Oman's Golden Visa Got 55,000 Applications. 70% Were People Already Living Here.

Since last August, more than 55,000 people have applied for a document that lets them live in Oman without a local sponsor. That sounds like the start of a familiar Gulf story: a golden visa program chasing global wealth, the way Dubai has done for years. Except in Oman, about seven out of ten of those applicants already live here. They are not new arrivals chasing a lifestyle upgrade. They are expats who have been cooking, teaching, nursing, and running small businesses in Oman for years, finally applying for long-term security in a country they already call home.

Key Takeaways

• Oman's Golden Residency program drew more than 55,000 applications in its first ten months, but the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion says roughly 70% came from expats already living in Oman, not new arrivals.
• Scale check: Dubai's residency authority alone issued 158,000 Golden Visas in 2023, more than Oman's entire national application count after nearly a year of running its program.
• Oman expanded the scheme again in June 2026, letting land buyers get sponsor-free residency, but capped those permits at 6 to 12 months, void the moment the property is sold.
• Unlike Dubai's open freehold market, Oman still only lets foreigners buy the property that qualifies them for residency inside designated tourism zones.
• One investment route into Oman's program requires the applicant's company to employ at least 50 Omani citizens, a jobs condition Dubai's original visa never had.

The Numbers Behind the Headline

Oman relaunched its investor residency scheme, branded Golden Residency, on 1 September 2025. The pitch is simple: invest a minimum of OMR 200,000 (about $520,000) through company capital, property in an approved tourism zone, government bonds, listed shares, a fixed deposit, or by employing at least 50 Omani nationals, and you get a renewable 10-year residency permit with no local sponsor required, plus coverage for your spouse, children, and first-degree relatives.

The numbers since then are real, not just marketing. Applications averaged about 5,500 a month through the first five months of 2026, pushing the total past 55,000, according to reporting by Gulf business outlet AGBI citing ministry figures. India, the United Kingdom, and Egypt are the top three source countries. Property sales tied to the scheme helped push Oman's overall property market up 6%, to roughly $3 billion, in the first five months of 2026. What the ministry has not done yet is start approving them at scale: processing only began in the third quarter of 2026, meaning the earliest applicants waited nearly a year for a decision.

How That Stacks Up Against Dubai

Dubai invented this playbook. The UAE's federal Golden Visa launched in 2019, and by 2023 Dubai's own residency authority, the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs, was issuing visas at a pace Oman has not come close to matching.

Dubai's 158,000 visas issued in 2023 was nearly double the 79,617 issued the year before, and more than triple 2021's total, according to GDRFA Dubai. Oman's entire national program, after ten months, has not caught up to what one emirate did in a single year. That is not necessarily a failure. It suggests Oman is running a smaller, slower version of the same idea, one aimed less at attracting fresh global capital and more at formalizing the status of expats already contributing to the economy.

The Guardrails Oman Built In

Dubai opened its property market to foreign buyers almost anywhere in the emirate starting in 2002, which fueled its real estate boom and, later, its exposure when that market crashed. Oman took a narrower route: foreigners can generally only buy freehold property that qualifies them for residency inside designated Integrated Tourism Complexes, a model this site examined in detail in how Oman built the same idea differently. It is a smaller, more controlled market by design, which is one reason a two-bedroom apartment in an Omani tourism zone still runs at a fraction of what an equivalent unit in Dubai Marina costs.

Oman also just tested a narrower on-ramp. In June 2026, Royal Oman Police Decision 87/2026 let foreigners who buy land plots or units still going through registration get a sponsor-free entry visa, extended to their first-degree relatives. But the fine print keeps it cautious: those permits run 6 to 12 months, renewable, and expire automatically the moment the property changes hands. Dubai's comparable real estate track offers 5 to 10 years. Oman is opening the door, just not very wide, and it is a more cost-effective route into the country than chasing Dubai's pricier lifestyle, a gap this site has previously quantified when comparing what actually makes Dubai 52% pricier than Muscat.

Who Actually Runs This

The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion, through its Investors Services Centre, owns the Golden Residency program and reviews applications. Royal Oman Police issues the actual residency permits and signs off on the legal amendments, like Decision 87/2026, which was published in the Official Gazette and took effect within days. International marketing and the digital application portal are outsourced to Migrate World, which operates in more than 60 markets to funnel applicants toward Oman's program. None of this runs on a headline budget the way a building project does. It runs on ministry staffing, a digital portal, and police processing capacity, and that last piece is the current bottleneck, since a program that took applications for nearly a year before issuing its first approvals is, by definition, still catching up to its own demand. It sits alongside Oman's broader push to diversify beyond oil, a goal tracked in the government's own 2024-2025 Vision 2040 progress report.

Why This Matters for Ordinary Omanis

If you are an Omani citizen, the part of this program worth watching is not the visa itself, it is the 50-jobs clause buried inside it. One of the seven qualifying routes only counts if the investor's company employs at least 50 Omani nationals, which means a slice of this foreign capital is legally tied to hiring citizens, not just parking money. That is a condition Dubai's original 2019 visa never carried.

The cautious pace also protects something Omanis already have that many Dubai residents do not: a country where citizens remain the majority, not a minority swamped by a fast-growing expat population. By keeping freehold property zoned, permits shorter, and approvals slower, Oman is trading speed for control. It means fewer viral headlines about record visa numbers, but it also means less risk of the property speculation and population swings that came with Dubai's faster, more open version of the same idea.