Omani public holidays are not set by the Labour Law, and they are not set by an annual ministerial decision either. The list sits in a standalone Royal Decree. The dates you actually get off work are set separately, by announcement — and for National Day they have not matched the decree in 2024, 2025 or 2026.
The holiday list is not in the Labour Law
Royal Decree 53/2023, the Labour Law, deals with official holidays in Article 79. The article is one sentence long. It names no occasion, gives no number of days, and sets no dates. It establishes a pay right and then points somewhere else.
That somewhere else is Royal Decree 88/2022, issued 7 December 2022 and published in Official Gazette 1471 on 11 December 2022. Article 1 of that decree is where the occasions are actually listed, and it applies by its own terms to state administrative units, other public juridical persons, and private-sector establishments — one list, both sectors.
"The worker is entitled to his gross wage during the official holidays prescribed by law."
That is the entire article. Any page that tells you "the Oman Labour Law grants 11 public holidays" or "Article 79 lists the following days" has not read it. The law grants pay; Royal Decree 88/2022 grants the days.
The decree chain, and where Renaissance Day went
The current position is the product of five instruments over thirty years. This chain is the evidence for everything else in this article, so it is worth setting out in full.
| Instrument | Date | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Royal Decree 76/96 | 28 September 1996 | Set the base list: Hijri New Year, the Prophet's Birthday, Al-Isra' wal-Mi'raj, National Day 18–19 November, and the two Eids |
| Royal Decree 27/2006 | 2 April 2006 | Amended RD 76/96 to insert item (d): Renaissance Day, 23 July |
| Royal Decree 56/2020 | 20 April 2020 | Repealed RD 76/96 outright and re-listed the holidays without Renaissance Day |
| Royal Decree 88/2022 | 7 December 2022 | Repealed RD 56/2020; added the Sultan's Accession Day; extended the list expressly to the private sector |
| Royal Decree 15/2025 | 21 January 2025 | Replaced item (d) of RD 88/2022: National Day becomes 20 and 21 November |
So: 23 July Renaissance Day was abolished as a paid public holiday on 20 April 2020. It was not moved to another date, and it was not merged into National Day. Royal Decree 56/2020 repealed the decree that contained it and simply left it out, and neither RD 88/2022 nor RD 15/2025 brought it back. The occasion still exists as a national anniversary. The day off does not.
Renaissance Day. Pages still listing 23 July as a holiday are five years out of date. Pages listing it on 19 November are wrong twice over — it was never on 19 November, and it no longer exists.
New Year's Day, 1 January. It appears on several HR and payroll vendor calendars for Oman. It appears in none of RD 76/96, RD 56/2020, RD 88/2022 or RD 15/2025. It is not an Omani public holiday.
A separate Arafat Day. Oman does not have one. 9 Dhu al-Hijjah is the first day of the decreed Eid al-Adha window (9–12 Dhu al-Hijjah), not a holiday alongside it. Splitting them is a Saudi or UAE pattern imported by mistake.
More generally: UAE and Saudi rules rank very highly on the same searches and differ from Oman's. If a source cites MOHRE, HRSD, GOSI, Qiwa, Mudad or Tas-heel, it is not describing Oman.
The 2026 calendar as actually announced
There is now a published annual list, and that is new. On 28 December 2025 the Council of Ministers approved a policy of announcing the dates of national and religious holidays in advance, at the start of each Gregorian year — expressly excluding the two Eids. The Ministry of Labour published the 2026 dates the same day. Before that policy, occasions were announced one at a time, days or weeks ahead.
| Occasion | 2026 dates | Status on 29 August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| HM the Sultan's Accession Day | Thursday 15 January | Taken |
| Al-Isra' wal-Mi'raj | Sunday 18 January | Taken |
| Eid al-Fitr 1447 | Thursday 19 – Monday 23 March, work resumes 24 March | Taken |
| Eid al-Adha 1447 | Tuesday 26 – Saturday 30 May, work resumes 31 May | Taken |
| Hijri New Year 1448 | Thursday 18 June | Taken |
| Birth of the Prophet | Thursday 27 August | Taken |
| National Day | Wednesday 25 – Thursday 26 November | Still to come |
25 and 26 November are the only official holiday days left in 2026. Nothing else in the published list falls after 27 August. This calendar was verified on 29 August 2026; if you are reading it later, treat the National Day entry as the one to re-check.
