56,000 Applied for Oman's Golden Visa. Zero Have Been Approved. Here's Why.

Oman opened a copy of Dubai's most famous export: a golden visa. Pay enough, get ten years of residency, bring your family, skip the local sponsor. Nine months later, roughly 56,000 people have applied. So far, the government has approved none of them.

Key Takeaways

• Oman's relaunched Golden Residency has pulled in about 56,000 applications since August 2025, but full processing has not started and zero permits have been issued
• Unlike Dubai's version, which runs mostly on real estate, Oman's routes also count government bonds and listed shares, tying the visa to the stock market instead of just property
• About 70 percent of applicants already live in Oman, which looks more like long-term expats securing their future than a flood of new foreign money
• Three separate government bodies have to sign off before anyone gets a card, which helps explain the backlog
• The real story for Omanis isn't the visa itself. It's where that investor money gets pointed, toward Omani companies rather than just Omani land

What Oman Actually Copied From Dubai

Dubai built part of its global brand on one idea: if you have money, it will make it easy for you to live there, no questions asked about your passport. The UAE's Golden Visa, launched in 2019, turned that into a product. Buy property, invest in a company, or bring a rare skill, and you get a renewable long-term residency card instead of the usual employer-sponsored visa that disappears the day you lose your job.

Oman relaunched its own version on 31 August 2025, an updated Golden and Silver Residency programme built around the same pitch: a 10-year card for bigger investors, a 5-year card for smaller ones, and no local sponsor standing between an applicant and their own paperwork (Gulf News). The Golden tier needs a minimum of OMR 500,000, about $1.3 million, in a company, government bonds, or property; the Silver tier needs OMR 250,000, about $650,000 (Trowers & Hamlins). Both let holders bring their immediate family.

56,000 Applications. Zero Approvals.

Here is the part that does not show up in the press release. Since the relaunch, Oman has been receiving an average of about 5,500 applications a month, close to 56,000 in total through May 2026. As of the most recent reporting, the government had approved none of them, and full processing was not expected to begin until the third quarter of 2026 (IMI Daily).

That is a real gap with the UAE, where a golden visa application typically clears in weeks, not the better part of a year. It also reshapes who is actually applying: about 70 percent of applicants already live in Oman (IMI Daily). This is not, mostly, a stampede of new foreign millionaires discovering Oman. It looks more like long-term expats, business owners, and families who already built a life here trying to convert an insecure work visa into something that cannot be cancelled along with their job.

Where Oman Is Doing It Differently

Dubai's golden visa, in practice, has been a real estate machine. Property purchases are the single most common route in, and that has helped fuel a housing market that priced many ordinary residents out of the emirate's own city centre. Oman watched that happen next door, and its own approach to expat property, covered in an earlier look at how Oman built freehold ownership differently from Dubai, shows it was already trying to avoid the same trap.

The golden visa follows the same instinct. Property is one qualifying route, but government bonds and listed shares on the Muscat Stock Exchange count too. That matters right now because Oman's stock exchange is in the middle of its biggest privatisation run in years. In early July 2026, Oman India Fertiliser Company's IPO closed 18 times oversubscribed, pulling in roughly $12.2 billion in bids for a $678 million offering, the largest order book any Oman listing has drawn (Enterprise MENA+). The Oman Investment Authority has roughly 30 more state assets lined up for sale or listing through 2029 across energy, logistics, utilities, and mining (Finance Middle East), and the exchange's own chief executive has said he expects three more IPOs before the end of 2026 (AGBI). A golden visa route that funnels investor cash into those listings, rather than only into villas, is a small but deliberate design choice, one that lines up with the same instinct behind Oman building its own financial centre instead of simply importing Dubai's, detailed in an earlier piece on Oman's answer to the DIFC.

Who Actually Runs This

Part of why approvals are slow is structural. An application does not go through one office. It starts at Invest Oman, which sits under the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion, gets pre-approved there, and then moves to the Royal Oman Police for security screening and the actual residency card. Property-route applications also loop in the Integrated Tourism Complexes Authority to confirm the real estate qualifies. Three institutions, one applicant, and no single office empowered to just say yes on the spot.

That split is not unique to Oman; most Gulf residency-by-investment schemes involve more than one ministry. But it is a real cost when a government advertises a 10-year card and still cannot tell 56,000 people when, or whether, they will get one. It is also a small case study in a wider pattern the country's own Vision 2040 progress indicators keep surfacing: plenty of Omani policy is well designed on paper, and the execution lag is where it loses people.

Why This Matters for Ordinary Omanis

If you are an Omani citizen, this programme is not really about you; it is about the roughly 2.3 million expatriates already living alongside you and the investors deciding whether to bring money into the country. But it still touches daily life in three concrete ways. First, every riyal that goes into a government bond or a Muscat Stock Exchange listing instead of a private villa is money that helps fund the privatised companies now employing Omanis, rather than money that simply pushes up rents in Muscat's nicer neighbourhoods. Second, a functioning golden visa keeps long-term expat professionals, doctors, engineers, teachers, business owners, in the country instead of pricing them into leaving for the UAE, and their spending and businesses support Omani jobs too. Third, the backlog itself is worth watching: a country that wants to be trusted with foreign capital needs its paperwork to move as fast as its announcements.

Oman copied Dubai's idea. It has not yet copied Dubai's speed. Whether that becomes a genuine advantage, a slower but more citizen-focused version of the same tool, or just a slower version of the same problem, depends on what happens to those 56,000 files once processing actually starts.