The migrant economy

Five populations, one word

Maldivian commentary uses “migrant” to mean at least five different groups, and the conflation produces most of the bad conclusions in this area. This paper distinguishes them throughout:

• Foreign residents — people usually resident in the Maldives who are not nationals. Census 2022 enumerated 132,493; MBS’s own adjusted base puts mid-2022 at 166,215; biometric registration under Operation Kurangi passed 202,000 by late 2025 [OFFICIAL / OFFICIAL / administrative via MEDIA]. These measure different concepts at different dates and must not be plotted as a series.
• Migrant workers — the employed subset, 129,292 at census [OFFICIAL].
• Undocumented migrants — a standing estimate of roughly 63,000, widely repeated since about 2019 and now old and wide [INDUSTRY-EST].
• Tourists — not residents, and absent from every figure in this paper.
• Resort and industrial-island workforces — resident, employed, and structurally outside the household-survey universe.

Our working range for resident foreigners in mid-2026 is 190,000–210,000 [OWN-CALC].

Not a population — a labour force

Labour-force participation among foreign residents is 99.4%, against 64.2% for resident Maldivians [OFFICIAL — Census 2022]. In Malé City the newest survey puts foreign participation at 99.1% [OFFICIAL — LFS Q3-2025].

This is structural rather than cultural: residence is conditional on employment, so the non-working foreign resident barely exists as a category. Dependants are rare, retirement does not occur in-country, and the population is overwhelmingly male — the sex ratio in Malé Atoll is 225 men per 100 women against 103 nationally [OFFICIAL].

The commercial consequence is that headcount is a poor guide to what this population buys. A Maldivian household of 4.5 people contains earners, dependants, children in school and someone buying furniture. A labour-quarters bed contains one working adult with no dependants in-country and a permit-linked tenure.

Where they work

Foreign residents are 43% of all employed persons — two workers in five [OFFICIAL]. Seven industries account for 88% of them: tourism 45,761, construction 35,512, wholesale and retail 14,347, manufacturing 8,728, transport 3,716, health 3,513 and education 2,714 [OFFICIAL].

Two of those are not dependencies but foundations. Construction runs at roughly thirteen expatriate workers per Maldivian [INDUSTRY-EST]; there is no Maldivian construction sector without them. Tourism’s operational workforce is similar. Meanwhile public administration and defence is the largest employer of Maldivians at 15.7% [OFFICIAL] — the two labour markets barely overlap.

Nationality concentration is the underappreciated risk. Bangladeshi nationals are 46% of employed foreign residents; India 29%, Sri Lanka 10%, Nepal 4% [OFFICIAL]. Applied to a mid-2026 foreign population of 190,000–210,000, the Bangladeshi cohort is 87,400–96,600 against a statutory cap of 100,000 from any single country [OWN-CALC on OFFICIAL shares; cap OFFICIAL via MEDIA].

That cap binds inside the current planning horizon. Any construction or tourism expansion plan that assumes labour is elastic should be tested against it — and it will bind before any localisation policy does.

Where they live

At census, 100,837 foreign residents lived in labour quarters, 22,628 in private households, and 3,334 on construction sites and boats [OFFICIAL]. Four in five live in arrangements HIES 2019 explicitly excludes from its scope — collective living quarters of ten or more residents, resorts and industrial islands.

This produces the measurement void that governs the whole subject: the largest single housing sub-market in the country, with six figures of occupants, is transacted informally per bed, has no rate series, no vacancy data, no formal asset class and no survey coverage. It is simultaneously the most under-supplied and the least measured segment of Maldivian real estate.

The question the evidence actually supports

The standard inference runs: migrant workers earn less, therefore they spend less, therefore a rising foreign share weakens domestic demand.

The first clause is plausible but unmeasured — no Maldivian wage or earnings statistic exists for anyone, and foreign workers are explicitly excluded from the minimum wage that would otherwise set a floor [OFFICIAL]. The second does not follow from the first without a consumption measurement that does not exist. And the third treats demand as a single quantity when it is a set of channels that move in different directions.

Read as hypotheses rather than findings — foreign-resident consumption is not surveyed, so the bands are wide and the reasoning is directional:

Channels that expand.

