Getting into Oman — the two different 14-day rules nobody is separating

If you are trying to work out whether you need a visa for Oman, start by separating two things that were merged in almost every report published in the last week. Oman has a visa exemption for around 100 nationalities, and — since 3 August 2026 — a separate free 14-day tourist visa. They both last 14 days. They are not the same, and one of them lets you stay longer.

The two 14-day rules, and why the difference matters

The first is the visa exemption. If you hold a passport from one of the listed countries, you enter without applying for anything. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs states plainly that this stay is limited to 14 days and cannot be extended or transferred to any type of residence visa. It is an entry permission and a dead end.

The second is a new visa category. ROP Decision 109/2026, issued on 27 July 2026 and published in Official Gazette 1659 on 2 August 2026, added a 14-day tourist visa at nil fee to the Executive Regulation of the Foreigners' Residence Law. It came into force the day after publication. Its defining feature is in the text: the holder may, before it expires, convert it into any other tourist visa category in the Regulation, subject to that category's conditions and fees.

There is a practical catch. The list of nationalities eligible for the new free visa has not been published. The decision delegates it to "the competent authority" and stops. Until ROP publishes that list, nobody can tell you whether your passport qualifies for the convertible version or only for the exemption — and any site that claims to know is guessing.

The decision numbers, settled

Two 2026 decisions have been mixed up in circulation, so for the record. ROP Decision 87/2026, issued 21 June 2026 and published in Official Gazette 1653 the same day, is the property instrument. It created the "owner visa" for holders of registered real-estate units, extended the land-purchase visa to buyers of unregistered land and units for themselves and first-degree relatives, added real-estate owners and investment-licence holders to those who may sponsor, and provided that residency ends when the property is transferred. It has nothing to do with tourism.

ROP Decision 109/2026 is the tourist visa, as above. One correction worth making: the Omani outlet Atheer, which reported the change well, gives the Official Gazette issue as 1695. The number is 1659 — both the Omani legal database and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs give 1659, and 1653 in June is consistent with 1659 in August. Atheer transposed two digits, and the error is now being copied.

Who enters without a visa at all

A common claim is that no authoritative list of visa-free nationalities exists and every list online is unsourced. That is wrong, and worth knowing. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the list, on its entry visas page, with a stated last-updated date of 16 January 2026. The ROP eVisa portal uses the same "Group 1" terminology in its eligibility wizard, so the two-group structure is the official one.

Group 1 nationals need a passport valid for not less than six months, a confirmed return ticket, a hotel reservation, valid health insurance and sufficient funds.

Group 2 nationals need all of the above plus one further qualification: residence or a valid visa for the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, a Schengen state or Japan — or GCC residence in an eligible profession.

• Group 1, Europe and its neighbourhood — the EU and EEA states, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican.
• Group 1, the Americas — Canada, the United States, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the entry printed as "French Guinea".
• Group 1, Asia and the Pacific — Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China including Hong Kong and Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
• Group 1, Middle East and Africa — Iran, Lebanon, South Africa, Mauritius and Seychelles.
• Group 2, the conditional list — Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Cuba, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Maldives, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.

Counting the page as printed gives 78 in Group 1 and 24 in Group 2, so 102 nationalities, and with the five other GCC states that is 107. That reconciles the "over 100 countries" figure you see everywhere with the "103 countries" figure from the earlier expansion — they are describing the same list at slightly different moments.

Two further points from the same source. Citizens of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates need no visa at all. And spouses and children accompanying an eligible traveller may come with them regardless of their own nationality.

The paid categories and what they cost

Every figure in that table comes from an Omani government page or from a decision text on the Omani legal databases. The first four rows and the express visa are from gov.om service pages carrying update stamps of 5 August 2025, except the family visa page which was updated on 28 December 2025. The GCC and relatives rows are from ROP's own visa pages. The investor and cultural figures come from the decisions that set them.

One trap in the gov.om service pages. Each carries a field labelled "Duration", and it is a service processing time, not a length of stay. The family visa page shows seven minutes in that field; the express visa page shows 24 hours. An express visa does not permit a 24-hour stay — ROP's own page gives three weeks from entry.

The GCC-resident route

If you live in another Gulf state, this is usually the cheapest way in. ROP's page gives the GCC residents' visa as OMR 5, valid 28 days from entry, single entry, extendable for one week only. You need a valid GCC residence permit in an approved profession, a passport valid for at least six months, documentation of your profession in the sponsoring GCC state, and you must arrive directly from that state or in transit through another GCC state. It can be applied for at entry ports or at Omani missions in GCC states, and it covers companions and relatives joining you.

ROP does not publish the list of approved professions. Both its page and the MFA page refer only to "professions approved by the competent authority". Reporting from 31 July 2026 says the list was widened to over 130 occupations for UAE residents, adding categories such as designers, jewellers and social-media influencers while keeping blue-collar categories out. The OMR 5 fee and the 28-day duration in that report match the official page; the occupation count does not appear on any official page and is secondary only.

