The UAE Runs 45 Free Zones on 45 Rulebooks. Oman Wrote One, and 4,467 Omani Jobs Followed

If you wanted to set up a business in a UAE free zone this year, you would first have to choose from more than 45 of them, each with its own regulator, its own fee schedule, and its own rulebook. In Oman, that choice does not exist anymore. One law now covers every free zone in the country.

Key Takeaways

• The UAE has more than 45 free zones spread across its seven emirates, each run by a separate authority with its own licensing rules, visa quotas, and pricing.
• Oman replaced two overlapping, decades-old free-zone laws with a single Royal Decree in April 2025, putting every zone under one regulator, the Public Authority for Special Economic Zones and Free Zones (OPAZ).
• Oman's zones attracted OMR 22.4 billion (roughly $58 billion) in committed investment by February 2026, up 6.8% on the year before, with 325 new investment agreements signed in 2025.
• Those zones created 4,467 jobs for Omanis last year, nearly double the government's 2,500 target, pushing Omanisation inside the zones to 36%.
• For an ordinary job seeker or small business owner, one regulator instead of dozens means fewer forms, fewer separate applications, and a licensing process you can actually predict.

The problem Dubai built for itself

The UAE's free zones were not planned as one system. They grew one at a time over more than 30 years, as each emirate and sometimes each city launched its own zone to compete for investors. Dubai alone now has more than 30 free zones; Abu Dhabi has around eight more, with others scattered across Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Ajman, and Fujairah.

The result is a maze. Each zone has its own licensing authority, its own published tariff, and its own rules on activities, visa quotas, and facility types, according to legal guides tracking the sector for investors in 2026 (Kayrouz and Associates). A company that wants a presence in two zones, say, one in Dubai and one in Abu Dhabi, effectively needs two separate registrations, two sets of paperwork, and two relationships with two different regulators. That is a manageable cost for a large multinational. It is a real barrier for a small trading company or a first-time entrepreneur.

Oman wrote one law instead

Oman took the opposite route. In August 2020, the government created OPAZ to oversee its economic and free zones under a single roof. Then, in April 2025, Royal Decree 38/2025 replaced the two older laws that had governed the sector separately, one for ordinary free zones since 2002 and one for the Special Economic Zone at Duqm since 2011, folding them into one harmonised legal framework (KPMG Oman).

OPAZ now oversees seven zones, the Special Economic Zone at Duqm, Salalah Free Zone, Sohar Free Zone, Al Mazunah Free Zone, Muscat Airport Free Zone, Khazaen Economic City, and the MADAYN industrial estates, plus two newly established zones in Al Dhahirah and Al Rawdah. Every one of them now runs on the same rulebook: 100% foreign ownership, no minimum capital requirement, a ten-year income tax exemption that can be extended, duty-free movement of goods, and licensing processed through a single digital platform called Tajawob instead of nine separate front doors.

What one law actually delivered

This is not just tidier paperwork. OPAZ reported OMR 22.4 billion in total committed investment across its zones by mid-February 2026, up 6.8% from the year before, with 325 new investment agreements signed in 2025 alone, worth more than OMR 1.4 billion in fresh commitments. Salalah Free Zone accounted for 28% of that investment, Sohar Free Zone 26%, and Khazaen Economic City grew 63% year on year. Nearly 97% of the new investment went into industrial manufacturing, not speculative real estate.

That pipeline is part of the same growth this site has tracked before: OPAZ's zones were already logging 294 active projects worth roughly $58 billion as of last month. The jobs numbers matter more to most people than the investment total. The zones created 4,467 jobs for Omanis last year against a government target of 2,500, almost double what was promised. That lifted the Omani workforce inside the zones to 30,780 out of about 85,000 total workers, a 36% Omanisation rate.

The machinery behind it, in plain terms

OPAZ is the single body responsible for all of this, not a ministry spread thin across nine zones. It licenses investors, tracks committed capital, and reports progress in public briefings, most recently in February 2026. The money is private investor capital drawn in by the incentives in Royal Decree 38/2025, not new government spending; the state's role is regulation and infrastructure, not the OMR 22.4 billion itself. The executive regulations that spell out the law's day-to-day detail were due within a year of the decree taking effect in April 2025, which is the piece still being finalised. The newest zones, Al Dhahirah and Al Rawdah, also show the same pattern seen elsewhere in Oman's development spending: growth pushed toward governorates outside Muscat, not concentrated in the capital, a trend this site has tracked in detail in its governorate development envelope.

Why this matters for ordinary Omanis

If you are a young Omani looking for work, one regulator publishing one set of job numbers means you can actually check whether the government is keeping its promise. Last year it beat its own target by nearly 80%. If you are running or starting a small business, you deal with one licensing process instead of guessing which of 45 different UAE authorities has the best deal for your specific activity this year.

None of this makes Oman's system perfect. A 36% Omanisation rate inside the zones is still a minority of the workforce, and the fine print of the new law is still being written a year after it took effect. But the basic choice Oman made, one law and one regulator instead of dozens, is the direct opposite of the fragmented system the UAE built over three decades. It is a quieter kind of mistake to avoid than a housing crash or a debt crisis, but for anyone trying to actually start a business or get hired, it is the one they will notice first.