No Omani law requires a business to have a website. If you sell online, that is a different question and a licensed activity. And if you do want a .om domain, the price published in the regulation is OMR 5 a year — which is not remotely what most of the internet will quote you.
What a .om domain costs, according to the regulation
The governing instrument is TRA Decision 1152/2/3/2022-5, the Domain Names Regulation, dated 23 November 2022 and published in Official Gazette 1469 on 27 November 2022. It came into force four months after publication and replaced the 2012 regulation and the 2012 fee decision.
Article 33 sets a single fee for registration or renewal: OMR 5 per year, and it is the same figure for every zone — .om, .com.om, .co.om, .net.om, .org.om, .edu.om, .med.om, .gov.om, .museum.om, .me.om and the Arabic .عمان. Transferring a domain to a new owner costs OMR 25, or OMR 50 if the name is classed as premium. Moving between registrars is free and, under Article 22, the losing registrar may not obstruct it or charge for it. Article 35 then caps what an accredited registrar may add. Its operating costs may not exceed 100% of the registration fee without the Authority's approval — which puts a lawful retail ceiling somewhere near OMR 10 a year.
Now compare that with the open market. 101domain, a large international reseller, advertises a .om at USD 311.99 to register and USD 362.99 to renew, offers only one- and two-year terms, states that individuals may not register, says a trademark is required, and quotes a registration time of two months. Every one of those five statements is at odds with the regulation, which allows terms of one to five years, permits Omani individuals to hold a .om, and gives the registrar 24 hours to verify documents.
We are not saying any reseller is acting unlawfully. International resellers are not TRA-accredited registrars; they buy through intermediaries and price for their own risk, support and paperwork. That is a commercial decision they are entitled to make.
We are saying that Oman publishes a fee of OMR 5 a year and a mark-up cap of 100%, and that a price three hundred times higher is worth a phone call before you accept it. Ask a TRA-accredited registrar what they charge you directly.
| Item | Amount in the regulation | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Registration or renewal, any zone | OMR 5 per year | Article 33 |
| Registrar's maximum mark-up | 100% of the fee | Article 35 |
| Transfer to a new owner, standard name | OMR 25 | Article 33 |
| Transfer to a new owner, premium name | OMR 50 | Article 33 |
| Transfer between registrars | No fee | Article 22 |
| One reseller's advertised price | USD 311.99 per year | 101domain — secondary |
The rules changed on 11 December 2025, and the change is not in the Gazette
Read the gazetted regulation and you will find that foreign access to .om is discretionary, not automatic. Article 8 lists who may hold a .om — Omanis, state bodies, foreign embassies, and companies, NGOs and non-profits licensed in Oman — and then adds that the Authority may permit foreigners and foreign entities. For .com.om and .co.om the wording is the same in substance: registered commercial enterprises in Oman, and the Authority may permit foreign businesses subject to conditions it sets.
Those conditions are not in the Gazette. On 11 December 2025 the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority is reported to have exercised that discretion: the requirement to produce a trademark certificate was dropped, and a foreign company may now register .om, .com.om and .co.om on a scanned copy of its commercial registration or equivalent company documents.
We could not find that change in any published instrument. We searched qanoon.om's index of TRA decisions for 2024, 2025 and 2026 and found decisions on radio frequencies, postal services, retail tariffs, invoicing systems, international cables, cloud computing and dispute settlement — and no decision amending the Domain Names Regulation. That is consistent, because the 2022 regulation already delegates the conditions to the Authority. But it means the operative rule for a foreign registrant exists only in TRA's administrative practice and in bulletins published by intellectual-property firms.
The only accounts of the December 2025 change are secondary, and they do not agree with each other.
CWB reports that the requirement for the domain to match the company name exactly was removed. Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property reports that the domain must still match the company name, provided it does not conflict with a trademark registered in Oman. Abounaja reports that it must correspond to the company's legal name, brand or business activity and that a local trustee or administrative contact in Oman is generally required.
We are not going to pick one. There is no published rule to check them against. If the name-match point or the local-contact point decides whether your registration works, put the question to a TRA-accredited registrar in writing before you buy anything.
