Key takeaways
- Kafala is a legal framework that ties a migrant worker’s residency status to a single sponsor, usually the employer. It is not a form of ownership, but it does give the sponsor significant control over a worker’s legal status.
- Every Gulf state, all six covered on this site, still uses employer-linked residency sponsorship in 2026. No country has abolished the system outright, whatever some press or commercial coverage claims.
- What has changed since around 2020 is the degree of restriction on movement. Qatar, Oman, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have all dropped or eased the No Objection Certificate requirement to change jobs, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar have scrapped exit permits for most private-sector workers.
- Bahrain reformed first, in 2009, moving sponsorship administration to a government authority. It later added, then discontinued, a sponsor-free “flexi permit.”
- Kuwait remains the most employer-centric system, and its direction in 2025 and 2026 has been mixed: exit rules tightened in 2025 while job-transfer rules eased for abuse victims in 2026.
- Rights groups report that informal practices such as illegal recruitment fees, passport retention and “absconding” charges against workers who flee abuse continue in several countries even where the formal legal requirement has been dropped.
If you are moving to the Gulf for work, you will hear the word “kafala” used loosely to mean everything from a visa process to outright servitude. Neither is accurate. This guide explains what kafala actually is, what it has restricted, how each of the six Gulf states has changed it, and what the system means for an ordinary employed expat in 2026, as distinct from ten or fifteen years ago.
What kafala is
Kafala is Arabic for sponsorship or guardianship. In its Gulf labour form, it is a legal framework that ties a migrant worker’s employment and residency status to a single sponsor, typically the employer, who takes legal responsibility for the worker and holds substantial control over their movement, ability to change jobs, and legal standing in the country. The International Labour Organization describes the imbalance of power this creates as one that “may be conducive to the exaction of forced labour” in specific cases, which is a careful distinction from saying the system itself constitutes forced labour.
The term comes from Islamic jurisprudence on guardianship. The modern labour-sponsorship system took shape in the early twentieth century to regulate pearl-industry workers in the Gulf, then expanded sharply from the 1950s to the 1970s as oil wealth drove demand for foreign labour. After the 1970s oil boom, Gulf states increasingly preferred South Asian labour over Arab labour, partly over concerns about pan-Arab political influence spreading among migrant communities.
All six Gulf Cooperation Council states, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait, still use some form of kafala in 2026, along with Jordan and, to a lesser extent, Lebanon outside the Gulf.
What kafala has restricted
Three restrictions defined the traditional system, and understanding them makes the country-by-country reforms below easier to follow.
An exit permit meant a worker legally needed the sponsor’s or employer’s permission to leave the country at all, even for a holiday or a family emergency. The employer effectively held a gate pass over the worker’s ability to travel.
A No Objection Certificate, or NOC, meant a worker who wanted to move to a new job needed a signed letter from their current employer saying they had no objection. An employer could simply refuse, trapping a worker in a job even after a better offer arrived elsewhere.
Passport confiscation meant employers routinely held a worker’s passport “for safekeeping,” which in practice made it impossible for the worker to travel or change jobs even where they were legally entitled to, because they had no identity document in hand.
Is kafala still in force? Country by country
UAE
Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 modernised private-sector labour rules: it capped working hours, mandated electronic wage payment through the Wage Protection System, banned employers from charging recruitment costs, and banned passport withholding. Workers can now change employer without their previous employer’s consent by giving written notice with a legitimate reason. Sponsorship, however, remains the legal basis of UAE residency. The law reformed the system; it did not abolish it, and there is still no minimum wage or collective-bargaining right for private-sector workers. Human Rights Watch’s 2026 World Report, covering 2025, found that employers still hold “disproportionate control… under the kafala system,” with illegal recruitment fees, passport confiscation and false absconding charges continuing in practice despite the legal reforms.
