As of 6 September 2026: the exit permit was removed for private-sector workers by Law No. 13 of 2018 and for almost everyone else by Ministerial Decision No. 95 of 2019, which took effect in January 2020. The ILO’s most recent published position, dated February 2026, records no change since.
No. The Qatar exit permit, in the form almost everyone still describes it, was abolished. In almost every case a worker in Qatar does not need an employer’s permission to leave the country, and has not needed it for years. That is the short answer to a question the internet still gets wrong, and the reason it matters is that people act on the wrong answer. They stay in jobs they could leave. They accept terms they could refuse. They pay agents to solve a problem that no longer exists.
The correction is not subtle and it is not recent. What follows is what the law actually says, who is still covered by an exception, and how many people that turns out to be.
What changed, and when?
Under the older system a migrant worker needed a sponsor’s approval to exit Qatar, temporarily or permanently. Two instruments dismantled it.
Law No. 13 of 2018, announced on 4 September 2018, removed the requirement for workers covered by the Labour Law, which is the bulk of the private sector. The International Labour Organization called it a landmark at the time and it was, but it left large groups outside its reach.
Ministerial Decision No. 95 of 2019, issued by the Ministry of Interior and effective from January 2020, closed most of that gap. It extended the removal to domestic workers, government and public-institution employees, workers in oil and gas, and workers in agriculture and at sea. The European Union issued a statement on 19 January 2020 welcoming it, which is a useful independent marker of the date.
The ILO’s Project Office in Doha states the combined position in a single sentence in its progress report of February 2025:
Since the adoption of Law No. 13 of 2018 and Ministerial Decision No. 95 of 2019 by the Ministry of Interior, migrant workers have had the right to leave the country either temporarily or permanently without prior approval from their employers.
Who still needs permission?
Two groups, and they are narrow.
The first is the carve-out written into the reform itself. An employer may still require approval for up to five per cent of its workforce, and the same ILO report is specific that this is “restricted to certain senior positions”. It exists so a company is not left exposed by the sudden departure of the handful of people who hold its licences, its accounts or its keys. It is not a mechanism for holding on to general staff, and a worker who is told otherwise is being told something the law does not support.
The second is the armed forces, which sat outside the January 2020 decree and remain outside it.
Everyone else leaves on their own decision.
How many people does the exception actually affect?
This is where the numbers are worth reading slowly, because they are the part almost nobody publishes.
The ILO reports 4,759 exit-permit requests during 2024, against 13,282 between January and October 2023. Those are requests across the whole country in a labour market of millions. The 2024 requests came mainly from construction, retail, transport, cleaning and manufacturing.
Read the two figures together and the direction is obvious, though the drop has more than one cause: the reform is working through, and Qatar’s construction workforce shrank after the 2022 World Cup, so there were fewer senior site roles to hold on to in the first place. Both things are true at once and neither cancels the other out.
What about domestic workers?
On paper, domestic workers were freed by the January 2020 decree along with everyone else. In practice the ILO is not willing to say the job is finished. Its February 2025 report records “broad acceptance” of the exit-permit removal among employers, then adds that resistance to labour mobility persists and that concerns have been raised about the extent to which domestic workers can change jobs or leave the country.
That is the ILO’s own language about its own programme, which makes it about as candid as institutional reporting gets. A domestic worker in Qatar has the legal right to go. Whether she can exercise it without an argument is a separate question, and one the law alone has not settled. Our guide to the Qatar domestic worker visa covers the sponsorship side of that relationship.
What we could not verify, and are not going to guess
Three things stayed out of reach, and they are worth naming rather than filling in.
The exact mechanism a worker uses today if they fall inside the five per cent, meaning the portal, the form and any fee, is not something we could read on a Qatari government page. Qatar’s Ministry of Interior portal and the national legal database both refused automated access. Every figure we found for it sat on a visa-agency site, and a visa agency is not a source.
The grievance route is the same story. A committee exists to hear appeals from workers refused permission to leave, and it appears in the ILO’s own legislative catalogue, but we could not open a primary document stating its current composition or its decision deadline. So we are not printing either.
Anyone who needs the operational detail should get it from the Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Labour directly. What is settled, and what this piece is for, is the legal position.
Why does the wrong answer survive?
Because the exit permit was famous and its removal was not. The kafala system generated a decade of coverage; a ministerial decision numbered 95 of 2019 generated a press release. Search results, relocation blogs and several AI assistants were trained on the era when the answer was yes, and none of them has a reason to revisit it.
There is a practical lesson in that for anyone moving to the Gulf. Labour law across the region has moved faster in the last eight years than the material written about it, and the gap is widest exactly where the old rule was most notorious. Check the ministry, check the date, and treat anything written before 2020 about Gulf labour mobility as a historical document. The same caution applies to the rest of Qatar’s labour reform package, including the minimum wage and the rules on changing employer, and to the practical detail in our guide to working in Qatar.
The UAE never had an employer exit permit, but it does stop people leaving over debt and open cases, and the page most guides send you to for checking that no longer exists.
What is the short version?
A worker in Qatar can leave the country without an employer’s approval. Law No. 13 of 2018 established that for the private sector and Ministerial Decision No. 95 of 2019 extended it, from January 2020, to domestic workers, government employees, oil and gas, agriculture and workers at sea. Two exceptions remain: the armed forces, and up to five per cent of a company’s workforce in certain senior positions. There were 4,759 exit-permit requests in the whole of 2024. The ILO’s most recent publication, dated February 2026, describes the removal as settled. If a source tells you otherwise, check its date.
Sources: International Labour Organization, Progress report on the technical cooperation programme between the Government of Qatar and the ILO, February 2025, paragraphs 11 and 40; ILO, The State of Qatar and the ILO, February 2026; ILO news releases of 4 September 2018 and 20 August 2020; European External Action Service statement, 19 January 2020.
Last updated: 6 September 2026.