So can a foreigner or a foreign company hold a .om?
On the current reporting, yes — a foreign company can, on company documents alone, and this is genuinely easier than it was before December 2025. The Arabic .عمان zone is a different matter: under the regulation it is restricted to Omanis and to entities licensed inside Oman, with no equivalent discretion written in. Whether a foreign registrant needs a person or entity inside Oman as an administrative contact is the one point we cannot resolve. One of the three secondary sources says yes and the other two do not mention it. There is no published requirement either way.
No Omani law requires a business to have a website
This is worth stating plainly, because a surprising number of setup guides imply otherwise. Nothing in the commercial registration process asks for a domain, a website or even an email address. The government's own service cards make the point: the requirements listed for creating a commercial register for a home business are property documents and a no-objection letter from the owner, at a total cost of OMR 3.6. There is no digital requirement anywhere in the list. The same is true of the activity-code system and of ordinary municipal licensing. A carpentry workshop, a consultancy, a café and a trading company can all register, operate and renew for years in Oman without a web page. If someone is telling you a website is required for your commercial registration, ask them which instrument says so.
Selling online, though, is licensed
The turn comes the moment you take orders or payment through an electronic channel. That is a separate, licensed activity under Ministerial Decision 499/2023, the E-Commerce Regulatory Regulation, published in Official Gazette 1510 on 10 September 2023 and in force ninety days later. Article 2 is unambiguous: e-commerce may not be practised without first obtaining the licence. Article 5 records in the licence the specific electronic means or electronic store you will trade through, and Article 8 requires a defined business address — the address on the licence for an individual, or the commercial registration address for a company.
The licence conditions, the disclosure list, the payment rules and the trust-certificate scheme are covered properly in our separate guide, selling online in Oman and the e-commerce licence. We are not going to duplicate it here.
The .om zones — and two that do not exist
Articles 8 to 17 of the regulation set out eleven zones. Here they are as the instrument actually defines them.
| Zone | Who it is for | Note |
|---|---|---|
| .om | Omanis, state bodies, foreign embassies, and companies, NGOs and non-profits licensed in Oman; the Authority may permit foreigners | The general zone |
| .عمان | Omanis and entities licensed inside Oman only | Arabic script, no foreign discretion written in |
| .com.om and .co.om | Commercial enterprises registered in Oman; the Authority may permit foreign businesses on conditions | Two zones, one rule |
| .net.om | Licensed telecommunications and IT service providers | Not a general business zone |
| .org.om | Public-benefit NGOs, professional societies, unions and non-profits licensed in Oman | Not for trading companies |
| .edu.om | Accredited educational institutions, government or private | Accreditation is checked |
| .med.om | Licensed healthcare institutions, government or private | Licensing is checked |
| .gov.om | State administrative units and public bodies | Closed to business |
| .museum.om | State museums and licensed private museum operators | Rarely used |
| .me.om | Omanis and residents of Oman | Introduced by the 2022 regulation |
Two zones that appear on almost every list you will find online are .sch.om and .pro.om. Neither appears anywhere in the current regulation. They are legacy entries that have been copied forward for years. If a registrar offers you one, ask them to point at the article. The Arabic zone .عمان is a real internationalised domain and Oman operates it alongside .om. It is worth knowing about if your customers search in Arabic, but be realistic: Arabic-script domains still break in a meaningful number of applications, and the regulation shuts foreign entities out of it entirely.
Term, renewal, and how you lose a name
The mechanics are set out in Articles 18 to 23 and they are tighter than most registries.
- Term: one to five years (Article 19). A registrar has 24 hours to act on a renewal request.
- Verification: 24 hours (Article 18). The registrar must process the request electronically on receipt and verify the documents within a day. If something is missing you get three days to supply it, after which the domain is deleted.
- Expiry: 30 days of grace, then 30 days on hold (Article 20). During the hold period the name cannot be used or modified — only renewed. After that the registration ends.
- Deletion on request (Article 23): the name becomes available again five days later.
