Since 18 May 2026 the legal character of property registration in Oman has changed. Registration used to be strong evidence of what you owned. It is now the thing that makes you the owner at all. Royal Decree 56/2026, the Real Estate Registry Law, took effect the day after its publication in Official Gazette 1648 and repealed the registry system that had run since Royal Decree 2/98.
Registration is now constitutive, not evidential
Two articles carry the whole change. Article 35 reads that nothing is accepted in proof of ownership of a property or a real estate unit except the title deed issued by the Real Estate Registry Office. Article 10 makes registration compulsory for every disposition that creates, confirms or transfers a real property right — including final judgments of the Omani courts — and then says that an unregistered disposition has no effect other than a personal obligation between its parties. Article 5 is the same rule stated positively: what is registered is binding on everyone.
RD 56/2026 contains no provision requiring you to register within any number of days or months of signing. We read all 40 articles. The only time limit anywhere in the law is in Article 22, and it applies to court judgments, not to ordinary sales.
There is also no transitional grace period and no grandfathering clause for property that was never registered under the old system. The law repealed RD 2/98 outright and said nothing about legacy holdings.
The absence of a deadline is not leniency. Under the old regime a late registration meant a weak position. Under Article 10 it means there is no real right at all — only a personal claim against the other party, worth nothing against a third party, a creditor, or a subsequent buyer who registers first. If a source tells you that you must register within X days in Oman, that number is not from this law.
Who you are actually dealing with
The ministry is the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning (MHUP), وزارة الإسكان والتخطيط العمراني. Its site is at mohup.gov.om — not mhup.gov.om, which is a common enough slip that it is worth stating. Inside the ministry, every registration act is performed by أمانة السجل العقاري, the Real Estate Registry Office; Article 36 of the new law gives the Registry Director the power to sign title deeds, with an express carve-out from the general rules on delegation. The ministry's own platform is Amlak (منصة أملاك), and you sign in to it, and to the MHUP services on gov.om, with the national digital identity THEQA.
| Channel | What it is | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Amlak online, via mohup.gov.om or gov.om | The ministry's own platform, THEQA sign-in. Every gov.om service card gives this as the delivery channel | The schedule fee, plus the OMR 5 application fee that appears on almost every card |
| Oman Post counters | A confirmed agent channel with its own published MHUP price list | A flat OMR 5.500 margin over the underlying fee |
| Licensed brokerage offices | MHUP states that Amlak operates in cooperation with real estate brokerage offices and companies | Their own commission. No published state fee for the intermediation |
We looked for this specifically and could not establish it either way — and the reason is itself the finding. The regulation now governing Sanad centres is PASMED Decision 443/2022, whose Article 2 repealed the older Raffd Fund Decision 16/2014 that most writing on this subject still cites. Decision 443/2022 publishes no list of permitted services at all: Article 2 confines centres to the services “listed in the system” and requires the Authority’s approval before any others are added. That register is not public. Every MHUP service card we checked on gov.om gives the channel as online only.
The honest position, and ours: a Sanad office can help you prepare and submit an online MHUP application, the way it would help with any other online form. We could not find it named anywhere as a statutorily authorised MHUP counter — but nor could we find a published list that rules it out. Treat a confident claim either way as unsourced.
So nobody can answer this from published sources — not you, and not us. There is no public list of what a Sanad centre is authorised to do. The commerce ministry announced an expansion of the Sanad service range in January 2026 without naming entities, and no published instrument adds MHUP registry services to it. Anyone quoting you a definitive answer is quoting the repealed 2014 annex.
One instrument sets every fee
The whole schedule is Ministerial Decision 570/2025, the regulation of values, fees and prices collected by MHUP, dated 19 January 2025 and published in Official Gazette 1581 on 26 January 2025. It repealed MD 43/2012 and MD 92/2016, and it runs to fourteen annexes: land grant values, extensions, excess areas, usufruct, food-security projects, land use change, registration and documentation, brokerage licensing, development services, owners' associations, contract forms, maps, other services, and exemptions. It was amended by Ministerial Decision 36/2026, dated 22 April 2026, published in Official Gazette 1645 on 26 April 2026 and in force the following day. MD 36/2026 changed one registration row, adjusted two exemptions, and added a pasture item — nothing else.