The two Eids sat outside the advance list and were announced separately, as the policy provides. Eid al-Fitr was announced by the Ministry of Labour on 11 March 2026 to begin on 29 Ramadan, Thursday 19 March, with work resuming Tuesday 24 March. Eid al-Adha was announced on 18 May 2026 to begin on 9 Dhu al-Hijjah, Tuesday 26 May, with work resuming Sunday 31 May. Both announcements covered the public and private sectors in a single statement. Eid dates follow the Main Committee for Determining the Beginnings of Hijri Months, the moon-sighting body, not the Ministry.
Decreed dates and observed dates are not the same thing
This is the part that catches people out, and it is not a rounding error. The decree gives fixed positions in the Hijri and Gregorian calendars. The announcement gives the days you actually stop work. In 2026 they differ for every single occasion.
| Occasion | What the decree says | Observed in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Accession Day | Named, with no Gregorian date attached in the decree text | Thursday 15 January |
| Al-Isra' wal-Mi'raj | 27 Rajab | Sunday 18 January |
| Hijri New Year | 1 Muharram | Thursday 18 June |
| National Day | 20 and 21 November, per RD 15/2025 | Wednesday 25 – Thursday 26 November |
The pattern is unmistakable once you line the dates up: every 2026 occasion has been placed on a Thursday or a Sunday, so that it abuts the Friday–Saturday weekend. National Day 2026 would otherwise have fallen on the weekend itself — 20 November 2026 is a Friday — and been worth nothing.
The only legal hook for this is a single open-ended clause in Royal Decree 88/2022: the dates of the holidays may be modified if the public interest so requires. No official document publishes the shifting as a rule. There is no stated criterion, no published method, and no announcement explaining why Accession Day moved from 11 to 15 January or why National Day moved to the 25th. We can show you the pattern; we cannot show you a rule, and we are not going to pretend the pattern is one.
It is not confined to 2026. National Day was announced for 20–21 November 2024 while the decree still said 18–19 November, and the decree was amended to match two months later by RD 15/2025. In 2025 it was announced on 9 November for 26–27 November — again not the decreed dates — this time by a Royal order relayed through the Oman News Agency rather than a ministry circular. Three consecutive years, three departures from the decree.
Why this article does not give you 2027 dates
No official 2027 holiday list exists. Under the December 2025 policy one is due at the start of each Gregorian year, so the 2027 list should appear around late December 2026. As at 29 August 2026, no Omani government source has published a single 2027 date. Every 2027 Oman calendar currently circulating is an aggregator's astronomical projection. Those projections compute the Hijri dates and stop there — which is exactly the step Oman's own announcements have departed from in each of the last three years. Planning a shutdown, a shipment or a board meeting around a projected 2027 Omani holiday means planning around a date the government has not set and has a recent habit of not using.
Public sector and private sector get the same holidays
This is a persistent source of confusion and the answer is short: the list is identical. Article 1 of RD 88/2022 applies one set of occasions to state administrative units, other public juridical persons and private-sector establishments together, and since the Ministry of Labour was established by Royal Decree 89/2020 the announcements are issued once, for both sectors, in the same statement. The confusion has two real roots. Historically the government sector did receive longer Eid breaks than the private sector, and articles from that era still circulate. And under the old law, Royal Decree 35/2003, private-sector holidays were set by a decision of the Minister under Article 65 — a separate instrument from whatever governed the civil service. Article 79 of the 2023 law changed that wording to holidays "prescribed by law", pointing at the Royal Decree that already covered both sectors. That is the single most important structural change in this area.