- Changing registrar (Article 22): you supply the password, the new registrar must decide within three days, and no transfer fee may be charged between registrars.
Selling a domain to someone else is a different transaction: the outgoing owner supplies the password and a written request, the incoming owner supplies a letter accepting the conditions, and the transfer fee under Article 33 applies — OMR 25, or OMR 50 for a premium name.
If there is a dispute over a name
Article 32 is the whole of it. The Authority adjudicates disputes between registrars, and between a registrar and a domain owner, and it may refer registrar-to-registrar disputes to an arbitration body on a list it publishes. Separately, Article 38 lets the Authority suspend or delete a domain that breaches the regulation, with a 30-day window to appeal. There is no published Omani equivalent of the UDRP — no panel, no published procedure for a trademark owner to recover a .om from a squatter, no published decisions. If you are relying on being able to claw back a name later, understand that you are relying on an unpublished administrative process.
Does a .om help you? No published Omani rule prefers one
We looked for a rule that ties any benefit to holding a .om — in government procurement, in the e-commerce licence conditions, in consumer protection, in any activity licensing. We found none. Ministerial Decision 499/2023 does not require an e-commerce licensee to use a .om. The tender materials do not require suppliers to hold one. No licensing authority we could find treats it as a condition.
So a .com is legally equivalent, and the choice is a commercial one rather than a compliance one. A .om signals that you are actually in Oman, which matters to some customers and to nobody else. A .com is easier to move, easier to sell, and works with every registrar and every service on earth. The one asymmetry worth weighing: a .om is cheap under the regulation and expensive through international resellers, so the real cost depends entirely on whether you can deal with an accredited registrar directly. Plenty of Omani businesses hold both and point one at the other.
Hosting: there is no Omani data-residency rule for an ordinary business website
There is no Omani instrument requiring a private company's website, or its customer data, to sit on servers inside Oman. No general data-localisation law exists. If you have been told otherwise, you have probably been told a rule from a neighbouring country.
What does exist is the Personal Data Protection Law and its executive regulations, Ministerial Decision 34/2024, published in Official Gazette 1531 on 4 February 2024. Article 37 requires the explicit consent of the data subject before personal data is transferred outside Oman, and provides that the transfer must not harm national security or the interests of the state. There are exceptions for treaty obligations and for data anonymised so that the individual cannot be identified by any means. There is no permit to apply for, no whitelist of approved countries, and no registration step. Article 40 does allow the Ministry to ask for an assessment of the protections at a foreign processor. Article 21 requires the controller to publish its personal data protection policy in a visible place, setting out how individuals exercise the rights the law gives them. That is the closest thing in Omani law to a mandatory element on a website.
The timing matters now. The original decision gave organisations a compliance period, and Ministerial Decision 6/2025, published in Official Gazette 1580 on 19 January 2025, amended Article 2 to extend it to two years from implementation. That period ran out in February 2026. The law is in full force today.
Put those two articles next to an ordinary small-business website and the practical consequence looks like this: a contact form, a booking form or a newsletter sign-up on a site hosted outside Oman moves personal data across the border, and Article 37 asks for the person's explicit consent to that. A published privacy page is what Article 21 asks for.
That is our reading of what the articles require. It is not a rule we found stated in those words by any Omani authority, and MTCIT has not published guidance applying the PDPL to small business websites. We are flagging it because it is cheap to comply with — a checkbox and a privacy page — and because almost nobody does.
The cloud regulation binds your host, not you
You may be pointed at TRA Decision 1152/2/19/2024-20, the Cloud Computing and Data Centre Services Regulation, published in Official Gazette 1564 on 29 September 2024. Read it and you will see it regulates providers. Article 2 prohibits establishing, operating or providing cloud computing or data centre services without a licence. Article 12 restricts moving higher-classified content out of Oman without the Authority's approval and requires providers to notify and get prior approval from subscribers before certain international transfers. Article 14(2) requires a provider to disclose the data centres it uses inside and outside Oman.
None of that licenses or restricts a business that simply buys hosting. A company in Oman renting a server or a shared hosting plan from a foreign provider needs no licence under this regulation. It is worth knowing precisely because you will be told otherwise.
