If you contract for the Omani government, you are graded. The grade comes from the Projects, Tenders and Local Content Authority, it is earned by the value of work you have already completed, and it lives in the Esnad tendering platform. It does not come from the Chamber of Commerce, and it is not set by your registered capital.
The two tables that do not exist
Almost every English-language guide to contracting in Oman contains one or both of the following: a table giving a minimum registered capital for each grade, and a table giving a maximum project or tender value each grade is allowed to bid for. We could not trace either to an Omani government source.
Tender Board Decision 104/2022, the regulation that actually creates the grading system, contains no capital requirement and no tender-value ceiling. Neither do the classification appendices the Authority publishes alongside it — we checked them specifically for رأس المال (capital) and for any maximum tender value, and neither appears. Grades are defined by the value of work you have already completed, not by a ceiling on what you may bid for next.
The figures usually given — Excellent at OMR 250,000 and above, First at OMR 100,000 to 249,999, Second at OMR 50,000 to 99,999, Third at OMR 25,000 to 49,999, Fourth up to OMR 24,999 — trace to a single law-firm blog post published on 9 March 2015. That post names no legal source and describes the figures as tender pre-qualification standards rather than statutory requirements.
An earlier post on the same blog says plainly that there is no direct law or provision defining the benefits and limits attached to company grades. Eleven years later we still could not find one. Treat those capital figures as a dated secondary claim, not as a rule.
Three grading systems people mistake for one
Part of the confusion is that Oman has more than one thing called a grade, and they share the same words — ممتازة (Excellent), الأولى (First), الثانية (Second), الثالثة (Third), الرابعة (Fourth).
- The Esnad classification, run by the Projects, Tenders and Local Content Authority under Decision 104/2022. Five grades, earned by the value of work completed in the last ten years. This is the one that governs government contracting.
- Oman Chamber of Commerce and Industry membership classes, set out in Article 65 of OCCI Decision 40/2023. There are ten of them, not five: International, International Consultancy, Gulf Company, Local Consultancy, Excellent, First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth. Article 65 sets registration and renewal fees per class — Excellent registration OMR 585 and renewal OMR 279 a year, First registration OMR 225 and renewal OMR 108 a year, Fourth registration OMR 33 and renewal OMR 25 a year. It does not say who assigns a company to a class, or on what criteria.
- A capital-based grade on the commercial registration. This is the one in the tables above, and we could not find a published legal basis for it at all.
So when a source tells you Oman has five contractor grades set by the Chamber of Commerce, it has fused the first two systems and got the authority wrong. The Chamber issues a membership certificate you need in order to apply for classification; it does not grade contractors.
Who actually runs the grading
The Projects, Tenders and Local Content Authority (هيئة المشاريع والمناقصات والمحتوى المحلي), which still trades under the old Tender Board acronym GSTB and the tenderboard.gov.om domain. Classification and registration run through its Esnad (إسناد) electronic tendering platform.
The instrument is Tender Board Decision 104/2022, the Regulation for the Classification and Registration of Suppliers, Contractors and Consultancy Offices, published on 12 December 2022. Article 3 repeals the previous Decision 2/91 — the system it replaced had been running since 1991.
- Article 2 — applies to suppliers, contractors and consultancy offices licensed in Oman. Foreign entities bidding in international tenders sit outside it.
- Article 4 — a global company inside an Omani free zone is treated as a foreign entity when it operates outside that zone.
- Article 6 — five grades; and the General Secretariat, not the regulation, determines the main and sub-fields of classification.
- Article 7 — the application documents and the application fee.
- Article 11 — the certificate is valid for not less than one year and not more than five, renewable from 60 days before expiry.
- Article 14 — the department may downgrade or cancel a registration after a 30-day notice to remedy.
Above it sits the Tender Law, Royal Decree 36/2008, whose Article 8(f) gives the Board power to classify and register suppliers, contractors and consultancy offices on the basis of the data they submit, in accordance with a regulation. That is the whole statutory footing: the law delegates, the regulation implements, and the operative detail lives in appendices the Authority can change without a decree.