The one genuine difference is operational, not legal. Businesses that must keep running through a holiday — hospitals, hotels, utilities, security, continuous plant — are told in each announcement to give affected staff either substitute leave days or additional compensation. That is the Article 71 mechanism described below. It is not an exemption from the holiday; it is a different way of paying for it.
Working hours: Article 70
Article 70 is a single sentence carrying five separate rules. Read it carefully, because two of them are commonly misapplied.
- Eight actual working hours a day, maximum.
- Forty actual working hours a week, maximum.
- One hour a day for rest and meals, which must fall within the working day but is not counted inside the eight. A standard day is therefore nine hours on the premises, eight of them worked.
- No more than six hours of continuous work without a break.
- In Ramadan, six hours a day or thirty hours a week — for Muslim workers.
Ramadan hours
The Ramadan reduction is in the Labour Law itself, which governs the private sector, so it is a statutory private-sector entitlement and not a civil-service courtesy. Employers who treat it as optional for private companies are wrong.
The text limits it, in terms, to Muslim workers. The law does not require an employer to extend the shorter day to non-Muslim staff. Many employers do, and that is entirely proper — but it is a contractual or policy choice, not a statutory obligation, and you should write it into the contract or the internal work regulation rather than assume it. The law also does not specify which six hours, and it does not set the start of Ramadan: that follows the moon-sighting committee, like the Eids.
The summer midday ban
Separately from Article 70, outdoor and construction work is prohibited between 12:30 and 15:30 from 1 June to 31 August. The Ministry of Labour confirmed the ban was operative for summer 2026 and it appears on the Ministry's own FAQ page. We were unable to establish the number of the ministerial decision it rests on, or the penalty for breaching it, so we are not quoting either. If you run outdoor sites, get the current decision reference from the Ministry directly rather than from a summary.
Overtime: Articles 71 and 72
Article 71 sets both a ceiling and a price. The ceiling is that original and additional hours together may not exceed twelve hours in a day. The price depends on when the extra work happens.
| When the work happens | Cash entitlement | Alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Daytime overtime | Basic wage for the extra hours plus at least 25% | Permission to be absent for the equivalent hours |
| Night overtime (9pm–5am) | Basic wage for the extra hours plus at least 50% | Permission to be absent for the equivalent hours |
| A weekly rest day or any official holiday | 100% of the daily basic wage, plus the wage for the day itself | One compensatory day for each day worked |
The night band is not a matter of opinion. Article 16 defines night work as the period between nine in the evening and five in the morning during which the worker is under the employer's direction and supervision. Work landing in that window attracts the 50% rate, not the 25%. Article 71 also requires the worker's consent to overtime, and Article 74 obliges an employer to move a night-shift worker onto days if an accredited medical body certifies they cannot do night work.
Article 72 is the exhaustive list of when consent is not needed. There are two cases and only two:
- Annual stocktaking, budget preparation, liquidation, closing accounts and preparing for a clearance sale — capped at fifteen days a year unless the competent authority licenses longer.
- Preventing an accident, repairing its consequences, averting certain loss of perishable goods, or meeting abnormal pressure — and the employer must notify the competent authority within 24 hours with a statement of the emergency, the overtime worked and the time needed to finish.
A number of payroll and HR pages quote "at least 125% to 200% of basic wage" for working an Omani public holiday. The 125% figure is the daytime overtime rate under Article 71 — basic plus 25% — and it does not apply to holiday work.
Holiday and weekly-rest-day work is priced separately in the same article: 100% of the daily basic wage on top of the wage for the day itself, or one compensatory day per day worked. Paying 125% for a public holiday underpays the employee and is an Article 148 breach.
The weekly rest day — and why nothing says Friday
Article 77 gives the worker a paid weekly rest of not less than two consecutive days, and adds that the worker may not be deprived of it because of absence from work, whether excused or unexcused. That last clause is worth knowing: unpaid absence earlier in the week does not let an employer cancel the weekend. What Article 77 does not do is name the days. Friday and Saturday are the national norm and the government has stated that both sectors follow them, but we could not verify any instrument that fixes Friday and Saturday for private employers, and the Labour Law itself is silent. For a private company the practical position is that the two consecutive days are statutory and *which* two they are is a matter for the contract or the establishment's internal work regulation. If your operation needs a different pair, write it down.
