DiveOS → Maldives diving regulations → Licensing
Maldives · unofficial working notesEverything in our other notes is regulation. This is the layer above it — the Act the diving rules are made under, which is where registration, the permit, inspection and the actual money live. It is also the only place in the whole corpus that names a figure with seven digits.
This is not legal advice, and it is not an official translation.
We are a software company. Not a law firm, not certified translators. Everything below is our own reading of a Dhivehi-language instrument, and this page is about statutory penalties, so the gap between roughly right and right is wider here than anywhere else we have written. Treat it as a starting point for a conversation with the ministry, or with a lawyer, and not as a substitute for either.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 1, Article 3.
Chapter 1 of the diving regulation is not more diving rules. It reproduces the Tourism Act provisions that the diving rules are made under, and that distinction matters for what follows: the depth limits and safety stops are regulatory, while registration, permits and fines are statutory.
Article 3 sets it up plainly. Operating places that provide diving services, providing services from them, and providing trip-organising services must all be done in accordance with the regulations made under the Act.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 1, Articles 29 and 30.
Article 29 is short: no place in the Maldives providing diving services to tourists may be operated except after registering at the ministry and obtaining its permit.
Article 30 then sets four conditions for that permit to issue, and two of them are about paperwork that exists long before anyone gets wet:
The first condition catches people. If your company's memorandum of association does not list operating diving centres as an object, you do not qualify for the permit — regardless of how good the centre is.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 1, Articles 31, 42 and 43.
The registration fee for a place providing diving services is MVR 5,000. Registration happens only on payment.
The permit itself runs five years — the same term the Act gives resorts, tourist hotels, guest houses, yacht marinas and tourist vessels — and it must be renewed when that period expires.
And Article 43 requires every permit to be displayed in a prominent manner in the establishment it was issued to. It is the sort of clause that is easy to satisfy and easy to quietly fail, because a permit in a folder in the office is not displayed.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 1, Article 45.
The ministry has the discretion to inspect places providing diving services, and to check whether the services provided meet three things at once: the standards the ministry lays down, the Act, and the regulations made under it.
Read alongside the record-keeping duties in our notes on rosters and safety, the shape of an inspection becomes fairly concrete. The dive roster must be kept a year and produced whenever the authorities require; this is the article that says who may require it.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 1, Articles 46 and 47.
Article 46 is the one to know. If the standard of service provided by a place providing diving services falls below the standards laid down by the ministry, the ministry has the discretion to:
Both, not either. And the trigger is not an accident or a breach of a specific clause — it is the standard of service falling below what the ministry lays down, which is a considerably broader gate than a numbered contravention.
Article 47 then catches everything else. Where the Act prescribes no particular course of action for a contravention of the Act or its regulations, the party may be fined up to MVR 100,000. So the depth limits, the roster, the flag, the safety stop — none of which carry their own penalty in the diving rules — sit under this residual ceiling.
Every "must" in our other notes has a number behind it after all. It is just in a different chapter from the rule it enforces.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 1, Articles 39 and 41.
A foreign party may carry out any tourism activity in the Maldives only after entering into the agreement required by the Foreign Investment Act, Law 25/79, and registering that investment at the ministry in the manner that Act states.
That sits before the diving permit rather than alongside it, and it is separate again from the Ministry of Trade registration in Article 30. A foreign-owned centre therefore has three distinct registrations to satisfy, at three bodies, before Article 29 is met.
Article 41 adds a continuing duty that is easy to overlook: all parties carrying out tourism activities must provide the ministry with the information it needs to prepare tourism statistics, in accordance with its regulations.
Every figure on this page has now been cross-checked against an English translation of the Act itself, not just our reading of the Dhivehi. The registration fee, the five-year term, the MVR 1,000,000 ceiling and the MVR 100,000 residual all match. So does the four-condition list, including the memorandum-of-association point.
But the currency question is now sharper, not softer. A Ministry of Tourism circular from 31 December 2013 refers to "clause 8 of the second amendment of the Maldives Tourism Act", which tells us the Act has been amended at least twice. Our translation is of the Act as enacted. So the figures above are what the Act said; whether an amendment has since moved them is a question we cannot answer from what we hold, and a fee set in 1999 is exactly the sort of number that moves.
Two decode defects are worth knowing here specifically. The `.docx` decode mislabels Article 30's four sub-paragraphs as (ހ)(ރ)(ރ)(ރ); the independent PDF decode gives the correct (ހ)(ށ)(ނ)(ރ) sequence and we used that. The same decode prints the Tourism Act's own number as 2199, having lost the slash from 2/99. Neither changes a duty, but both are the kind of thing that would make a citation wrong.
We also have not read the articles on registering places that were already operating unregistered when the Act commenced, on making regulations, or the repealed Act.
Every section names its article. Given this page is about statutory fines, it is the one we would most like corrected if we have it wrong.
One caution about who to ask. These articles name the Ministry of Tourism, which is the name as of the 2003 instrument. The department has been renamed at least twice since — Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture on the 2013 amendment, and ފަތުރުވެރިކަމާއި ތިމާވެށްޓާބެހޭ ވުޒާރާ, Ministry of Tourism and Environment, on the March 2026 procedure. For anything current, that last name is the one to go by.
A licence with an expiry, a fee, a memorandum of association that has to say the right thing, a document that has to stay on a wall, and an inspection that can ask for a year of dive rosters. Have a look if it is useful — these notes stand on their own either way.