The five grades and what earns each one
The Authority publishes classification appendices covering five categories — contracting, the conditions for adding a sub-field within contracting, consultancy, services and supply. For contracting, the qualifying test is the value of work you have executed in the last ten years.
| Grade | One project of at least | Or several projects totalling |
|---|---|---|
| Excellent (الممتازة) | OMR 3,000,000 | OMR 5,000,000, with at least one project of OMR 1,000,000 |
| First (الأولى) | OMR 500,000 | OMR 1,000,000, with at least one project of OMR 200,000 |
| Second (الثانية) | OMR 200,000 | OMR 500,000, with at least two projects of OMR 50,000 each |
| Third (الثالثة) | OMR 30,000 | OMR 150,000 |
| Fourth (الرابعة) | Not legible in the published appendix | Not legible in the published appendix |
The Fourth grade row is the honest gap here. The appendix is a scanned document, and repeated readings of the Fourth grade row produced either the Third grade's figures again or an obviously corrupted cell. We are not going to guess at it. If you are applying at the bottom of the scale, ask the Authority directly.
The same appendix sets, for each grade, a number of technical staff, a minimum qualification — a bachelor's degree in the relevant specialisation for the top two grades, a technical diploma below that — and a minimum total headcount: 24 employees for Excellent, 12 for First, 8 for Second, 3 for Third.
The technical staff counts themselves came out differently on each reading of the scanned file. The Excellent row read once as four technical staff of whom 10% Omani, and once as ten Omani plus four expatriate. Rather than publish a number we cannot stand behind, we are telling you the requirement exists and that this is a row to read at the counter.
What Esnad registration costs
Fees are published on the Authority's registration page and are set by grade. Multi-year registration is a straight multiple of the annual fee, up to five years.
| Grade | Application fee | Each additional field | Annual fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excellent | OMR 10 | OMR 5 | OMR 200 |
| First | OMR 10 | OMR 5 | OMR 150 |
| Second | OMR 10 | OMR 5 | OMR 75 |
| Third | OMR 5 | — | OMR 50 |
| Fourth | OMR 5 | — | OMR 50 |
So five years at Excellent grade is OMR 1,000, and five years at Third or Fourth is OMR 250. The Authority states 15 days for processing from the point the application is reviewed. Under Article 11 the certificate itself can run anywhere between one and five years, which is a decision made on your file rather than one you choose.
Which field you register in
Registration is by field, not general. The gov.om description of Isnad lists twelve sectors a company can register in:
- Urban contracting
- Port contracting
- Roads and bridges
- Railways and dams
- Pipeline networks
- Well drilling
- Electromechanical contracting
- Communications
- Consulting
- Public services
- IT services
- Supplies
That top-level list is public. The sub-fields are not. Article 6 of Decision 104/2022 hands the definition of main and sub-fields to the General Secretariat, and no consolidated list of them is published in the regulation or on the Authority's site. Appendix 2 of the classification document deals specifically with the conditions for adding a sub-field within contracting, which is where most arguments about scope actually happen.
What you need before you apply
Article 7 sets the documentary requirements. None of them is unusual, but all of them have to be current, and the commercial registration condition catches people out because it is not simply "valid".
- A commercial registration valid for at least 60 more days
- An Oman Chamber of Commerce and Industry membership certificate
- A municipal licence
- A tax certificate
- Any sector licences your chosen fields require
- An Omanisation certificate — listed on the gov.om description of Isnad alongside the Article 7 documents
- The application fee
How grading meets government tendering
The gov.om page describing Isnad states that institutions and companies must register in one of the listed sectors to be eligible for government tenders. In practice, no Esnad registration means no bid. What is worth knowing is that neither the Tender Law nor Decision 104/2022 contains an express article saying so — the requirement is operational, enforced through the platform, rather than written into the statute.
The financial thresholds people quote from the Tender Law are about who awards a tender, not about which grade may bid for it. Article 15 of Royal Decree 36/2008:
- Internal tender committees inside a government unit handle tenders up to OMR 250,000
- Subsidiary committees in the governorates handle tenders up to OMR 50,000
- A subsidiary committee's decision is final up to OMR 10,000; above that it goes as a recommendation to the head of the unit
Article 36 gives a 10% price preference to national products of small and medium industries.
OMR 250,000 is the value at which a tender moves from a unit's internal committee to a higher level. It is not a cap on what a Second grade contractor may bid for, and no such cap is published anywhere.
What does happen is that individual tender documents restrict eligibility to named grades, tender by tender. That is a condition of that particular tender, set by the issuing entity — not a general rule you can plan against in advance.