Annual leave, and the overlap question everyone asks
Article 78 gives not less than thirty days of annual leave on the gross wage, not the basic. The worker may not take leave before six months have elapsed from the joining date — note that this is a bar on taking, not on accruing. Unused leave may be carried over up to a maximum of thirty days, and that thirty-day cap does not apply where the reason the leave was not taken was the requirements of the business.
Now the question everyone actually asks: what happens if a public holiday falls inside your annual leave? The Labour Law contains no rule on it. Article 78 does not exclude official holidays or weekly rest days from the thirty days, and Article 79 addresses pay and nothing else. We looked for a ministerial decision filling the gap and did not find one. Claims that Omani public holidays are automatically "added back" to annual leave trace to no instrument we could locate — which does not make them wrong in practice at a given employer, but does mean they are policy, not law, and belong in your contract if you want them.
If a public holiday swallows your weekly rest days, Royal Decree 88/2022 does deal with it: if either or both of the two weekly rest days falls within the holiday days, compensation is made by one day. One day, whether it ate one of your rest days or both.
The same decree adds a specific rule that Friday is compensated if it falls on the first day of either Eid. Cite the decree for this, not the Labour Law — Article 79 says nothing about it.
Penalties
Two articles matter here. Article 147 penalises breach of Article 70 — the working-hours limits — with a fine of not less than OMR 500 and not more than OMR 1,000. Article 148 penalises breach of the weekly rest, annual leave and official holiday articles with a fine of not less than OMR 100 and not more than OMR 300. In both cases the fine is multiplied by the number of workers affected and doubled on repetition, which is what turns a small number into a large one at any real headcount.
Our caveat, and it is a real one: we verified these article numbers and amounts in the official English translation of the Labour Law and on decree.om, which agree with each other independently. We could not retrieve the Arabic Gazette text of Articles 147 and 148 to check them — the Ministry of Legal Affairs and Ministry of Labour sites were unreachable throughout. We also found the list of articles cross-referenced by Article 148 differs slightly between renderings, with one adding a further article. Treat the fine ranges as verified-in-English and the cross-reference list as unconfirmed.
The Ministry of Labour's public FAQ still describes the weekly hours reform as a reduction to 45 hours. Forty-five is the figure from Article 68 of the repealed Royal Decree 35/2003. The current figure, under Article 70 of RD 53/2023, is 40.
We are not flagging this to score a point. If you are about to rely on a government web page for a number, check whether the page is describing the law in force or the law it replaced. Vintage is the most common failure in this whole subject, and it is not confined to consultancy blogs.
For completeness, since the comparison is often asked for: the old law set nine hours a day and forty-five a week (Article 68), a rest break of not less than half an hour (Article 69), two consecutive weekly rest days after five continuous working days (Article 71), and thirty days annual leave after six months (Article 61). The 2023 law cut the day to eight and the week to forty, lengthened the break to a full hour and put it outside counted time, kept Ramadan at six and thirty, kept annual leave at thirty days, and — the structural change — moved the holiday list from a ministerial decision to a Royal Decree.
What are the public holidays in Oman in 2026?
Is 23 July Renaissance Day still a public holiday in Oman?
How many hours a week can you legally work in Oman?
What are you paid for working on a public holiday in Oman?
Do public holidays get added back to your annual leave in Oman?
When will Oman announce the 2027 public holidays?
If you are setting a shutdown calendar, a shift roster or a leave policy, the two dates to hold lightly are National Day 2026 and anything in 2027. We re-check this page against the decrees and the Ministry announcements, and the next real change is due around late December 2026 when the 2027 list is published. Our office in Al Ghubra handles labour-side paperwork day to day and can confirm the current position at the counter if you need it before then.