The nationality question, settled
The most repeated claim about Omani property is that transfer costs 3% if you are foreign and 1% if you are Omani. It is not in the fee tables. Annex 7 sets one sale rate — 3% of property value — and it is nationality-blind. So is Annex 1, the land grant and ownership values annex, which prices purely by governorate and land use. The 1% figure does exist, but it belongs to two rows that have nothing to do with citizenship: row 2, an individual transferring registered property into a company he wholly or half owns, and row 3, an investment fund buying property. And row 2's 1% no longer exists at all — MD 36/2026 replaced it with a flat OMR 40 on 27 April 2026, which on a OMR 200,000 property takes the charge from OMR 2,000 to OMR 40.
Nationality does appear in the schedule, twice, and neither instance is a percentage. Annex 11 item 3 prices the non-Omani property ownership application form — استمارة طلب تملك العقار لغير العمانيين — at OMR 25. That is the line that shows up on the gov.om sale service card as a separate charge. The second instance is in the advertising rows of Annex 9, which we are not publishing (see below). Beyond that, nationality enters the schedule only through Annex 14, where the exemptions are keyed to statuses only Omanis hold — family income support, housing assistance, retirees, general councils — rather than to nationality as such.
That is the whole difference, and it is a flat form fee from Annex 11, not a rate. The 3% registration fee in Annex 7 row 1 applies to the buyer regardless of passport.
This resolves the question our buying guide could only flag as unsettled. At annex level the tables are unambiguous: there is no citizenship split in the registration percentages.
The specific secondary source we traced the claim to: the property costs page at omanpropertyinvestment.com states "3% for foreigners" and "1% (reduced from 2% in January 2026)" for Omanis. It cites RD 12/2006 and the ministry in general terms and gives no legal source for the percentages themselves. The "reduced from 2% in January 2026" line corresponds to no instrument we could find — MD 570/2025 is January 2025, and its Annex 7 row 1 has read 3% from the day it was issued. This is a commercial page doing its best with a confusing schedule rather than anything worse, but it should not be used as an authority.
What everything costs
Registration and transfer — Annex 7
| Item (Annex 7 row) | Fee | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Sale deed; gift from a non-relative or beyond the first degree | 3% of property value | No nationality split |
| 2 — Individual transferring property into a company he wholly or 50% owns | OMR 40 | Was 1%; changed by MD 36/2026 |
| 3 — Investment fund purchasing property | 1% of value | Unchanged |
| 4 — Islamic bank to buyer, first sale deed | 0.5% of value | Annex 14 item 7 also exempts these |
| 5 — Units in integrated government housing projects | OMR 100 | Covers grant, sale, mortgage and deed |
| 6 — Transfer of a usufruct right | 3% of the value of standing structures | Not of the land |
| 7 — Single inheritance registration | OMR 20 | Disputed by the service card |
| 8 — Multiple inheritances in one transaction | OMR 40 | Disputed by the service card |
| 9 — Heir divestment (تنازل) | OMR 20 | |
| 10 — Gift between first-degree relatives; wills | OMR 20 | |
| 11 — Estate or co-owner division | OMR 20 | Disputed by the service card |
| 12 — Exchange (مبادلة) | 2% of each property's value | Charged on both sides |
| 13 — Mortgage registration | 0.5% of mortgage value | Capped at OMR 100,000 |
| 14 — Development Bank mortgage | OMR 100 | Flat |
| 15 — Mortgage cancellation | OMR 20 | |
| 16 — Mortgage transfer | OMR 10 | |
| 17 — Usufruct contract registration | OMR 25 | |
| 18 — Ownership registration | OMR 20 | |
| 19 and 20 — Notary visit to your premises | OMR 150 | OMR 5 if the applicant is disabled or unable to attend |
Deeds, maps and the small services — Annexes 12 and 13
| Service | Fee | Annex |
|---|---|---|
| Title deed extraction, Arabic or English | OMR 10 | 13 |
| Replacement deed, lost or damaged | OMR 30 | 13 |
| Property data certificate | OMR 10 | 13 |
| Survey map (كروكي) | OMR 10 | 13 |
| Landmark delivery for a plot (تسليم معالم) | OMR 10 | 13 |