The separate engineer gate: OSE accreditation
Since 1 August 2025, professional engineering accreditation from the Oman Society of Engineers is required in order to issue or renew a Ministry of Labour work permit for any engineer working in Oman. The Ministry announced it on 15 June 2025 and applied it to engineers already in post as well as to new hires.
The basis is worth being precise about, because it is unusual. The scheme rests on a cooperation agreement signed in June 2021 between the Ministry of Labour and the Society. We could not find a published royal decree or numbered ministerial decision behind it. If a source cites a decree number for engineering accreditation in Oman, ask where they got it.
| Accreditation tier | Fee |
|---|---|
| Application processing, non-refundable | OMR 35 |
| Associate Engineer | OMR 70 per two years |
| Professional Engineer | OMR 90 per two years |
| Consultant Engineer | OMR 120–165 per two years |
A plain Engineer tier is also listed, with no published fee. The Society does not publish the years of experience required for each tier, nor renewal rules beyond the two-year fee cycle. It states 14 working days to approve an application and up to 21 working days or more to verify a degree obtained outside Oman — that verification is the step that actually sets your timeline. Documents are a photograph, resident card or passport, the degree certificate, a primary-source verification report for foreign degrees, the transcript, and experience certificates from graduation onwards with job descriptions.
The Esnad classification appendices ask for technical staff holding a bachelor's degree or technical diploma in the relevant specialisation. They do not require those engineers to be accredited by the Oman Society of Engineers, or registered with any professional body.
The Society's accreditation bites at the work permit stage, at the Ministry of Labour. So you can satisfy your grade with a qualified engineer whose work permit you then cannot renew. Plan for both, and do not assume clearing one clears the other.
Staffing rules for construction firms
Ministerial Decision 127/2020, issued on 30 March 2020 and published in Official Gazette 1336, governs the recruitment of non-Omani manpower in construction works and brick factories. It is the closest thing to a staffing standard for the sector, and it works off headcount rather than grade.
- Omanisation of at least 10% for firms with 99 or fewer non-Omani workers, and at least 12% for firms with more than 99
- A sliding requirement for engineers and technicians by workforce size, from one professional for 6 to 14 workers up to four professionals for 60 or more
- Full-time management and social insurance registration, with exemptions for government projects, globally rated firms, and firms employing 100 or more workers
- A municipal licence, a tenancy contract and the construction agreement, translated into Arabic where needed
- No outstanding labour violations, and payment of the prescribed fees
Note what is not in it. The decision makes no reference to your grade or to your capital. Your obligations under it are driven entirely by how many people you employ, which means a Third grade company running a large site carries the same engineer requirement as a First grade one.
What we could not establish
- No maximum tender value per grade. Not in Decision 104/2022, not in the appendices. Any article giving you one has invented it.
- No minimum capital per grade. Same two documents, same answer.
- No published list of contracting sub-fields, because Article 6 delegates it to the General Secretariat.
- Fourth grade contracting requirements — the published appendix is a scan we could not read reliably at that row.
- Technical staff counts per grade — present in the appendix, but not legible consistently enough to publish.
- No decision number behind the OSE accreditation requirement.
- No separate contractor register at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning or at the municipalities. Muscat Municipality's building permit service includes a step for changing the contractor on a permit, but we found no municipal or ministry grading register. Searches for one return Saudi and Emirati results — Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Municipalities and Housing runs a contractor classification, and Abu Dhabi's Department of Municipalities and Transport runs another. Neither applies in Oman.
- Whether Royal Decree 36/2008 is still the operative Tender Law in its original form after the Authority was created. The consolidated text sits behind a paywall, and we did not verify it.
Doing this in practice
Is there a minimum registered capital for each contractor grade in Oman?
What is the maximum tender value each contractor grade can bid for in Oman?
How do I get an Excellent grade contractor classification in Oman?
How much does Esnad registration cost in Oman?
Do engineers in Oman need Oman Society of Engineers accreditation?
What is the Omanisation rate for construction companies in Oman?
The order that works is: commercial registration and Chamber membership first, then the municipal licence and tax certificate, then Esnad registration in the specific fields you intend to bid in — and separately, Ministry of Labour work permits with Oman Society of Engineers accreditation for every engineer on the payroll. The grade follows from the projects you can evidence, so a new company starts low by definition and moves up through the Authority's upgrade service as the completed-work file grows. Our office in Al Ghubra can file the Esnad registration and the accreditation applications; the project evidence has to come from you.