• Worker accommodation. Over 100,000 occupants and growing with the permit stock. Essentially all of this demand is foreign.
• Remittance services. MVR 2.4bn–9.6bn a year of transfer volume on the two official series [OWN-CALC from OFFICIAL]. The leakage from goods demand is a market in financial services, and the fourfold gap between licensed and balance-of-payments measures is a direct measure of how much of it remains informal — which is to say, addressable.
• Labour supply. This is the largest effect and the one least often counted as demand. Without roughly 35,500 migrant construction workers there is no construction sector, no reclamation follow-through and no housing supply at any price.
• Staples and telecommunications. Per-head categories. Every resident eats and holds a SIM, and international calling is a foreign-resident market specifically.

Channels that contract, relative to headcount.

• Household formation and family housing. Only 17% live in private households; most arrive without dependants. This is the sharpest correction to naive population-driven housing demand.
• Discretionary retail and dining. Suppressed, though by an unknown amount.
• Retail credit and deposits. Permit-linked tenure makes term lending structurally difficult regardless of income — a constraint of legal form rather than of affordability.

The honest net. It cannot be computed. What can be said is that the composition of demand shifts decisively toward per-head, low-value, high-volume and accommodation-linked categories, and away from household-based, discretionary and credit-linked ones. For a business, the sign of the effect depends on which of those two lists its category sits on — and that is a more useful question than the aggregate one.

The state’s position is not one-sided either

Work-permit fees of MVR 350 a month plus an MVR 2,000 annual quota fee per worker imply roughly MVR 0.8bn a year at census employment and MVR 1.2bn at today’s estimated stock [OWN-CALC on OFFICIAL fee schedules]. The state has a direct and material revenue interest in the size of the foreign workforce.

That sits against the policy direction. The 2025/26 Expatriate Employment Regulations removed the old regularisation chapters and hardened enforcement; phased localisation quotas are being built into the 2026 e-visa system [MEDIA]. Localisation is therefore a fiscal decision as well as a labour-market one, and the two pressures point in opposite directions — which is a reason to expect slower implementation than announcements imply.

What a binding localisation policy would actually do

Following the channels rather than the slogan, a genuinely binding restriction would:

• raise construction costs and lengthen delivery, since the sector is roughly 90% expatriate at trade level;
• shrink worker-accommodation demand, which is the one segment currently under-supplied at six-figure scale;
• reduce remittance outflows, improving the external position analysed in How the Maldivian economy actually works — one of the few unambiguously positive effects;
• tighten tourism operational staffing, where 45,761 migrant workers are employed;
• not obviously raise Maldivian employment, since measured Maldivian unemployment is already low at 5.1% nationally and 3.6% in Malé, and the binding domestic constraint is female participation at 55.4% in Malé, not a shortage of jobs [OFFICIAL].

That last point is the one most often missed. The Maldives does not have an unemployment problem that migrant labour is displacing. It has a participation problem, concentrated among women, that localisation policy does not address.

What we do not know

• Foreign-resident income is not measured. No wage series exists for anyone in the Maldives, and the minimum wage does not apply to foreign workers, so there is not even a legal floor to reason from.
• Foreign-resident consumption is not measured at all. HIES excludes the accommodation four in five of them live in. Every channel assessment in this paper is a hypothesis.
• The population is not a single number. Census, adjusted base and Kurangi registrations differ by up to 70,000, and the undocumented estimate is old and wide.
• Sectoral stocks post-2022 are unpublished. Kurangi totals are cumulative registrations, not a current stock by industry.
• Worker-accommodation rents are transacted informally per bed with no public rate series of any kind.
• The remittance series differ fourfold and cannot both describe the same flow.
• Nationality shares are census-dated. The cap arithmetic applies 2022 shares to a 2026 population, and the shares themselves may have moved.

Sources

• MBS — Employment analysis, Census 2022
• MBS — Population Dynamics: Summary, Census 2022
• MBS — Labour Force Survey Report Q3-2025 (Malé City)
• MBS — Maldives Population Projection 2022–2062
• NBS/MBS — HIES 2019 Household Expenditure (scope notes)
• Ministry of Economic Development — Minimum Wage Order
• Maldives Immigration / MIRA — work-permit and quota fee schedules
• Expatriate Employment Regulations 2025/26
• MMA — Payments Bulletin 2024; World Bank WDI — personal remittances paid
• Friedrich Naumann Foundation — Migration in and from the Maldives (June 2025)