| Registry annotation (تأشير) | OMR 10 | 13 |
| Name correction on a title deed | OMR 10 | 13 |
| Copy of a document | OMR 1 per page | 13 |
| Utility or service route approval, up to 3 km | OMR 20, then OMR 5 per km | 13 |
| General location map approval | OMR 10 | 13 |
| Expedited service | OMR 100 | 13 |
| Paper extract plan, A-0 to A-3 | OMR 15 | 12 |
| Digital map, 100 m by 200 m | OMR 10, then OMR 25 per further unit | 12 |
| Digital map, 1 km by 2 km | OMR 50, further area pro rata | 12 |
Land use, brokerage and forms — Annexes 6, 8 and 11
| Item | Fee | Annex |
|---|---|---|
| Residential to commercial, mixed, industrial or tourism | OMR 3.000 per m² in Muscat governorate and Salalah; OMR 2.000 per m² elsewhere | 6 |
| Agricultural to commercial, mixed, industrial or tourism | OMR 1.000 per m² | 6 |
| Agricultural to residential | OMR 0.500 per m² | 6 |
| Green lodge on agricultural land | OMR 1.000 per m² | 6 |
| Additional housing unit on agricultural land | OMR 0.100 per m² | 6 |
| Brokerage company or office licence, issue and renewal | OMR 50 | 8 |
| Replacement brokerage licence | OMR 25 | 8 |
| Broker card, issue and renewal | OMR 15 | 8 |
| Replacement broker card | OMR 5 | 8 |
| Sale, mortgage, gift or exchange contract form | OMR 2 | 11 |
| Usufruct contract form | OMR 5 | 11 |
| Non-Omani property ownership application form | OMR 25 | 11 |
| Ownership-proof application form | OMR 25 | 11 |
| Grievance form against an ownership-proof decision | OMR 25 | 11 |
The exemptions almost nobody publishes — Annex 14
Annex 14 has eleven items and is the part of the schedule most likely to be worth real money to a reader, which is precisely why it is missing from the portals. Two of its items — 4 and 7 — were amended by MD 36/2026.
- Income at or below OMR 300 a month, and people not in work — exempt from residential land value and registration fees.
- Persons with disabilities — exempt from all fees under the regulation, with stated exceptions.
- Family income support beneficiaries — exempt from all fees except sales and transfers for consideration, exchanges with a balancing payment, mortgages, mortgage cancellations, margin annotations for mortgages, ownership-by-price registration and excess-area registration.
- Housing assistance programme beneficiaries — a one-time exemption from deed issuance, sale, and mortgage and discharge fees on a plot or residential unit.
- Retirees on more than OMR 300 a month — 50% off the value of granted land.
- General (municipal) councils — land values, registration and landmark fees, deed extraction.
- Islamic banks registering property on purchase — all sale-deed fees.
- Waqf — all waqf registration fees. Note that Article 17 of RD 56/2026 requires a waqf property to have a title deed before it can be registered as waqf.
- Court or administrative attachment — both the attachment and its release.
- Land taken for public interest, and administrative renaming — deed issuance, landmark delivery and registration fees where a wilayat, quarter or village is renamed or a plan moves jurisdiction.
Where the fee schedule and the service cards disagree
| Service | MD 570/2025 schedule | gov.om service card |
|---|---|---|
| Inheritance registration | OMR 20 single, OMR 40 multiple (Annex 7 rows 7 and 8) | OMR 30 service fee, OMR 45 total with submission and deed |
| Partition or division | OMR 20 (Annex 7 row 11) | OMR 30 per property, plus OMR 10 per resulting deed |
| Broker card, first issue | OMR 15 (Annex 8 row 3), one figure nationwide | OMR 25 in Muscat, OMR 15 in other governorates |
| Replacement deed | OMR 30 service, OMR 10 deed (Annex 13) | OMR 45 total; Oman Post lists OMR 55.500 lost and OMR 35.500 damaged |
The pattern matters more than any single row. The statutory schedule and the operational service cards do not reconcile, and the gap runs in the same direction every time — the counter asks for more than the annex says. The likely explanation is that the cards bundle submission, form and printing charges that the annexes price separately, but on the broker card the schedule has no geographic split at all, so bundling does not explain it. Two practical conclusions: budget from the higher figure, and if you are challenging a charge, quote the annex row rather than the card.
