Executive Summary
- 653 of 990 active tenders (66.0%) accept every classification grade; the other 337 name a narrower range.
- Restriction is a category effect: 87.2% of Supply rows accept every grade, against 0.7% of Construction and Maintenance rows.
- It cuts both ways: 213 rows (21.5%) exclude Fourth grade and 196 rows (19.8%) exclude Excellent grade.
Tender type tells you which supplier pool a notice is aimed at. Grade tells you whether your registration can enter that pool at all. Most suppliers filter on the first and meet the second only after they have already spent review time.
Every grade reaches a similar share of the list
The reach numbers are almost flat: 794 rows name Excellent grade and 777 name Fourth, a spread of 17 rows across the whole ladder. That is not because grade rarely matters. It is because restriction points in both directions at once. Of the 337 restricted notices, 141 keep Excellent grade inside the window and 124 keep Fourth, while 72 name neither end. Every grade loses a similar number of rows - but not the same rows.
| Most common restricted grade ranges | Rows |
|---|---|
| Excellent + First | 56 |
| Third + Fourth | 53 |
| Fourth | 47 |
| Excellent + First + Second | 38 |
| Excellent | 28 |
Read that table as eligibility windows, not as a quality ranking. A top-grade contractor is excluded from the lower bands exactly as a Fourth-grade contractor is excluded from the upper ones, so "higher grade, more work" does not hold on this list.
How narrow the windows get
| Grades named on the notice | Rows | Share |
|---|---|---|
| All five | 653 | 66.0% |
| 4 | 41 | 4.1% |
| 3 | 40 | 4.0% |
| 2 | 161 | 16.3% |
| 1 | 95 | 9.6% |
337 rows name fewer than five grades, and the restricted ones are tight: 256 of them (76.0% of restricted rows) name only one or two grades. When a notice narrows at all, it usually narrows hard.
Restriction is a category effect, not a market-wide one
| Category | Graded rows | Open to all grades | Excludes Fourth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supply | 572 | 499 (87.2%) | 50 |
| Construction and Maintenance | 146 | 1 (0.7%) | 68 |
| Services | 144 | 119 (82.6%) | 20 |
| Information Technology Services | 44 | 31 (70.5%) | 13 |
| Electromechanical and Telecommunications Contracting and Maintenance | 33 | 2 (6.1%) | 19 |
| Consulting Offices | 28 | 0 (0.0%) | 28 |
Supply is close to unrestricted: 499 of 572 rows (87.2%) accept every grade. Construction, electromechanical and infrastructure work is where classification does the filtering. A supplier reading only headline volume will overestimate its addressable list in exactly the categories where grade matters most. The Oman construction tenders analysis covers that category in depth.
Grade and tender type are different gates
| Tender type | Graded rows | Open to all grades |
|---|---|---|
| Open | 500 | 296 (59.2%) |
| SME | 403 | 304 (75.4%) |
| International | 45 | 18 (40.0%) |
| Vehicle Contract | 21 | 21 (100.0%) |
An SME-designated tender is not automatically open to every grade, and an open tender is not automatically restrictive. The two labels answer different questions, so a bid queue needs both filters. The SME and open tender analysis covers the access side of that pair.
Where grade-restricted work comes from
How to use this
Read your own certificate first, then filter the active list to the notices that name your grade, then apply category, tender type, document-sales and closing-window gates in that order. Reversing the order wastes the most review time. OmanPro's customized tender monitoring applies these gates per business profile, and the Oman Tender Market Report provides the broader market baseline. This week's 9-15 August pulse shows the same gates on fresh flow.
Methodology and limitations
This article uses OmanPro's structured sync of the public Oman Tender Board dashboard. The population is lifecycle_status=floated and bid_closing_at >= 2026-08-15: 990 active rows, all of which carried a usable classification-grade list. Full floated-list refresh; 2,382 rows seen and 115 changed. OmanPro is independent from Tender Board.
The grade list is read exactly as the source prints it beside each tender's category. A grade match is a necessary condition, not a guarantee: registration status, specialization, documents and notice conditions still decide eligibility. One row equals one opportunity, not spend or value. Separately, 486 of the 990 active rows already had a stored document-sales end date before the snapshot. Verify the live notice before acting.
