Oman work visa: the employer gets the permission, not the employee

Nothing can be applied for until the company exists and has a labour file, so the commercial registration, Chamber membership and an authorised signatory come first — formation steps covered on our formation page, and the reason a first hire is planned alongside incorporation.

The condition that catches new foreign-owned companies is the one-Omani rule. From 1 April 2024 the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion made employment of at least one Omani mandatory on a foreign investor’s commercial registration one year after trading starts, with that employee registered with the Social Protection Fund; non-compliant registrations are blocked on the Oman Business Platform until corrected. In May 2025 the Ministry of Labour announced a parallel mechanism giving foreign-investment establishments three months to hire one Omani or file a plan, with new work permits withheld from those that do neither.

Small enterprises get a gentler curve. Ministerial Decision 103/2015 applies the prescribed ratio in stages — a quarter in year one, half in year two, three quarters in year three, in full from year four — and exempts newly established small enterprises for two years.

Article 23 deliberately contains no number. That single fact explains most of the confusion here: every percentage you read must trace to a ministerial decision, and if it does not, it is somebody’s estimate wearing a uniform.

So what percentage applies to you? We could not find an official, publicly readable table of Omanisation percentages by sector, and we looked in the four places it would be: the Ministry’s list of its own ministerial decisions, the Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs register of Ministry of Labour decisions, the Ministry’s open-data portal, and the Ministry’s dedicated Omanisation page. That last one is not a table at all. It is a lookup that takes an activity, a profession, an establishment size and a governorate and answers whether foreign workers are permitted for that combination. A yes or no, with effective dates — not a percentage.

The sector figures circulating online, sixty per cent for banking and the rest, are not traceable to any published decision we could verify, and several appear to be achieved workforce statistics relabelled as quotas. We will not reprint them. The one genuinely published figure we found shows how narrow these rules really are: Ministerial Decision 127/2020 sets a floor of not less than 12% for construction and brick-factory establishments with more than 99 non-Omani workers. Omanisation is also not Emiratisation or Saudisation; a percentage met elsewhere in the Gulf tells you nothing here.

Must a foreign-owned company hire an Omani? In practice yes, because of the one-Omani rule above. Beyond that first hire it becomes a percentage question, tested against your own establishment record at every renewal and every new request — so a company can drift from compliant to non-compliant by hiring expatriates alone.

Ministerial Decision 235/2022 prohibits non-Omanis from practising the professions in its schedule, which listed 210. Ministerial Decision 501/2024 added 39 more, phased across four commencement dates rather than all at once, so an occupation usable last year may not be usable now.

The temptation is to pick a title that is still open and put the person in it anyway. Do not. The Royal Oman Police requires the occupation on the visa application to match the labour permit exactly, and that occupation follows onto the resident card, into the labour record and through every renewal. A mismatch surfaces at renewal, at transfer and whenever a professional licence is needed. Regulated work — medical, teaching, religious and media roles — carries separate approvals on top.

Two lists run in parallel, which is why document requests feel contradictory. The Ministry of Labour needs what proves the job: the registered contract, the occupation, the qualification behind it, plus the municipal licence and lease for the workplace. The Royal Oman Police needs what proves the person.

Nationality changes the paperwork, not the entitlement. Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, Nepali, Sri Lankan, Egyptian and Nigerian workers meet the same tests; what differs is the medical certificate list and how qualifications are attested at home. One exception is on the record: the Royal Oman Police made nationals of Bangladesh ineligible for new Omani visas of any type from 31 October 2023, exempting several categories in June 2024. We could not confirm officially whether general work visas have since reopened, so put that to the Omani embassy before recruiting.

Medical fitness is a statutory condition of the work permit under Article 28, so a failed medical ends the file rather than delaying it. Ministerial Decision 602/2025 acknowledges this: where the worker fails the medical or the Royal Oman Police does not approve, the employer pays a token OMR 1 to re-issue the licence instead of the full fee. The resident card is the stage an employer cannot do for the employee — the applicant must appear in person with the original passport and the post-medical labour form, and biometrics are captured there. The employment visa itself is valid two years from stamping, multi-entry, with a OMR 50 monthly fine for late renewal.

One route that used to be open is now closed, and it catches people already in the country. Following a Royal Oman Police announcement in November 2023, a tourist visa cannot be converted to a work visa inside Oman. The restriction covers every visitor category — tourist, dependent and express alike. The worker must leave, obtain the employment visa abroad and re-enter on it.

That asymmetry is worth stating precisely, because the numbers circulating online are neither. Consultancy pages quoting three to five days, or six to eight weeks, describe their own averages. The only official figure is the Ministry’s one-to-two-week range for the labour stage, and it names Omanisation analysis for establishments below their rate as something that lengthens it. Nothing official covers the visa, the medical, the card, or the end-to-end journey.

Two things move the total more than anything on that list. The Omanisation adjustment is the larger: the same first-category permit costs OMR 210.70 for a compliant employer and OMR 602 for one that is not, nearly OMR 400 apart on a single hire. And elapsed time is usually decided outside Oman, by how fast a certificate is attested or a medical appointment comes free.

Two duties sit alongside that and are routinely misunderstood. Article 6 provides that an employer may not retain the worker’s passport or personal documents except with the worker’s written consent, and Article 147 penalises breach at OMR 500 to OMR 1,000 per worker affected. Note the carve-out: this is a consent requirement, not an absolute ban, so saying Oman forbids passport retention outright overstates it. Article 14 then requires the employer to return the non-Omani worker to their country within 60 days of the contract ending — a cost to budget when hiring, not a question to resolve when someone leaves.

On pay there is a point worth correcting. Oman publishes no minimum salary an expatriate must earn to qualify for a work permit. The OMR 325 monthly minimum wage, OMR 225 basic plus OMR 100 in allowances under Ministerial Decision 222/2013, applies by its own terms to Omanis in the private sector. Salary appears in the expatriate rules only as an occupational fee classifier, never as an eligibility bar, so figures presented online as Oman work visa salary requirements are recruitment conventions rather than law.

Transfer is the question employees ask most. Article 29 prohibits an employer from allowing a non-Omani to work for anyone else unless the Ministry has been notified electronically and has authorised it, and the Ministry charges OMR 5 for the transfer service. It is a two-authority transaction in which the outgoing employer has a real role, so a worker cannot arrange it alone.

Cancellation is the step employers skip and regret. An uncancelled permit leaves a departed worker on your labour file and in your Omanisation denominator, and it sits in the way of the next hire. Dependants’ residence derives from the employee’s and does not survive it, which is covered on our family residence page.