The services, one by one
Transferring ownership by sale
Documents are light — title deed, survey map, IDs of seller, buyer and any agent, and the power of attorney. The conditions are the hard part. Both parties must attend in person or be properly represented, must be 18 or over and legally competent, and both must already be registered on the ministry's platform before the application is submitted. Names must match the identity documents exactly. Fees on the card are OMR 5 submission, OMR 25 for the non-Omani sale form where it applies, OMR 10 for the deed, OMR 2 for the contract, and the 3% registration charge, which is why the card shows the total as variable. Stated processing time is 2 days. The card also restates the ownership rules: GCC nationals cannot buy agricultural land or strategic locations, and other foreign buyers are confined to Integrated Tourism Complexes.
Registering an inheritance
The document that unlocks this is the الإعلام الشرعي, the Sharia inheritance certificate, alongside the original deed, the survey map and identity documents. The condition people trip over is that every heir must be registered on the ministry's platform before the application can go in — one unregistered heir stops the whole file. The property must not be under attachment or mortgage unless the mortgagee consents, and minors must be handled through real estate offices. The card gives OMR 5 submission, OMR 30 service and OMR 10 for the new deed, total OMR 45, in 1 day. See the conflicts table for why that OMR 30 does not match Annex 7.
Registering a mortgage, and releasing it
To register, you need the mortgage contract, an official letter from the mortgagee, a certified authorisation letter, the deed, ID and power of attorney, and an updated survey plan if the ministry asks. All parties must attend or be represented, and the property must be free of attachment or any prior mortgage unless consent has been obtained. Fees are OMR 5 submission, OMR 2 for the contract, 0.5% of value and OMR 10 to print the deed; 2 days. Releasing is much simpler: a non-objection letter from the mortgagee, the power of attorney, ID and the deed, at OMR 5 plus OMR 10 plus OMR 20, again 2 days. The OMR 20 release fee is the one figure in this whole article where the schedule and the service card agree exactly.
Replacing a lost or damaged title deed
Both versions cost the same on gov.om — OMR 5 submission, OMR 10 deed, OMR 30 service, OMR 45 total, in 2 days. For a damaged deed you bring the damaged original, the كروكي and your ID. For a lost deed there is an extra step that catches people out, and it is a month long.
You must publish an announcement of the loss in a newspaper, and the application may only be filed after thirty days have passed from publication. That is a condition on the card, not a queue time — the OMR 45 and the 2-day processing sit on the far side of it.
There is a trap in the damaged-deed route as well. If the property details are not legible on the damaged deed, the ministry treats it as a lost deed. You then go back to the newspaper and the thirty days. If a deed is deteriorating, replace it while the details can still be read.
Subdivision, merger and the cadastral plan
Subdivision (إفراز) is the heaviest file on the list: owner and agent ID, power of attorney, deed, cadastral plans, a detailed survey report, a schematic plan, a site survey, a statement of dimensions, an approval memorandum and payment receipts. The card composes the cost as OMR 5 Oman Post, demarcation at OMR 20 in Muscat governorate and Salalah or OMR 10 in other wilayat including Quriyat, OMR 10 per resulting deed and OMR 20 registration per property, and states a minimum of OMR 65 and 60 days. Merger (دمج) is lighter — OMR 5, OMR 0.500 form, OMR 5 cadastral plan and OMR 10 deed, OMR 20.500 total, also 60 days — but the conditions are strict: the deeds and the land use of the plots must match, the merger must not affect site planning, roads or services, and the merged area cannot exceed the sum of the originals. Renewing a cadastral plan is OMR 6.500 plus OMR 5 plus OMR 10, OMR 21.500, and takes 90 days.
