a published figure you can look up and match, and anyone quoting you a universal number for it is inventing one. It is the Ministry assessing whether the capital stated in your constitutive contract is plausible for the activity you have described. A consultancy declaring a modest capital raises no question. A construction or import business declaring the same figure invites one. Capital can also be increased later by amending the constitutive contract, so the declared figure is a starting position rather than a permanent ceiling.

The competitor error worth correcting here is not only the OMR 150,000 figure but the shape of the claim around it. Several advisory sites go to the opposite extreme and state flatly that no capital requirement exists, which is legally right and practically misleading. Both statements are needed together: no general statutory minimum, and a real test applied to the number you choose.

Premises follow the same logic as capital: general rule light, activity rule heavy. An office-based consultancy is flexible. A workshop, a clinic, a restaurant, a warehouse or anything requiring inspection is not, and the lease or facility record becomes part of the file rather than an administrative detail.

The register records, for each such person, their name, date of birth, nationality, place of residence and address. Where ownership runs through overseas companies, the register looks through them to the real people at the top, not to the intermediate entities.

Three details in the decision are routinely missed and each of them is an obligation rather than good practice.

• If no one reaches the 25% threshold, the most senior executive of the company is recorded as the beneficial owner instead.
• The company must appoint a contact person resident in Oman for Ministry purposes.
• Any change of ownership, merger, transfer or restructuring must be reflected in the register within five working days.

Full foreign ownership makes this easier, not harder: with a single foreign shareholder the register is short and the chain is obvious. The version that takes work is a corporate shareholder with its own layered ownership, where the chart has to be built before the register can be completed. Banks ask for the same chart during onboarding, so building it once serves both.

Those Executive Regulations were amended by Ministerial Decision 411/2025, effective 2 October 2025, and the amendment changed what a foreign investor has to produce and when. As reported, the investment licence must now be obtained before establishing the project, and the application has to include the investor’s credentials, a feasibility study and an implementation timetable. A feasibility study is a document you write, not a form you sign, so it belongs in your planning rather than in the week you file.

The condition foreign investors are most often told about too late is Omanisation. Under the same amendment the company must appoint at least one Omani employee within one year of commencing commercial operations. That is a direct consequence of owning the company outright and it carries a payroll cost, so it belongs in your first-year budget alongside the renewal fees.

Applications run through the Oman Business Platform at business.gov.om, the Invest Easy service, and can be filed by the investor, an authorised signatory or a delegated representative. Licence validity is reported as two years. We have not been able to confirm that figure on the platform directly, so treat the renewal date as something to read off your own issued licence rather than off this page.

Done properly, checking your own code against the restricted-activities list is a short sequence, and each step has an authority attached to it rather than an opinion.

• Write down the revenue-generating activity in one sentence. What you sell, to whom, from where. Trading, consulting and services are categories, not activities, and a category cannot be looked up.
• Find the matching activity on the Oman Business Platform. The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion maintains the activity classification at business.gov.om, based on the international ISIC structure. Search by name first, then confirm the code.
• Read the sub-activity, not the family. The prohibited line frequently runs inside a family rather than between families: restaurants are open, mobile coffee shops are reserved; construction is open, crane rental is reserved.
• Repeat for every activity you intend to register. The most restricted activity on the file governs the whole registration, so one reserved activity in a list of four decides the outcome for all four.
• Ask whether a sector regulator sits above the Ministry. If the activity is financial, medical, educational, telecoms, tourism or manpower, identify that authority now rather than after registration.
• Check again on the day you file. The list is the Ministry’s current record, not the version quoted on any website, including this one.

That last point is the whole reason a published list needs a date next to it. The prohibited list has been set once and amended twice since the Foreign Capital Investment Law came into force: created in December 2020, amended in June 2023, amended again in August 2024. Any page quoting it, including this one, is a snapshot.

If the lookup leaves you unsure, that is a useful result rather than a failure. Borderline cases are almost always a sub-activity question, and they are answered by matching your description to the correct code before filing, not by registering and hoping. That is the check we do, and it is the check worth paying for. Where the activity is plainly open, you do not need us to tell you so.