If you are planning a small café in Muscat and you have read that you need a 25 m² kitchen and a 30 m² dining hall, stop. Those minimums were abolished in 2018. They are still being quoted as live 2026 requirements by consultancy guides that have not read the amending decision, and they are the single most consequential error in this topic — because they talk people out of premises that are perfectly lawful.
The floor-area minimums were abolished in 2018
The controlling premises regulation for restaurants and cafés is Ministerial Decision 29/2016, the Regulation of Health Requirements for Activities Related to Public Health, issued 4 February 2016 and published in Official Gazette No. 1136 on 21 February 2016. As originally issued it did set minimum areas: a 9 m² store, a 9 m² preparation area, a 25 m² cooking area, a 9 m² washing area and a 30 m² dining hall for a restaurant; for cafés, a class 1 kitchen of 24 m² with a 20 m² dining area, and a class 2 kitchen of 14 m² with a 10 m² dining area.
Ministerial Decision 226/2018, published in Official Gazette No. 1261 on 23 September 2018, amended that regulation. Its Article 6 says, in full, that the minimum condition on the area of the shop or workplace is abolished wherever it appears in the Health Requirements Regulation. Not for one activity, not for cafés only — wherever it appears. Every square-metre figure in the paragraph above was deleted eight years ago. What did not change is the functional zoning — the amendment deleted areas, not compartments, so a kitchen still has to be laid out as a store, a preparation area, a cooking area and a washing area, with the equipment described further down this page.
The 2016 text with the areas in it, and the 2018 decision abolishing them, are both published on qanoon.om. We could not find a consolidated official text of the regulation as amended, and no Muscat Municipality page states the current position either way.
Later-in-time and express-repeal logic clearly favours the 2018 abolition, and that is how we would read it. But we are telling you what the two documents say rather than presenting a single clean answer, because the clean answer does not exist in published form. If an inspector or a consultant quotes you a square-metre minimum, ask them to show you where it survives MD 226/2018 Article 6.
Who licenses what — and who does not
Muscat Municipality is the licensing authority. Under the Muscat Municipality Law, Royal Decree 38/2015, Article 7 gives it the power to licence commercial, professional, industrial, tourism, recreational and health activities (7(5)), to monitor food establishments and food-establishment workers (7(6)), to regulate signboards and advertising (7(20)) and to set its own fees (7(23)). Royal Decree 36/2022, the Governorates System, confirms the position: municipalities issue commercial and industrial licences and carry out food inspection, and Article 19 gives Muscat Municipality elevated status with its own sub-budget rather than sitting as a directorate under the governor.
The Ministry of Regional Municipalities and Water Resources no longer exists. It was abolished by Royal Decree 101/2020, which was itself repealed and replaced by RD 36/2022. Any 2026 content that tells you to apply to MRMWR is stale by six years. The reason MD 29/2016 is still the operative health regulation despite being issued by a ministry that has been dissolved is that the restructuring expressly preserved existing regulations and decisions in force to the extent they do not conflict.
Several published guides refer to the "ROP Civil Defence Directorate". There is no such body. Civil Defence in Oman is the Public Authority for Civil Defence and Ambulance (PACDA — هيئة الدفاع المدني والإسعاف), a standalone authority governed by Royal Decree 39/2021, with its own domain at cdaa.gov.om and its own decision-making power.
The underlying statute is the Civil Defence Law, Royal Decree 76/91, amended by Royal Decree 75/99. Fire prevention and protection requirements in buildings sit in Decision 77/2002, amended by PACDA Decision 234/2019.
This matters practically: you are dealing with a separate authority with its own counters and its own forms, not with a police directorate.
PACDA publishes twelve licence and certificate types, including a facility safety licence, a safety licence for commercial or industrial activities, preliminary safety approval of facility drawings, fire-equipment certification and installation compliance certificates. What it does not publish is a fee schedule, a processing time, or any list of which business types require which licence. MD 29/2016 Article 2 requires "approvals from other concerned authorities" without naming them, and no official page states whether a fit-out tenant in an existing building needs its own PACDA approval or can rely on the landlord's building-level certificate. We flag that as an unanswered question, not as a step we can price.
The sequence, and what each step actually asks for
There is no single official page setting out the end-to-end process. The order below is assembled from the instruments and the Muscat Municipality e-service pages, each of which we can cite; the sequencing is our reading of how they fit together.