Neither إفراز nor دمج appears as a priced line anywhere in the fourteen annexes of MD 570/2025. We checked all of them. There is no subdivision fee and no merger fee in Omani law as published.
What you actually pay is assembled from other annexes — a form price from Annex 11, a cadastral plan and landmark delivery from Annex 13, a deed for each resulting plot, and a registration charge per property from Annex 7. That is why the gov.om cards give a composed figure and a minimum rather than a price.
The practical consequence: for these two services there is no single official number you can hold anyone to. Ask for the breakdown line by line and check each line against the annex it comes from.
Changing land use, and government residential land
Agricultural to residential is priced at OMR 0.500 per m² in Annex 6, and the gov.om card reproduces that exactly, adding OMR 5 service, OMR 4 form approval, OMR 5 cadastral plan and OMR 10 deed, over 35 days. The gates are the real content: a minimum area of 3 acres (12,600 m²), the land must not be irrigated by traditional falaj channels, access roads and services must exist, and a single plot cannot be changed unless it is already affected by the uses of the plots around it. Separately, government residential land for Omani citizens runs through the Choose a Residential Land service: Omani nationality, minimum age 23, applicant must be a family breadwinner, and must never have received residential land or a social housing grant before. Cost is OMR 5 submission, OMR 12 for deed and cadastral plan, and the grant value itself at OMR 1 per m² in Muscat and Salalah or OMR 0.500 per m² elsewhere, in 2 days, applied for in your governorate of residence or work.
What the ministry now demands of brokers and developers
Royal Decree 79/2025, the Law Regulating Real Estate, was published in Official Gazette 1613 on 14 September 2025 and came into force 180 days later, around 13 March 2026. It consolidated three repealed laws into one: the 1986 brokerage law (RD 78/86), the 1989 apartments and floors system (RD 48/89) and the 2018 escrow account system (RD 30/2018). It runs to 65 articles in nine chapters, and the obligations that touch the ministry directly are these.
- A ministry licence before you advertise. Article 6 requires a licence from MHUP before a project is advertised locally or internationally.
- A 10-year structural warranty. Article 18 imposes a ten-year guarantee on fundamental defects, and Article 19 bars unauthorised charges on unit sales.
- Escrow per phase, insulated from insolvency. Article 29 requires a separate escrow account for each project phase; Article 36 holds back a portion for one year against defects; Article 37 puts the escrow account outside the developer's insolvency estate, except to satisfy purchasers.
- Off-plan is corporate only. Chapter IV restricts off-plan projects to corporate developers, voids contracts other than the approved sale agreement (Article 25), and bars transfer of the project land without ministry consent after licensing (Article 27).
- Owners' associations are mandatory, with ministry-approved bylaws, registration on the first unit sale and legal personality on registration (Articles 49 to 52). Article 43 prohibits cutting off access to a unit to force payment of service fees.
- Brokerage and valuation cannot be combined. Article 61 forbids one person practising both. Both require a ministry licence and entry in a ministry register (Article 57), and claims are time-barred after five years (Article 62).
- Penalties. Article 63: one to three years and OMR 10,000 to OMR 100,000 for major violations such as operating unlicensed. Article 64: ten days to six months and OMR 1,000 to OMR 10,000 for unlicensed brokerage or valuation. Article 65: administrative fines up to OMR 10,000, doubled on repetition, with licence revocation available.
Article 3 of the decree gave developers six months from the law's entry into force to register existing off-plan units and prior transactions in the preliminary register. Counting from around 13 March 2026, that window closes around September 2026.
The preliminary register is not a lesser record. Article 25 of RD 56/2026 gives registration in it the same procedures and the same legal evidentiary force as the main register — which is the hinge that connects the two new laws.
If you bought off-plan before March 2026, the question worth asking your developer now is whether your unit is in that register.
