Oman’s Golden Residency has drawn about 5,500 applications a month through the first five months of 2026, bringing the total to roughly 56,000 since its relaunch last August, AGBI reported, citing economy ministry figures. Processing will not begin until the third quarter, and the ministry expects approvals within the following three months.
Around 70% of those applicants already live in Oman as expatriates, according to the ministry, with India, the United Kingdom, and Egypt the largest source nationalities. That split makes the volume look less like a wave of new arrivals than like Oman’s resident expatriate base converting into long-term status.
Applications piled up during a turbulent stretch for the Gulf. The 2026 Iran war dented the safety premium that underwrites the region’s golden visas, and in the UAE authorities evacuated stranded holders and reportedly revoked Iranian residents’ permits. By contrast, the war touched Oman far less, and its program looked comparatively steady.
What the relaunch changed
Oman has offered residence by investment for years, well before the 2025 fanfare. On August 31, the country repackaged that existing program instead of launching a new one, something observers pointed out when the relaunch was announced. Anastasia Barna, chief executive of advisory firm One World Migration, was blunt about it.
The program “is not new,” she said. “It has always been there; they just started marketing it and changed it a little last year.”
What changed was mostly presentation. Oman handed the program an international marketing mandate, moved applications onto a digital portal its partner Migrate World runs, and clarified family inclusion. Investment criteria themselves stayed largely intact, a reading practitioners confirmed after checking the official portal.
Terms of the permit
At the center sits a single ten-year renewable residence permit. Qualifying investors commit at least OMR 250,000 (approximately US$650,000) through one of several routes, among them property in tourism complexes, government bonds, listed shares, or a fixed bank deposit. The permit covers immediate family and removes the local-sponsor requirement that governs ordinary work residency.
For foreign investors chasing returns, the appeal is narrower than the marketing suggests. Barna said her firm was among the first to handle Oman cases, starting in 2023, when the process was opaque enough that no one outside the country could explain how to run it. Building it out took repeated trips to make contacts with the authorities.
Most of that work went through bonds, and she is skeptical of the property angle the relaunch now promotes. “If you are local, or you want to live in Oman, it is a very stable investment,” she said. “But if you are a foreign investor looking for a return, I am very skeptical about the Oman market.”
She questions the double-digit price growth that recent reports claim, seeing little real demand behind it. Across the Gulf, she would put Saudi Arabia ahead of Oman, “where the market really will grow because there is demand for property.”
The permit’s real use, in her telling, is parking capital rather than mobility. Omani government bonds, her preferred route, were yielding around 5% to 5.5% by her account, and she calls the residency a way “to keep the money, to park it in the bonds.” Processing ran fast in her experience, with officials approving cases within a week or two and handing over the investor card on the spot.
A personal income tax arrives in 2028
Oman levies no personal income tax today, part of the appeal for parking money there. That changes on January 1, 2028, when a 5% tax on annual income above OMR 42,000 (approximately US$109,000) takes effect under Royal Decree 56/2025, the first such levy in the Gulf. Interest and investment income fall within its scope, a detail that bears on the bond-parking play for higher earners.
The exemption threshold is high enough that the tax authority expects only about 1% of the population to pay it. For an investor parking several hundred thousand rials in interest-bearing bonds, though, the calculation is worth running before 2028 arrives.
A big number, no approval stats yet
Against a population of roughly 5.4 million, about 2.3 million of them expatriates, 56,000 applications in about nine months is a large figure for Oman. It reads larger still next to the program’s thin pre-relaunch uptake. Whether the volume converts into approvals is the open question: The ministry has issued none yet and has not started processing.