Saudi Arabia
The Labour Reform Initiative, effective from 14 March 2021, let private-sector expatriate workers apply online for exit and re-entry visas and final exit visas without employer approval, and change jobs at the end of a contract without the employer’s consent, through a Ministry portal. A 2025 report from the anti-slavery organisation Walk Free frames later 2025 changes, including contract-based employment reforms and the Musaned platform for domestic workers, as Saudi Arabia having “formally abolished” kafala, while conceding that “ensuring reforms translate into real protection remains a challenge”. Human Rights Watch’s February 2026 World Report disagrees, stating that Saudi Arabia’s “legal and regulatory framework fails to address widespread abuses from the kafala system… despite several rounds of labor reforms,” and citing continued wage theft, no union rights, and particular vulnerability for women separated from their sponsors. The two sources disagree directly. Treat any claim that Saudi Arabia has abolished kafala with caution.
Qatar
Announced in August 2020 and first endorsed by Qatar’s Council of Ministers in October 2019, the reforms scrapped the NOC requirement to change jobs, replacing it with one to two months’ notice, and introduced the Middle East’s first non-discriminatory minimum wage of QAR 1,000 a month, plus food and housing allowances where the employer does not provide them. The ILO’s own February 2026 assessment describes continued institutional progress, including an upgraded electronic job-transfer platform launched in May 2024, a new occupational health and safety committee in February 2025, and new sectoral skills bodies in March 2025. Human Rights Watch’s assessment is more critical: it reports that “employers confiscating passports and charging illegal recruitment fees remain common and largely unpunished,” and that in practice workers still often need a signed release letter from their original employer to change jobs, meaning informal employer control persists despite the legal change. Leaving a job without completing the required notice period is still prosecuted as absconding (HRW).
Oman
A Royal Oman Police decision abolished the NOC requirement for the large majority of private-sector expatriate workers, phased in from mid-2020 with full effect from 1 January 2021, letting most workers change employer without their current employer’s consent, though a narrow list of professions and sectors remained excluded. While Oman’s 2023 Labour Law strictly bans holding worker passports, practical mobility still depends on whether your initial contract term has been completed.
Bahrain
Bahrain was the regional first mover. From 1 August 2009, sponsorship of migrant work visas moved from individual employers to the government’s Labour Market Regulatory Authority, letting workers apply to the LMRA to change employer rather than needing their current employer’s own consent. Human Rights Watch called this, at the time, “a major advance,” while noting it excluded domestic workers. Bahrain later introduced a “flexi permit” letting some migrants work without a specific employer sponsor at all. The LMRA later discontinued that programme, citing abuse and permit holders working on expired or invalid permits, giving holders a three-month grace period before pushing them back toward employer sponsorship. Bahrain is often cited as having gone furthest historically, and it did reform earliest, but its most liberal instrument was later rolled back, so its current framework has moved back toward conventional employer sponsorship rather than continuing in a straight line toward less control.
Kuwait
Kuwait retains the most employer-centric system of the six. Under the standard private-sector Article 18 permit, transferring to a new employer historically required roughly a year of service and the current employer’s consent. Administrative Decision No. 680 of 2026, reported in June 2026, created formal exceptions letting workers transfer sponsorship before completing a year of service specifically in abuse cases, such as an employer’s negligence on residency paperwork, a false absconding report, proven contract violations or assault, or an employer’s bankruptcy, provided the worker files a labour complaint and the Public Authority for Manpower investigates and approves. PAM also gained power to suspend the permits of employers found in violation. At the same time, Kuwait moved the opposite way on exit control. From 1 July 2025, all private-sector migrant workers were required to obtain employer approval before leaving the country even briefly, a requirement previously limited to extended absences, affecting more than two million workers according to one rights group, which called it a regressive tightening of kafala-style control. Kuwait’s recent trajectory is mixed rather than a straightforward liberalisation: transfer rules eased for abuse victims in 2026 while general exit control tightened in 2025.