- Commercial registration and the economic licence through Invest Easy, with the correct 6-digit activity code. Restaurants and cafés under ISIC 5610 are not on the foreign-investment prohibition list — but the mobile café, code 561008, is closed to foreign investment by MOCIIP Decision 435/2024.
- Premises: a signed lease or title deed. Note MD 29/2016 Article 3 before you sign anything — see the siting rules below.
- Municipal activity licence from Muscat Municipality, issued once the health requirements are met and the other authorities have approved.
- Safety approval from PACDA, where required — see the caveat above about what is not published.
- Health cards for every worker, issued by the municipality.
- Tourism classification certificate, if you fall inside Article 24 of the 2026 Executive Regulation — check this early, because a franchise agreement alone triggers it.
- Separate permits for outdoor tables, and for any signboard that is not a standard storefront sign.
Muscat Municipality's own e-service page for issuing an activity practice licence lists exactly four attachments: a current lease contract or title deed; the signboard design certified by a translation office together with the signboard dimensions; a trademark certificate if a trademark appears on the sign; and the licence certificate issued from Invest Easy. Renewal additionally requires the survey map and the previous licence attachments, and states that the municipal licence must be linked to the economic licence issued by MOCIIP through Invest Easy. Neither page mentions Civil Defence or the Ministry of Health.
Muscat Municipality's FAQ confirms that Sanad offices can complete all Muscat Municipality electronic services except building-permit services, and that licence renewal now runs through the Invest Easy gateway. Outdoor seating is a separate licence with its own document set, including the property owner's written consent for the external area and an undertaking to remove the tables when the contract ends. None of these three service pages publishes a fee or a processing time, and there is no official end-to-end timeline for opening a restaurant in Oman anywhere we could find — every "6 to 8 weeks" figure in circulation is a consultancy estimate presented without a source.
The annual municipal licence fee
Fees are set by Muscat Municipality Decision 1/2018, dated 3 January 2018 and published in Official Gazette No. 1226 on 14 January 2018. The figures below come from the accommodation and food-service schedule of that decision. Note what drives the fee: it is the activity class, not the size of the premises.
| Activity line in Decision 1/2018 | Annual fee |
|---|---|
| High-end and tourist restaurants | OMR 1,000 |
| First-class restaurant | OMR 500 |
| Second-class restaurant | OMR 300 |
| Third-class restaurant | OMR 200 |
| Fast-food outlet | OMR 300 |
| Coffee shop | OMR 125 |
| Café serving mainly food | OMR 75 |
| Café serving mainly drinks | OMR 75 |
| High-grade café | OMR 300 |
| Cafés, general line | OMR 125 |
| Shisha café | OMR 5,000 |
| Mobile restaurant / mobile food service | OMR 150 |
The OMR 5,000 shisha line is not a typo. It is the highest figure in the food-service schedule, forty times the general café line and five times the top restaurant band, and it sits alongside the 5,000 charged to a seven-star hotel. If shisha is part of your concept, it is the dominant licensing cost in your model and it should be decided before you sign a lease, not after.
The fee column header in the decision is worth quoting because it settles a question people pay twice for: the annual fee is stated as the annual amount in Omani rials including a commercial signboard of an area not exceeding 5 m². A separate signboard payment only arises above 5 m², or for a non-standard sign type. Muscat's official Commercial Signboards Guide caps a standard storefront sign at 5 m² and 1.25 m in height, and requires separate permits from the External Advertising Section for rooftop, neon, customised and directional signs. The guide also permits Arabic only, English only, or both — it does not mandate Arabic, and it does not mandate Arabic-first placement.
The Decision 1/2018 PDF has a text layer, so the numerals extract cleanly. The Arabic labels do not — they render with heavy character corruption. The amounts above are reliable; the English activity descriptions attached to them are our best reading of corrupted Arabic labels and should be re-checked against printed Gazette 1226 before you rely on a specific line for a specific concept.
Two separate extractions of the same document also number the accommodation and food-service schedule differently — as Annex 8 in one and Annex 9 in the other, with identical rows and identical figures. We therefore cite the schedule by name rather than by annex number.