On whether a foreigner can be licensed as a broker, the two sources point different ways and the distinction is worth stating precisely. RD 79/2025 is silent on nationality — Article 57 requires a licence and registration but sets no citizenship condition in the published text, deferring the conditions to the executive regulation. The operative gov.om service card, however, requires the applicant to be an Omani national, or a GCC citizen with usual residence in Oman, along with being 21 or over, registered in the commercial registry and an Oman Chamber of Commerce member, of clean record and not an undischarged bankrupt, holding suitable premises in Oman in their own name, and having completed an accredited real estate training course. Fees are OMR 25 in Muscat or OMR 15 elsewhere plus OMR 5 online. So brokerage is closed to non-GCC foreigners in practice, but by an administrative condition rather than by the statute — which means it could change when the regulation lands.
Both executive regulations are missing
Neither new law has an executive regulation. RD 56/2026 directs the Minister to issue one in its second enacting article and, unusually, sets no deadline at all; nearly three months after the law took effect nothing has been published. RD 79/2025 does set a deadline — one year from entry into force, so around March 2027. A sweep of the ministry's published decisions for 2026 turns up only MD 36/2026, a fee amendment. Until the regulations arrive, the old rules continue to the extent they do not conflict, and a long list of things stays undefined: the conditions for replacement deeds (Article 34), the registration application procedure (Article 23), the cases where fees can be refunded (Article 9), access to registry information (Article 30), the escrow initial deposit percentage (Article 31 of RD 79/2025), broker licence categories and duration, and the minority safeguards in owners' associations.
The second enacting article of RD 56/2026 gives the Minister of Housing and Urban Planning the power to license governmental and private entities to authenticate real estate instruments and legal dispositions — الترخيص للجهات الحكومية والخاصة بتوثيق المحررات والتصرفات القانونية — on conditions to be set in the executive regulation.
Because the regulation has not been issued, that power cannot presently be exercised. No private entity can yet be licensed to authenticate a real estate instrument in Oman.
This is the single most consequential pending item in Omani property administration for anyone in the service-centre business, and it is the reason this page will be revisited. It is the legal hook by which private offices could one day authenticate property instruments directly instead of merely submitting forms — and until the regulation defines the conditions, nobody knows who will qualify.
What we could not confirm
- Annex 9, development service fees. Two separate reads of the same official text returned different item numbering and different figures, including for the advertising rows that distinguish Omani and non-Omani display. We are not publishing any Annex 9 number rather than publish one we cannot reproduce consistently.
- Whether Sanad centres have been added to the MHUP channel since 2014. No instrument found either way.
- The MHUP mobile app. Amlak is confirmed as a platform; an app is referenced only by secondary aggregators, and we could not confirm a store listing.
- Several primary sites were unreachable to us — mjla.gov.om, mohup.gov.om's own news pages, omannews.gov.om, housing.gov.om and omanportal.gov.om all blocked automated retrieval. Where a figure here comes from qanoon.om or decree.om reproducing Gazette text, that is what we read.
- ITC residency terms. Ministerial Decision 191/2007 grants two-year renewable residency to non-Omani owners of built units in Integrated Tourism Complexes, but it predates the 2025 and 2026 revisions to property-linked visas, so treat those terms as needing separate checking.
One methodological warning, because it will affect anyone who tries to verify this in Arabic. Bahrain's housing ministry has the identical Arabic name — وزارة الإسكان والتخطيط العمراني — and its pages outrank Oman's on most Arabic searches for the term. Jordan runs its own government platform called سند, so Arabic searches for Sanad services return Jordanian results. And Egypt's housing ministry and its new-cities authority surface on ministerial-decision queries. This topic misleads in three directions before any Emirati content enters the picture, so check the domain before you trust the page: Omani official sources end in .om.
Do foreigners pay a higher property registration fee in Oman?
How long do I have to register a property purchase in Oman?
How much does it cost to register a property sale in Oman?
What do I do if I lose my title deed in Oman?
How much does it cost to subdivide a plot of land in Oman?
Can a foreigner be a licensed real estate broker in Oman?
If you are doing one of these transactions, the two things worth getting right before anything else are that both parties are registered on the ministry's platform, and that whoever attends has authority in the exact form Articles 18 and 19 require — an express written power for the specific act. Our office in Al Ghubra prepares and submits these files online, and can tell you which of the fee lines above will actually appear on your invoice.