Dubai's Free Zones Employ Almost No Emiratis. Oman Just Created 4,467 Local Jobs Running the Same Model.

Walk into Jebel Ali Free Zone in Dubai and you will find more than 11,000 companies from 150 countries, $190 billion in annual trade, and no legal requirement for the zone's businesses to hire a single Emirati. That model made Dubai rich. Oman is copying it. The difference is Oman wrote a rule Dubai never did.

What Dubai Built and Why It Worked

Dubai created Jebel Ali Free Zone in 1985. The proposition was simple: bring your company, pay no corporate tax, repatriate profits freely, and we will ask nothing more. Companies arrived from every continent. By 2024, JAFZA hosted 10,850 companies; the count crossed 11,000 by 2025. Annual trade through the zone reached $190 billion in 2024. Office occupancy jumped from 79% to 93% in a single year, according to JAFZA's reported figures.

The trade-off for the UAE was deliberate. Almost none of that activity directly employs Emiratis in any mandated way. The zone runs overwhelmingly on expat labor. Dubai decided early that port fees, logistics revenue, real estate, and the spillover economic activity across the city were worth accepting the jobs-for-locals gap inside the zone itself.

It was a rational calculation. It also means that after four decades, JAFZA is one of the world's most successful trade corridors and almost incidental to the employment question that keeps Gulf governments awake at night.

Oman's Version of the Same Bet

Oman began building its own zone ecosystem later and under tighter fiscal constraints. The Public Authority for Special Economic Zones and Free Zones (OPAZ), established in 2020, now oversees 23 zones across the country: special economic zones, free zones, and industrial cities. Total committed investment across all zones reached RO 22.4 billion by end-2025, a 6.8% increase on the prior year, according to OPAZ's official figures published in February 2026.

In 2025 alone, 325 new investment agreements were signed and RO 1.4 billion in fresh capital was committed. The Salalah Free Zone captured the largest share at 28%, with the Sohar Free Zone close behind at 26%. Both are port-adjacent industrial areas, the same DNA as JAFZA. Industrial manufacturing, petrochemicals, minerals, and renewable energy accounted for 97% of all new investment.

Oman also updated the legal framework. Royal Decree 38/2025, issued in April, brought in a new zones law with 10-year income tax exemptions for qualifying enterprises, renewable for two further periods for strategic activities, alongside streamlined visa processing and simplified foreign ownership rules.

The Rule That Makes It Different

Here is where the models split. Omanization, the requirement to employ Omani nationals, applies inside the zones. The floor is lower than on the mainland: as low as 10% in some zones compared with roughly 35% for many mainland sectors. But the floor is real, published, and tracked.

In the Special Economic Zone at Duqm, Omani employees more than doubled over 12 months, rising from roughly 1,600 to 3,245 by mid-2025. The Omanization rate climbed from 20% to over 26% in the same period. The total workforce in Duqm now exceeds 12,400, with committed investment at RO 6.3 billion, up 5.3% year-on-year, according to SEZAD's official half-year report.

Across all OPAZ zones combined, 4,467 new Omani jobs were created in 2025. That is not a transformative number in isolation, but for a zone ecosystem still in an early-growth phase it is a meaningful baseline, and the direction is upward across nearly every zone on the OPAZ map.

Dubai's JAFZA has no equivalent reported figure because there is no equivalent structural requirement.

Where Oman Is Still Well Behind

Honesty requires saying this directly. The gap between Oman's zones and JAFZA is very large. JAFZA's annual trade throughput alone is worth more than twice the total committed investment across all of Oman's 23 zones. Dubai has had 40 years of brand recognition, the world's busiest container port adjacent to the zone, and a density of freight forwarding and customs services that Oman has not yet built.

Duqm's total workforce of 12,400 would register as a rounding error in JAFZA's operator headcount. Attracting the next wave of anchor tenants, the global manufacturers who require absolute certainty on visa processing, arbitration, and customs clearance timelines, requires a track record Oman is still accumulating.

The geographic distribution of Oman's zones is both a strength and a constraint. Spreading zones from Salalah in the south to Sohar in the north and Duqm in the middle extends opportunity beyond Muscat, which is sound development policy. It also means no single zone yet has the critical mass to compete with JAFZA on pure logistics volume or to offer the clustering effects that global manufacturers increasingly require.

Who Runs It and How the Money Flows

OPAZ coordinates all 23 zones from the centre, with individual zone authorities, including Duqm's SEZAD and the Salalah and Sohar Free Zone administrations, operating under the OPAZ framework. A new governance structure under Royal Decree 39/2026 tightened zone-level oversight and reporting requirements earlier this year. How these translate into measurable Vision 2040 program progress can be tracked through the progress indicators dashboard.

The capital behind zone development is a mix of government-backed infrastructure spending and private investment commitments. The RO 22.4 billion figure represents signed agreements, not fully deployed cash. The doubling of Omani workers in Duqm and the 6.8% growth in overall committed capital do suggest actual deployment is underway rather than merely on paper. The inland logistics network connecting these zones is also expanding: A'Dhahirah's dry port recently signed its construction contract, extending zone-linked trade infrastructure into the interior for the first time.

Why This Matters for Ordinary Omanis

Free zones alone will not solve Oman's private-sector employment challenge. But they are among the most direct mechanisms Vision 2040 has for creating technical, manufacturing, and logistics jobs that are not government positions and do not depend on oil revenue.

The 4,467 Omani jobs added across OPAZ zones in 2025 are real salaries going to real households, in Salalah, Sohar, Duqm, and the industrial cities between them. If Duqm's Omanization rate keeps rising from 26% toward 30% and beyond, that is hundreds more Omani professionals entering the zone economy each year, in a governorate that had little formal private-sector employment a decade ago.

Dubai proved that free zones can anchor an entire city's growth. Oman is running a version of the same play: smaller, slower, and with less capital. But the design includes a structural requirement that local people get a share of the employment being created. That is not incidental to Vision 2040. In many ways, it is the whole point.