For comparison with what circulates online: mawaleh.com's 2026 restaurant-licence article gives a "Muscat Municipality Trade License, OMR 200–400, scaling with premises size". Decision 1/2018 contradicts that at both ends of the range, and the driver is activity class rather than premises size. That page carries nine fee ranges and seven timeline ranges for which we found no official corroboration at all, plus the ROP Civil Defence error. We name its figures only to say they are unverifiable; we do not reproduce them.
Tourism classification — new since April 2026, and widely missed
Ministerial Decision 9901/2026, the Executive Regulation of the Tourism Law, was issued on 16 April 2026 and published in Official Gazette No. 1645 on 26 April 2026. It repealed the previous Executive Regulation and MD 124/2021. Its Article 24 brings a defined class of restaurants and cafés inside the tourism regime.
- Located in a tourist zone or site
- On government tourism land
- Inside a hotel property
- Operating under a franchise agreement
Establishments in any of those four categories must obtain a tourism classification certificate under Article 25. The Ministry decides within 30 days of a complete application (Article 26). The certificate is valid for three years and renewable, with the renewal application due at least 60 days before expiry (Article 27). Annex 1 sets issuance or renewal of a restaurant or café classification at OMR 200 per three-year term, and Annex 2 establishes a single category — "ordinary" — for restaurants and cafés. Article 11 provides for violations up to OMR 4,000. Anyone outside the four categories may apply voluntarily.
Read Article 24 carefully. A franchise agreement is a trigger on its own. An international-brand café on an ordinary Muscat high street — nowhere near a tourist zone, not on tourism land, not inside a hotel — is caught, and needs a tourism classification certificate on top of its municipal licence.
This is four months old at the time of writing and we have not seen it covered in any other guide to opening a restaurant in Oman. If you are signing a franchise or master-franchise agreement, price the classification and the 30-day decision window into your opening schedule.
The premises rules that still apply
MD 29/2016 covers restaurants, fast-food restaurants, cafés, mobile cafés, public kitchens, shawarma and grilled-meat outlets, pastry and fatayer shops, sweet-corn vendors, automated bakeries, food transport vehicles and tourist-ship dining. Article 2 requires the municipal licence to be obtained after the health requirements are met and after approvals from other concerned authorities, and requires the licence to be displayed in a prominent place inside the premises. Article 5 makes the licence non-transferable between people or between premises without the municipality's approval — so you cannot simply buy a licence with a business.
Siting and structure
- No licence may be issued where sewage pipes or a septic tank exist on the premises (Article 3). Check this before you sign a lease; it is not a defect you can remedy with a fit-out.
- Food activities are prohibited in residential-commercial buildings except on the ground floor (Article 4), with an exception for tourist restaurants and cafés.
- Permanent construction in block or cement to approved technical standards.
- Ceiling height not less than 3 m, painted a light colour.
- Non-slip floor tiling or marble, easy to clean; walls tiled internally up to ceiling height.
- Lighting, ventilation and air-conditioning; windows fitted with fine mesh against insects and rodents.
Kitchen zoning under Article 11
- Store — refrigerators and freezers, metal shelving at least 30 cm above floor level, and a separate chemical storage area.
- Preparation area — separate sinks and tables for fish, meat and vegetables, a foot-operated or touch-free hand-wash station, and foot-operated lidded waste bins.
- Cooking area — metal equipment, with non-stainless steel prohibited; extraction hood with oil filters; self-closing extract fans; thermometers on refrigeration units.
- Washing area — a three-compartment stainless-steel sink, metal shelving, hot and cold water.
- Dining hall — a minimum of 1 m between tables.
The temperature rules survive the 2018 amendment intact, because the amendment deleted areas and not temperatures: hot holding at a minimum of 63.5 °C, cold holding at a maximum of 5.4 °C. The same 63 °C threshold reappears in the rewritten mobile-café rules. These are the two numbers most likely to be checked with a probe during an inspection. Toilets, separately, must not open directly onto the dining hall — though they may be shared where the unit sits inside a complex — and need an adequate number of WCs and basins, foot-operated bins, automatic extract fans, and hand-wash stations with soap and disinfectant. Article 8 gives municipality officials with judicial-police status the power to enter and inspect at any time and take samples free of charge; Article 15 of the Food Safety Law, Royal Decree 84/2008, gives food inspectors the same status.