What must appear on the page, and what must appear on the invoice
This is where most guidance blurs together three different obligations that bind three different things. The Executive Regulation of the Consumer Protection Law, Decision 77/2017, published in Official Gazette 1185 on 12 March 2017, is about documents and products, not web pages. Article 12 requires the invoice to carry the supplier's name, the name of the commercial establishment, the commercial registration number and their full particulars, and requires the invoice to be in Arabic, though another language may accompany it. Article 23 requires Arabic to be among the languages used for product data and labelling.
Neither of those articles binds your website. There is no Omani instrument we could find requiring a business website to be in Arabic, to display a commercial registration number, or to display a VAT number.
What does bind an electronic store is Article 9 of Ministerial Decision 499/2023: accurate data about the goods or services, the measures protecting consumer data, the complaints procedure, the tax number if there is one, the licence number and trade mark, contact and customer-service details, the return and exchange policy, and the terms of use. Note what is on that list and what is not: the licence number is required, the commercial registration number is not, and Arabic is not mentioned.
| Requirement | What it binds | Instrument |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier name, trade name, CR number, in Arabic | The invoice | Decision 77/2017, Article 12 |
| Arabic among the languages of product data | The product and its labelling | Decision 77/2017, Article 23 |
| Licence number, trade mark, tax number, contact, complaints, returns, terms | The electronic store | MD 499/2023, Article 9 |
| Data protection policy in a visible place | The data controller | MD 34/2024, Article 21 |
| Having a website at all | Nothing | No instrument found |
The law everyone still cites was repealed
Almost every English-language page on Omani websites and e-commerce cites the Electronic Transactions Law, Royal Decree 69/2008. It is no longer in force. Decree.om carries the repeal note on the face of the 2008 decree: it was repealed by Royal Decree 39/2025, the new Electronic Transactions Law, dated 9 April 2025 and published in Official Gazette 1591 on 13 April 2025, in force the following day. The new law runs to 37 articles where the old one had 54.
We are not going to tell you what RD 39/2025 requires of a website operator, because we have not read its body — the full text sits behind a subscription wall and we could not retrieve it. What we can tell you is that any advice you are given that rests on RD 69/2008 rests on a repealed instrument, and that whether the old supplier-disclosure duties survived into the new law is a question we cannot answer from published sources.
Where the official record stops
Three things we tried to establish and could not:
- The list of accredited registrars. The registry site at registry.om was unreachable throughout our research. We know from Muscat Daily that a sixth registrar, Cloud Acropolis, was accredited on 28 April 2026 — so there were six as at that date — but we cannot name them. Ask TRA directly on the contact details published at tra.gov.om.
- A domain dispute policy. Nothing beyond Article 32. No panel, no procedure, no published decisions.
- Registration statistics. No published figure for how many
.omdomains exist, in any zone.
This is the single biggest source of wrong information on this subject. The United Arab Emirates regulator was also called the TRA until it was renamed TDRA in 2021. Search for "TRA domain rules" and most of what comes back is Emirati.
Nothing about .ae applies in Oman: not the mandatory trade licence check, not aeDA's registrar rules, not Emirati pricing. Oman does not issue trade licences at all — it issues a commercial registration. Saudi Arabia's SaudiNIC presence requirements and the Saudi e-commerce regulation's on-site disclosure duties are likewise Saudi, not Omani. And there is no "GCC data localisation rule" — each country legislates separately, and Oman has not legislated localisation.
Do I need a website to get a commercial registration in Oman?
How much does a .om domain cost in Oman?
Can a foreign company register a .om domain?
Is a .com acceptable for a business in Oman, or do I need a .om?
Do I have to host my website or my customer data inside Oman?
Does my business website have to be in Arabic, or show my CR number?
We are a Sanad office in Al Ghubra. We cannot register a domain for you — that is a job for a TRA-accredited registrar — but we do handle the commercial registration and the e-commerce licence that sit underneath it, and we would rather tell you a requirement does not exist than sell you compliance with one that does not.