Separately there is a GCC citizens' companions visa at OMR 5, valid one month from entry and renewable for a like period, for foreign nationals residing with a GCC citizen in designated categories and for foreign wives of GCC citizens. You must enter accompanied by the sponsor or a family member. The two routes are easy to confuse — one is for residents of the Gulf, the other for people travelling with a Gulf citizen.

Extensions

Three different rules apply depending on what you hold, which is why the answers you find contradict each other. The exemption cannot be extended at all — the MFA says so. A 30-day sponsored tourist visa is extendable for a similar period, per ROP. And gov.om prices a visit visa extension at OMR 20 as a fixed fee, without stating how long the extension runs. That last omission is genuine: no Omani page we found puts a duration against the extension fee.

What the eVisa portal does not publish

The official channel is evisa.rop.gov.om, and it is a JavaScript application. Its pages for visa types, eligibility, frequently asked questions and announcements return only navigation to anything that is not a full browser session. We could not extract a single fee, processing time or validity period from it.

What we can source is the fee for each category, from gov.om and the decisions, and the durations from ROP's own pages. What nobody can currently source is how long the online application actually takes, what the portal's validity window is between issue and entry, or what its refund policy is.

Converting a visit visa to a work visa

This was permitted, then withdrawn, and both changes rest on announcements rather than published law. On 31 May 2021 the Inspector-General of Police and Customs amended the regulation to allow conversion to a work visa without leaving the country, from GCC-residents' visit visas, family and relatives visit visas, single-entry tourist visas of ten days or one month, business visas, express visas, investor visas, student visas, sailor and cruise-passenger visas, and property owner visas. No decision number was published for it, and it does not appear on the Omani legal databases — the only 2021 ROP amendment indexed there is Decision 234/2021, which deals with investor visas.

It was then withdrawn. Tourist and express visa holders of all nationalities can no longer convert in-country and must exit, obtain the work visa, and re-enter. EY dates the change to 31 October 2023, announced by ROP through its account on X. Fragomen dates it to 8 November 2023 and describes it as covering all visitor categories including dependent visas. The two disagree; 31 October is the more likely effective date because it coincides exactly with the Bangladesh measure announced in the same review, and 8 November is probably the date the change was circulated to clients.

The point to take away is not the fortnight of uncertainty. It is that both the grant and the withdrawal of an important right rest on unnumbered ROP announcements with no traceable instrument behind either. If you are planning around in-country conversion, you are planning around something that could change the same way it changed twice before, with no gazette notice.

Bangladeshi nationals

From 31 October 2023, following a review of visa policy, ROP suspended the issue of new Omani visas of every type to nationals of Bangladesh, until further notice. The suspension was announced through ROP's own channels and is reported by both EY and Fragomen.

It was partially lifted in mid-2024, though the sources disagree on scope. Prothom Alo, reporting a note from the Omani embassy in Dhaka on 12 June 2024, gives ten exempted categories: official visas, family visas, engineers, doctors, nurses, teachers, accountants, investors, high-income tourists, and visit visas for Bangladeshis resident in GCC countries. The Business Standard, reporting on 30 May 2024, gives twelve categories covering broadly the same professional and family groups. Both are secondary; neither cites an Omani decision.

Work visas were not part of that reopening, and we found nothing showing they have been restored since. As late as February 2025 Bangladesh's Chief Adviser was publicly asking the departing Omani ambassador to reopen visas for Bangladeshi workers, and received no commitment. So the position we can defend is: restricted since 31 October 2023, partially reopened for skilled, professional and family categories in mid-2024, work visas apparently still closed. If you are recruiting from Bangladesh, verify with ROP before you commit to anything — this is the single item in this guide most likely to have moved without being reported.

What is not published, stated plainly

• The nationality list for the free 14-day tourist visa under Decision 109/2026. Not published as at 9 August 2026.
• eVisa processing times, portal validity windows and refund policy. No official source states any of them.
• The approved-professions list for the GCC residents' visa. Referred to by both ROP and the MFA, published by neither.
• The duration of a paid visit visa extension. gov.om gives the OMR 20 fee without a period.
• Any decision number for the May 2021 conversion amendment or its 2023 withdrawal.
• A consolidated, current ROP list of visa types. The static pages are years behind the decisions.

Do not import Gulf rules from next door

Searches for Omani entry rules return UAE and Saudi results at the top of the page, and the systems are not comparable. Oman has no equivalent of the UAE's grace periods, and its eVisa is a different system with different categories. If a page mentions ICP, GDRFA, MOHRE, Absher or Enjaz, it is not describing Oman, whatever the headline says. This matters most for the 14-day question: the UAE's visa-on-arrival periods have nothing to do with Oman's 14 days, and mixing them is how people arrive with the wrong expectation of how long they can stay.

Questions people actually ask

If you are applying from Muscat rather than from abroad, the practical questions are usually which category you actually qualify for and whether your sponsor's paperwork will hold at the counter. Our office in Al Ghubra submits these daily and can tell you what the system accepts today, which is not always what the published pages describe.