Health cards for your staff
Under MD 29/2016 Article 9(9), every worker must hold a valid health card issued by the municipality certifying freedom from communicable diseases. Periodic medical examination is mandatory. The card must state the specific activity the worker is authorised to perform — so a card is not generic across roles. Workers in food facilities must also complete training courses determined by the municipality.
What no official source publishes is the fee, the validity period, or the test panel. MD 29/2016 mandates the card and the periodic examination and specifies neither duration nor tests. The Muscat Municipality e-services portal exposes a Health Affairs category but no readable health-card service page. This is a genuine void, not a research failure, and it is worth knowing before you build a staffing timeline around it.
Figures do circulate, and they come from different jurisdictions. SEZAD Duqm publishes OMR 10 and five working days for its own health card. The gov.om health-card service, provided by the Public Establishment for Industrial Estates, publishes a zero fee, roughly one day, and a medical examination less than three months old — for businesses in PEIE estates. mawaleh.com states OMR 50–100 renewed annually for a "Municipality Health Certificate", which we could not verify anywhere. Three schemes, three jurisdictions. None of them is "the Oman health card fee", and a restaurant in Al Ghubra is governed by none of the first two.
This is the live contamination risk in Omani food-service content, and it is not the UAE. Arabic searches for the health card return Saudi sources at the top — momah.gov.sa, balady.gov.sa, modon.gov.sa, and Riyadh municipality e-services — none of which have any application in Oman.
The terminology differs and that is what to search on. Oman uses بطاقة صحية — a health *card*, issued by the municipality. Saudi Arabia uses شهادة صحية — a health *certificate*. Search the Omani term, and check the domain before you trust the page.
Tax and the recurring charges
VAT is charged at a standard rate of 5%, with mandatory registration at OMR 38,500 of annual supplies and voluntary registration from OMR 19,250. The framework is Royal Decree 121/2020, issued 12 October 2020 and effective 16 April 2021. The Oman Tax Authority's own VAT FAQ confirms the 5% rate and confirms that certain food items are zero-rated by a Chairman's decision — but it does not publish the zero-rated list, and it does not state whether restaurant meals fall inside or outside it. We are not going to guess at that; ask the Tax Authority in writing if your margin depends on it.
A 4% tourism tax is payable by restaurants and hotel establishments to the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism, quarterly, with penalties for late payment. The official service page requires the establishment to hold a tourism licence or a classified-restaurant certificate — which is the second reason the Article 24 classification question above matters.
The 5% municipality levy is where the sources disagree. Muscat Municipality's own services page lists a monthly hotels-and-restaurants fee of 5%, due by the 25th of the month, alongside a 10% fee for entertainment centres and cinemas. PwC's Worldwide Tax Summaries lists Omani municipal taxes as 3% on property rentals, 5% on hotel occupancy and 10% on leisure and cinema houses — with restaurants not included in the 5%. We could not locate the legal instrument imposing the levy on either reading, so we cannot tell you which is right. Budget for it, and confirm with the Municipality.
Staff, work permits and Omanisation
Ministerial Decision 602/2025 governs labour authorisation and work permits. Employers need written Ministry of Labour approval to recruit non-Omanis; permits run for 24 months. Corporate employer fees per worker are OMR 301 for category 1 professions, OMR 251 for category 2, OMR 201 for category 3 and OMR 301 for the investor category. Article 8 is the one to plan around: fees are reduced by 30% for employers meeting their Omanisation quota and doubled for employers who do not, with the investor category exempt from the doubling.
There is no published Omanisation percentage for restaurants, cafés or food service generally. The only decision that would contain such a table is Ministerial Decision 321/2009 on national workforce percentages in certain professions and private-sector activities, published in Gazette No. 894 on 1 September 2009 — and its PDF is an image-only scan with no text layer. We could not read a single percentage from it and we will not guess one. The Ministry of Labour does not publish a sector-rate table either. Any specific F&B percentage you see quoted online is unsourced. What is documented is the mechanism rather than the rate: establishments that have not met their required quota must file an annual Omanisation plan, any expatriate recruitment request must be accompanied by a plan, and temporary recruitment licences are capped at five individuals per permit, cost OMR 36 and run for six months. Compliance is assessed per establishment against the Ministry's system, and non-compliance is priced through the doubled permit fees above.