What kafala means today versus ten or fifteen years ago
No Gulf state has abolished employer-linked residency sponsorship outright. All six still tie a migrant worker’s legal residency to a sponsor, usually the employer, in 2026. What has changed since roughly 2010 to 2015 is the degree of restriction on movement, and it has changed unevenly. The NOC requirement to change jobs has been formally dropped in Qatar, in Oman, and in modified form in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Exit permits have been formally scrapped for most private-sector workers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Bahrain briefly allowed sponsor-free work before rolling that back.
Multiple 2025 and 2026 reports from Human Rights Watch on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and the Kuwait exit-permit reporting, stress that on-paper mobility rights are often undermined in practice. Informal release-letter requirements, illegal recruitment fees, passport retention and absconding charges against workers who flee abuse all continue to function as de facto sponsor control in places where the formal legal requirement has been removed.
The honest summary for a reader planning a move: kafala persists everywhere in the Gulf as the legal basis of residency. Several countries have removed specific chokepoints, mainly the NOC and exit permit, for most non-domestic workers. Enforcement gaps and domestic-worker exclusions mean the practical experience for some workers, particularly those in lower-wage or informal sectors, is still closer to the old system than the law on paper suggests.
What rights groups are still flagging in 2025 and 2026
Amnesty International documented in a February 2025 report on Saudi Arabia and Qatar that male workers were still being charged around USD 1,000 in illegal recruitment fees despite laws prohibiting the practice. The same report found that passport confiscation and unpaid wages, both indicators of forced labour under ILO criteria, are not automatically investigated in Saudi Arabia or Qatar even when raised.
Domestic workers remain a specific gap. Amnesty found that Saudi Arabia’s 2023 domestic-worker regulations and Qatar’s 2017 Domestic Workers Law both exclude domestic workers from the main labour law and give them weaker protections than other categories of worker, and that none of the abuse survivors Amnesty interviewed for that report saw their abusers held accountable.
The absconding charge is a recurring theme. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty report that workers who flee an abusive employer risk being reported as absconding, which can lead to arrest or deportation instead of protection, a direct kafala-linked practice that persisted through 2025 and 2026 reporting on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
It is worth noting that the ILO’s own February 2026 Qatar assessment reads far more positively than the rights-group reporting, focusing on institutional achievements such as new platforms and committees rather than on enforcement gaps. This is a real difference in tone between an international body engaged in ongoing technical cooperation with a government and advocacy organisations reporting independently, and readers should weigh both kinds of source rather than relying on one alone.
Common misconceptions worth correcting
Kafala does not mean the employer owns the worker. It is a sponsorship and guardianship relationship for immigration and legal-status purposes, not a property relationship, even though its abuse can amount to forced labour in specific cases. The ILO’s own phrasing is careful on this point: the system “may be conducive to” forced labour, not that it equals it in every case.
Kafala has not been abolished in Qatar, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, whatever some press or commercial coverage claims. None of the 2025 or 2026 primary or rights-group sources checked for this article support full abolition anywhere in the Gulf. Sponsorship-based residency itself remains legally intact in all six states, even where mobility restrictions within it have eased.
Not all migrant workers face the same restrictions. Reforms have applied unevenly, and domestic workers are consistently the group most often excluded from NOC and exit-permit reforms and most exposed to remaining abuses. A construction worker’s legal mobility in 2026 can look very different from a domestic worker’s, even in the same country.
It is also not accurate to say no reform has made any real difference. Formal exit-permit and NOC abolition in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and Kuwait’s 2026 carve-out for abuse victims, are real, documented legal changes with verifiable mechanics. The accurate criticism from rights groups is about enforcement and remaining loopholes, not that nothing has changed on paper.
What this means for you as an expat
If you are taking a job in the Gulf in 2026, your residency will still be sponsored by your employer in every one of the six states. Ask specifically, before you sign, whether your contract requires a notice period to change jobs, whether you need employer approval to leave the country and for how long, and whether your employer has any history of withholding passports. These are the practical questions kafala reform has changed the answers to, country by country, and your own experience will depend far more on your specific employer’s conduct than on the headline reforms alone.
