Seventeen per cent or eight, and the licence decides

Maldivian GST is not one tax with one rate. The Act creates two: a tourism goods and services tax and a general goods and services tax. Which one you are in is not a matter of preference or of what you sell. It is set by section 15.

Section 15(a)(1) lists the establishments that are in the tourism sector — tourist resorts, integrated tourist resorts, resort hotels, hotels, tourist guest houses, picnic islands, private islands, tourist vessels, yacht marinas, and other such establishments authorised by the Ministry of Tourism.

Then section 15(a)(2) does something worth reading slowly. It brings in:

“Goods sold and services supplied by shops, diving schools, spas, water sports facilities, and other such places established on establishments specified in subsection (a)(1)”

A diving school is not swept in by a general phrase about tourism businesses. It is named, in the same breath as shops and spas. There is one carve-out in the same clause: shops and cafés operating exclusively for the employees of the establishment are excluded.

So the question a Maldivian dive centre has to answer is not “am I a tourism business”. It is narrower and more mechanical: am I established on one of the places in 15(a)(1)?

Both rates have moved repeatedly since the Act commenced. The two current figures, and the step immediately before each, are what matter for anything you are still reconciling:

That is a gap of more than double. Two dive centres running the same courses off the same reef can be charging 17% and 8% respectively, entirely legitimately, because of where each one is established.

MIRA's fact sheet on the 2025 change is unusually practical, and it mentions dive schools directly. Prices for tourism goods and services had to be displayed inclusive of the new rate from 1 July 2025, and point-of-sale, accounting, billing, reservation and website systems all had to reflect it. On timing, businesses that do not run 24 hours — the fact sheet's own examples are restaurants, spas and dive schools — could apply the new rate from the moment they opened on 1 July, while everyone else applied it from 00:00.

Which rate applies to a given transaction is fixed by the time of supply: in general, the date the tax invoice is raised or the date payment is received, whichever comes first. For a dive centre taking deposits months ahead of a trip, that rule is not academic.

“Established on” sounds obvious until you have to apply it to a dive centre in a building on a local island. MIRA's guesthouse guide works the question through, and the test it lands on is documentary rather than geographic.

Where a guesthouse sits on land leased by the Government, a City Council, an Atoll Council or an Island Council for the purpose of developing and operating a tourist guesthouse, a diving school, shop, spa or water sports facility operated within it falls under tourism sector GST. MIRA's worked example is set on Ukulhas.

Where there is no council lease of that kind, the guide turns to the operating licence issued by the Ministry of Tourism, and two examples sit either side of the line:

• If the licence specifies the entire building as the guesthouse, a business on the ground floor is inside the boundary and charges tourism GST.
• If the Ministry's document specifies that only part of the building is the guesthouse, a business outside that part is not in the tourism sector and charges general GST instead.

And the point most likely to catch a dive operator: MIRA states that where a business sits inside the boundary, the treatment is the same even if it is owned or operated by a third party.

Read that against how Maldivian diving is actually structured. A great many resort dive centres are run by separate companies under contract — the operator's name on the door is not the resort's. On MIRA's reading, being a different legal entity does not move you out of the tourism sector. What matters is the boundary in the licence.

We are quoting a guide written for guesthouses because it is where MIRA works this reasoning out in the open, and because it names diving schools while doing so. We have not found the equivalent worked examples for resorts, and we are not going to assume the analysis transfers word for word.

This is the provision we would most want a new dive centre to see, because getting it wrong is silent until it is expensive.

For an ordinary business, registration is triggered by size. If, at the end of any month, turnover for the twelve months then ended exceeded MVR 1,000,000 — or is estimated to exceed it over the following twelve — you must apply to register by the end of the next month. Below that, you need not register at all.

Section 51(f) removes that threshold entirely for anyone supplying the goods and services in section 15. They must apply to register within 30 days of commencing business, whatever their turnover.

Diving schools are in section 15. So a dive centre established on a resort has no minimum. One customer in the first month, or none, makes no difference: the clock is 30 days from the day the business starts, not from the day it becomes profitable.

A small detail that stops an honest miscalculation: section 51(h) says the tax itself is not counted when working out whether you have crossed the threshold. You measure the sales, not the sales plus the GST you collected on them.

Filing frequency then follows size rather than sector. Under section 24, the taxable period is every three months where supplies are less than MVR 1,000,000 per month, and every month at or above that. A smaller operator may still choose monthly filing with the Commissioner General's approval.

It would be easy to treat this as a resort question and move on. The register says otherwise. Of the 442 dive centres on the Ministry's list, the islands carrying the most entries are Rasdhoo, Fuvahmulah, Dhigurah, Ukulhas, Dhangethi, Maafushi and Dhiffushi — local islands, not resorts. Ukulhas alone carries six, and Ukulhas is the island MIRA chose for its own worked example.

We are not going to tell you which of those centres are in which sector. The test is the lease and the licence boundary, and we cannot read either from a register. What the numbers show is only that this question lands on a large part of the industry rather than a handful of resort operations — and that the answer is a document in a drawer, not a judgement about what kind of business you feel like.

Currency. Our copy of the Act is the consolidated version of 5 November 2024 and the rate fact sheet is version 24.1. We have not checked whether anything has been amended since. Given that the tourism rate moved in July 2025, that is a real possibility rather than a formality, and it is the first thing to verify.

Green tax and bed tax. We hold MIRA material on both, and on the tourism service charge. Those sit on the accommodation provider rather than on a dive centre's own supplies, and we have not worked out whether any of it reaches a diving operation. Rather than guess at a tax we have not traced, we have left it out.

Resorts specifically. The worked examples above come from the guesthouse guide. The statutory rule in section 15 covers resorts plainly enough, but the boundary reasoning is illustrated only for guesthouses in what we have read.

Input tax, zero-rating and exemptions. Not covered here at all. We hold MIRA guidance on several of them and have deliberately not summarised what we have not worked through.

The responsible body for everything on this page is the Maldives Inland Revenue Authority, not the Ministry of Tourism — which makes it the one page in these notes where the ministry we usually point you to is the wrong door. If we have misread a section, we would rather be told than keep it up.

Charging the right rate is one thing; being able to show, per invoice, which rate you charged and when the supply happened is the part that gets tested. That is a records problem before it is a tax problem. Have a look if it is useful.