Penalties — and the two-tier problem
Two penalty regimes apply to the same restaurant in Muscat, and they do not agree. MD 226/2018 added a national violations table with 49 infractions and fines from OMR 5 to OMR 300, doubling on repeat with possible suspension of the activity. Muscat Municipality Decision 55/2017, published in Gazette No. 1187 on 26 March 2017, sets its own administrative tariff, and it is an order of magnitude harsher on the headline offence.
| Breach | National table (MD 226/2018) | Muscat (Decision 55/2017) |
|---|---|---|
| Operating without a municipal licence | OMR 30 | OMR 300 + work stoppage |
| Worker without a valid health card | OMR 10 | OMR 100 + that worker suspended |
| Food-poisoning incident | OMR 300 | OMR 2,000 + 10-day closure |
| Handling prohibited or adulterated food | OMR 100 | OMR 1,000 + destruction + 3-day closure |
| Breach of personal hygiene | OMR 10 | OMR 20 |
| Improper food storage temperature | Not among the rows we could read | OMR 100 + destruction |
| Failure to display the licence | Not among the rows we could read | OMR 50 |
Both instruments are current and neither expressly disapplies the other. We are not going to resolve it for you — we are telling you that a Muscat inspector has a OMR 300 line and a OMR 30 line available for the same conduct, and that the Muscat tariff also carries work stoppage, which costs far more than either fine. Note too that operating a tourist facility or shopping centre without a licence is OMR 1,000 under the Muscat tariff, which is the band a classified tourist restaurant would sit in. Above both sits the statutory layer. The Food Safety Law, RD 84/2008, Article 22, provides imprisonment of up to one year and/or a fine of up to OMR 10,000, doubled on repeat. The Muscat Municipality Law, RD 38/2015, allows temporary closure of an establishment for up to 10 days or revocation of the licence (Article 17), sets an administrative fine ceiling of OMR 5,000 (Article 19), and provides criminal penalties of OMR 50 to OMR 5,000 and/or imprisonment from 24 hours to six months (Article 14).
What no official source publishes
These are findings, not omissions from this article. Each one is a question we tried to answer from Omani government sources and could not — and part of the reason is that Oman's own business-licensing portal is closed to automated fetching, so the fee schedules behind Invest Easy are not publicly citable:
- No Muscat Municipality health-card fee, validity period or medical test panel. The card is mandatory; its terms are unpublished.
- No Muscat Municipality processing time or fee on the e-service pages for issuing or renewing an activity licence.
- No official end-to-end timeline for opening a restaurant. Every week-count in circulation is an estimate.
- No PACDA fee schedule, no processing time, and no list of which business types need a safety licence. cdaa.gov.om lists the twelve licence types and nothing more.
- No answer on whether a fit-out tenant needs its own PACDA approval or can rely on the landlord's building certificate.
- No published Omanisation percentage for food service.
- The fee for a signboard above the included area is contradictory rather than missing. Decision 1/2018 includes a sign up to 5 m² in the annual activity fee, while the Municipality's own 2019 services guide charges from 3 m² — the two are set out side by side in signboards and shop licences. No fee is published at all for the separate rooftop, neon and customised sign permits.
- No readable text of MD 2/2010, the Food Safety Regulation from Gazette 903, 16 January 2010. The qanoon.om PDF is an image-only scan, so its licensing and health-card provisions are unverified.
- No published Environment Authority category list. EA Decision 107/2023 creates categories A, B and C at OMR 900, 300 and 150 per three-year permit, but assignment of projects to categories is left to a determination by the EA President that is not published — so whether a restaurant needs an environmental permit at all cannot be answered from official sources.
- No traceable legal basis for the 5% municipality levy on hotels and restaurants, on either reading of it.
If you want the paperwork handled
Is there a minimum floor area for a restaurant or café in Oman?
How much is the annual municipal licence fee for a café in Muscat?
Can a foreigner open a restaurant or café in Oman?
Does my café need a tourism classification certificate in Oman?
How much does a health card cost for restaurant staff in Oman?
What is the Omanisation percentage for restaurants in Oman?
Our office is a Sanad centre in Al Ghubra, and Muscat Municipality's own FAQ confirms that Sanad offices can complete all of its electronic services except building permits. That covers the activity licence, the renewal through Invest Easy, the outdoor-tables application and the signboard permits. What we cannot do is tell you a fee or a timeline that the Municipality has not published — and on this topic, that is a lot of them.