Every Gulf state requires domestic-worker recruitment agencies to hold a licence. But only two of the six publish a per-agency record you can link to. In the other four, an agency's licence can be verified — but only by someone holding its licence number and willing to perform a manual lookup. This is an audit of what a family can actually check before they pay.
⚡ Key findings
- Across the six GCC states we index 1,797 domestic-worker recruitment agency listings.
- 973 of them (54%) carry a direct link to that agency's own record on the national regulator's system.
- All 973 sit in just two countries — Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
- In Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman, that figure is zero. Not because the agencies are unlicensed, but because no regulator in those four states exposes a stable public URL for an individual agency.
The two kinds of "verified"
"Government-verified" is used loosely across this industry, so it is worth separating two very different things.
A linkable public record means the regulator hosts a page for that specific agency, and anyone can open it. You can send the URL to your spouse, paste it into a complaint, or archive it. Saudi Arabia's Musaned platform and the UAE's MOHRE / Tadbeer system both work this way.
Lookup-only verification means the licence is genuinely checkable — but only by a person who already has the licence number, visiting a portal or app and querying it. There is no shareable proof and no way to audit the market as a whole. This is the situation in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman.
Both are real oversight. The difference is who can perform the check, and whether the result can be passed to anyone else.
Country by country
| Country | Regulator | Listings we index | With a linkable government record | How a family verifies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia | Musaned (MHRSD) | 1,107 | 829 (75%) | Per-agency page on Musaned |
| 🇦🇪 UAE | MOHRE / Tadbeer | 151 | 144 (95%) | Per-centre record via MOHRE |
| 🇶🇦 Qatar | Ministry of Labour | 262 | 0 | Quarterly PDF list on mol.gov.qa |
| 🇧🇭 Bahrain | LMRA | 205 | 0 | Licence-number lookup at lmra.gov.bh |
| 🇰🇼 Kuwait | PAM | 38 | 0 | manpower.gov.kw or the Sahel app |
| 🇴🇲 Oman | Ministry of Labour | 34 | 0 | Licence-number enquiry |
| Total | 1,797 | 973 (54%) | ||
Why the gap matters
For families. A linkable record collapses the trust problem to one click. Without it, a family is asked to accept a licence number written on a business card, and most never check it — verification that requires effort is verification that mostly does not happen.
For workers. A domestic worker is usually recruited in her home country, before she has any Gulf phone number or residency. A public URL can be opened from Manila, Addis Ababa or Kathmandu. A lookup portal that expects a licence number she was never given cannot.
For researchers and journalists. A PDF republished quarterly cannot be diffed, and a lookup portal cannot be audited at scale. Where records are linkable, questions like "how many licensed offices closed this year" are answerable. Where they are not, they simply are not.
What the regulators themselves publish
Every one of these six states does publish something, and none of this should be read as an absence of regulation:
- UAE — MOHRE. As of 15 December 2025 MOHRE reported 136 licensed Tadbeer domestic-worker recruitment centres nationwide: 44 in Abu Dhabi, 42 in Dubai, 23 in Ajman, 13 in Ras Al Khaimah, 8 in Sharjah and 6 in Fujairah. Note that MOHRE's wider figure of 311 approved offices covers business-services and guidance centres and delivery providers too — it is not the domestic-worker recruitment count, and is easy to misquote.
- Qatar — Ministry of Labour. Publishes a list of registered recruitment agencies as a downloadable PDF, refreshed quarterly.
- Bahrain — LMRA. Licences are checkable at lmra.gov.bh, and LMRA separately publishes a list of cancelled or revoked employment-office licences — a genuinely useful negative check that the others do not match.
- Kuwait — PAM. Licence and commercial registration are confirmable through manpower.gov.kw or the Sahel government app.
✏️ Revised 3 August 2026
Figures were restated after we removed 419 duplicate rows from our own database — the same recruitment office listed twice by two separate imports. The earlier version of this page reported 2,206 listings and 1,483 with a linkable government record; the deduplicated figures are 1,797 and 973. Saudi Arabia's count fell from 1,516 to 1,107 for the same reason.
The finding is unchanged. Linkable per-agency records still exist in only two of the six states, and the four zeroes are unaffected — deduplication touched only rows that shared a Musaned id with another row of the same office.
Methodology
Figures are drawn from the GCC Domestic agency database on 3 August 2026, counting only publicly listed profiles. An agency is counted as having a linkable government record when we store a direct URL to its entry on the relevant regulator's own platform — a stricter test than simply appearing on an official list.
⚠️ Limitations — read these before citing
- These are our coverage figures, not official market totals. They describe what we index and verify, not how many licensed agencies exist in each country.
- A zero does not prove a regulator publishes nothing. It means no per-agency public URL exists in our dataset for that country. Where a regulator publishes only a PDF or a lookup form, no such URL can exist — but our own collection coverage is also a factor, and we do not claim to separate the two perfectly.
- Our UAE count (151) exceeds MOHRE's December 2025 figure of 136 Tadbeer centres. The likeliest explanations are the eight-month gap and the inclusion of offices from MOHRE's broader approved-office category. We flag it rather than reconcile it silently.
- A stored government link is not a live licence check — and in four countries we cannot make it one. On 3 August 2026 we re-verified 944 listings directly against the live Musaned marketplace: 944 of our 1,107 Saudi listings (85%) were confirmed still present, and 109 no longer appear and are flagged for review. Outside Saudi Arabia almost nothing could be re-verified — 261 of 262 Qatar listings, 108 of 205 in Bahrain and all 34 in Oman have never been checked against their regulator, because no per-agency record exists to check against. That is the practical cost of the gap described above, and it applies to us exactly as it applies to any family. Overall 586 of 1,797 listings (33%) have never been licence-verified. Read the linkable-record figure as traceable to a government record, not confirmed active today.
- Coverage is uneven by design. Kuwait (38) and Oman (34) are thinly covered relative to their markets; those totals reflect our collection to date, nothing more.
Sources
- GCC Domestic agency database, 3 August 2026 (publicly listed profiles).
- MOHRE Tadbeer centre count and emirate breakdown, reported 15 December 2025.
- Qatar Ministry of Labour registered recruitment agency list, mol.gov.qa.
- Bahrain Labour Market Regulatory Authority, lmra.gov.bh.
- Kuwait Public Authority for Manpower, manpower.gov.kw.
This page is updated as our dataset and the underlying regulator systems change. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite these figures with attribution to GCC Domestic; if you need a breakdown we have not published, ask and we will run it.
