DiveOS → Maldives diving regulations → When not to dive
Maldives · unofficial working notesFour things the regulation prohibits outright, five it calls the safest conditions, and the documents a guest has to produce before any of it matters. One of the four is a 24-hour rule about flying — which, in a country where most guests leave by seaplane, is less settled than it first looks.
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. Treat it as a starting point for a conversation with the Ministry of Tourism, not as a substitute for one. Where we are unsure, we say so rather than rounding it up to confidence — and there is a real unresolved question in the flying section below.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 3, Part 4.
Short list, stated flatly, no qualifiers:
The first two restate the limits covered in our notes on depth and decompression, which is worth noticing: the regulation sets them once as standards and again as prohibitions. Breaching them is not falling short of best practice, it is doing a prohibited thing.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 3, Part 4, clause 3.
Most of the diving world treats surface interval before flying as agency guidance, typically 12 or 18 hours depending on who certified you and how many dives you did. Here it is 24 hours, and it is a prohibition in a regulation rather than a recommendation in a manual.
Now the part we cannot settle. The clause says a pressurised aircraft.
Most guests leave an outer-atoll resort by seaplane. The operator that flies that network, Trans Maldivian Airways, puts it at over a million passengers a year to more than eighty resorts, on a fleet of de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otters — and seaplanes on these routes generally are not pressurised. On the face of the wording, that transfer may sit outside the clause. We do not know whether that is the intended reading.
We are raising it rather than answering it, because the two possible answers point in opposite directions and both are consequential. If the clause is read narrowly, a same-day dive-then-seaplane is outside the prohibition. If it is read purposively — the point being cabin altitude and off-gassing, which an unpressurised aircraft at altitude also produces — then the transfer is squarely the thing the rule exists to prevent.
The safe operational answer and the strict legal answer are not necessarily the same here, and this is exactly the sort of question to put to the Ministry rather than settle from a vendor's website. If you have a written answer, we would like to see it.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 3, Part 4, clause 3. Network scale and fleet type from Trans Maldivian Airways, transmaldivian.com, retrieved 22 August 2026; TMA does not state whether the DHC-6 is pressurised.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 3, Part 10.
The fourth prohibition bans diving in a prohibited or non-designated area. Part 10 is where those are set out — and the first thing to say is that it names no places. Not one atoll, island or reef. It works by category instead:
The regulation says plainly that the security areas are not always marked on charts, and tells you to contact the authorities to find out. A rule that admits you cannot look it up is unusual, and worth taking at its word.
It directs divers to the Maldives National Defence Force or the Coast Guard, or to the Ministry, rather than to a published map. So "check the chart" is not a defence here, and for anywhere near a harbour, a naval area or an undeveloped atoll, the compliant answer is a phone call before the dive rather than a look at the plotter.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 3, Part 3.
The regulation describes an ideal, in numbers. Read carefully: these are framed as the safest conditions, not as a threshold below which diving is banned. The prohibitions are the previous section; this is the benchmark everything else is measured against.
Any Maldivian operator will read that list and notice how much ordinary diving here sits outside it. Channel dives run current by design. That is not a contradiction — the list is a definition of ideal, not a prohibition — but it does mean a centre making a defensible go decision is documenting a departure from a written standard, and it is worth being able to show how that decision was made.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 3, Part 2.
Two obligations, and the second is the one that gets missed. The centre must know the weather conditions for the area being dived. And where there is something at the site worth flagging, the divers must be told before they go in.
It is a briefing duty, not just a checking duty. Knowing about the current and not mentioning it is not compliance.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 3, Part 5, clause 1.
Five items, submitted to the centre:
Two things there are easy to get wrong. The logbook threshold is 900 minutes or 30 dives, either one — and excluding training dives means a freshly certified diver with exactly the course in their book does not meet it. And the medical is an or: a certificate under twelve months, or a self-declaration. Not both.
The last clause gives the centre something useful. On the basis of what the logbook shows, the centre may prohibit the diver from certain activities. That is explicit backing, in the regulation, for saying no to a guest who has the card but not the experience.
Diving Regulation 2003, Chapter 3, Part 6.
A small distinction with a clear line through it. The regulation says it is highly desirable that all divers use dive tables and computers — language of encouragement, not obligation.
But then: dive tables must be available at the centre for divers to use. The using is encouraged; the having is required.
The seaplane question above is genuinely open and we have not resolved it.
Parts 11 to 17 (wrecks, cultural heritage, environment, anchoring, baitfishing areas, taking marine resources, and confiscation) have since been written up on look but do not touch. Part 1, diving according to plan, is short enough that we would rather render it properly than summarise it from its heading.
Every section names its chapter, part and clause, and the flying question is one we would genuinely like an answer to.
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.
Last dive date, logged minutes, medical expiry, what each guest may and may not be taken on — the go decision runs on facts about people that are usually spread across a clipboard and somebody's memory. Have a look if it is useful.