Who you may put in the water

Whoever supervises diving activity and leads it in the water has to clear four separate requirements. Most centres think about the first one and assume the rest.

A qualification. An experienced RSTC divemaster, a four-star CMAS diver, or a certification equivalent to the RSTC standard.

The right to work here. They must be able to show a Maldivian work permit and visa — or evidence that they are a Maldivian citizen.

Professional liability insurance. Named as its own requirement.

Personal insurance for diving accidents, and specifically for treatment in a decompression chamber. That is a second, distinct policy from the liability cover, and the regulation calls out chamber treatment by name.

Two insurances, not one. Liability cover protects the people around them; the chamber cover protects them. The regulation asks for both, separately.

This is worth separating out, because it is easy to file under "immigration, somebody else's problem". The diving regulation itself makes the permit and visa a condition of leading a dive. Whatever the immigration process is — and that sits outside this instrument, in rules we have not read — a dive leader without one is not compliant with the diving regulation either.

We flagged foreign-instructor permits as absent from our source material. That was wrong in an important way: the process is elsewhere, but the requirement is right here, and it is enforceable through the diving rules.

All training and all certification of divers must be carried out by dive instructors. Assistant instructors and divemasters may be employed to help them, but the certifying act belongs to the instructor.

To work as one, on top of everything in the previous section, a person needs an instructor certification to the RSTC standard, a CMAS star equivalent, or an equivalent recognised against RSTC. They must be actively teaching in association with a training agency in the discipline they teach — and the regulation adds that they must follow every standard of that programme without deviation.

And a detail that connects to the daily roster: the base leader, or the assistant base leader standing in for them, must be an instructor. Our notes on depth limits cover the requirement that somebody hold that role every single day. This is the qualification bar for the person who does.

This one is a rule most centres already follow as agency practice, without necessarily knowing it is also law here. An orientation dive is required — regardless of how well certified the diver is — when either of two things is true:

• they cannot show evidence of 30 logged dives, or
• they have not dived in the previous three months

Either one triggers it. A diver with an advanced card and 200 dives who last got wet in April is in scope in August.

The regulation is then unusually careful about what the dive is for. It says plainly that the orientation dive is not an examination. It is a shallow-water dive in a defined environment, and its purpose is to let the diver establish their own confidence and skills. The list it gives is mask clearing, recovering a dislodged regulator, neutral buoyancy control, ascending, descending, and breathing from an alternate air source.

That framing matters commercially as well as legally. A check dive presented as a test the guest might fail is a bad first morning. The regulation describes it as the guest getting reacquainted with themselves, which is both truer and easier to sell.

The definitions part is short and worth knowing, because it decides who all of the above applies to. "Diving" means recreational scuba diving on a cylinder. "Dive centres" means diving schools, dive bases, and any other party providing diving services to tourists in the Maldives.

That last clause is deliberately wide. It does not turn on what you call yourself or what kind of premises you operate from.

The immigration process behind the work permit is not in this instrument and we have not read it. We can tell you the diving regulation requires the permit; we cannot tell you how to obtain one.

We also have not read Part 1 (standards for approved training centres), Parts 6 and 7 (equipment), Part 8 (vessels) or Part 9 (safety obligations). Those are separate readings. The insurance clauses name two policies but do not, as far as we can see, set minimum cover levels — if a level is specified somewhere we have not found it, and we would rather say that than imply there is none.

Every section names its chapter, part and clause.

One caution about who to ask. The responsible department has been renamed at least twice across these instruments — Ministry of Tourism in 2003, Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture in 2013, 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.

If something is wrong, out of date or superseded, tell us and we will fix it and re-date the page. The last checked date is when a person last went back to the source.

Certifications that expire, insurance that has to be current, a permit per person, an instructor rostered as base leader every day, and a check-dive rule that turns on each guest's last dive date — that is a records problem, and it is the one this whole section of the regulation keeps circling. Have a look if it is useful.