Are you eligible for QDB's Working Capital Guarantee?

Qatar Development Bank activated what it calls a Situation Room in early March 2026, in response to regional developments, and in May announced two financing programmes through it. One provides direct financing to Qatar-based factories. The other, the Working Capital Stabilization Guarantee Program, runs through partner national banks and is aimed at companies in service sectors.

The terms on the guarantee programme are unusually generous, which is why it has been widely discussed. What has not been discussed is that the eligibility check most companies will run does not work reliably, and it fails in the direction that costs them — telling companies that qualify that they do not.

This article covers how to check eligibility properly, what the sector list actually contains, how the facility size is calculated, and one arithmetic point about the grace period that is decided at signing and cannot be revisited afterwards.

What is being offered

The structure is straightforward. A partner national bank provides the financing. QDB guarantees 100 per cent of the principal, charges the bank no guarantee fee, and the maximum profit rate is capped at QMR plus 0.5 per cent. The tenor runs up to four years including a grace period of up to two years, and the guarantee itself is valid for a maximum of four years from issuance.

Qatar Central Bank has separately directed banks operating in Qatar to cooperate with the programme. That direction carries an important qualification, covered further down.

Eligibility, as QDB states it, has three conditions. The company holds an active commercial registration or a valid business licence. Its activity falls within the designated service sectors. And it meets the credit assessment criteria of the participating partner banks.

The second condition is where almost all of the confusion sits.

The published eligibility test

QDB's guidance names five eligible sectors and gives each a range of ISIC divisions. It then explains how to use them: take the first two digits, reading from the left, of the activity code shown on the commercial registration issued by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. If those two digits match one of the listed ranges, the activity is eligible. The worked example given is activity code 551010, hotels and motels, where 55 is the two-digit code.

That example works. The problem is that it is not representative of what MOCI activity codes look like.

Separately, QDB publishes a directory of the codes that actually qualify  PDF — 1,526 of them, across the five sectors. That document is the operative list. The two-digit rule is a shortcut for reading it.

Where the test breaks

Qatari commercial registration activity codes are legacy numbers. They are not ISIC codes with extra digits appended, and their leading digits frequently have no relationship to the ISIC division the activity belongs to. The codes in QDB's own directory run to six, seven and eight digits and begin with values across the whole numeric range.

Take the very first activity listed in the directory: code 0702010, general management consulting offices. Its first two digits are 07, which in ISIC corresponds to the mining of metal ores. That range appears in none of the five eligible sectors. Applying the published test, a management consultancy holding that code on its commercial registration would conclude it is not eligible — while sitting at position one on QDB's list of eligible activities.

This is not a handful of edge cases. We checked every code in the directory against the published ranges. 394 of the 1,526 eligible activities fail the two-digit test — just under twenty-six per cent. The failures are spread across all five sectors, from twenty-one per cent of the ICT codes to thirty per cent of the professional services codes.

The pattern is not random either. Two hundred and sixty-three of those failures are codes beginning 20, a single block of legacy numbers covering everything from consulting and advertising to cleaning, packaging and equipment rental. The rest are spread across thirty-six other leading pairs. None of them falls inside the published ranges, and every one of those activities is on the eligible list.

The failure also runs the other way. Travel agencies carry code 632000, whose leading pair, 63, sits inside the range published for information and communications technology. A reader applying the shortcut would conclude a travel agency qualifies as an ICT business. It does qualify — the directory places it under administrative and support services — but the reasoning that got there was wrong, and reasoning that is right by accident will not hold on the next code.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Qatari commercial registrations routinely carry several activities. The directory is a list of activities, not of companies, so a business whose headline activity is absent may still hold a second or third activity that appears.

There is one further category worth flagging. Alongside the MOCI codes, the directory contains 251 entries in a different format, hyphenated — 6910-001, 7020-005, 8213-001 and many others. These are Qatar Financial Centre permitted activity codes. Every one of them passes the two-digit test, because the QFC numbering is built on the ISIC structure rather than on the legacy MOCI codes. The trap described above is a MOCI problem, not a QFC one. But nothing in QDB's summary tells a QFC-registered entity that it is in scope at all.

What the sector names hide

The five sector headings are broad, and the labels do a poor job of describing what is underneath them.

Eligible activity codes by sector, per QDB's published directory, version 01

Sector as QDB names it	Codes	ISIC divisions	Fail the two-digit test
Professional, scientific and technical activities	552	69–75	164
Administrative and support service activities	421	77–82	96
Information and communication	238	58–63	49
Arts, entertainment and recreation	179	90–93	52
Accommodation and food service activities	136	55–56	33
All five sectors	1,526	—	394

Those division ranges are the standard ISIC Rev.4 structure, and they are what the contents of each section of the directory correspond to. It is worth noting that QDB's summary guidance pairs three of the five sector names with different ranges from the ones above. Where the summary and the directory point in different directions, the directory is the document that lists actual codes, and it is the one to work from.

More practically: the labels understate their own scope badly. Professional, scientific and technical is the largest sector at 552 codes and takes in legal practice, accounting and audit, tax advisory, management consultancy, architecture, engineering, technical testing, research, advertising, market research, design, photography and veterinary services. Administrative and support, at 421 codes, covers cleaning, security, manpower supply and recruitment, vehicle and equipment rental, travel agencies, facilities management, catering and event organisation.

A cleaning contractor, a manpower supplier or a limousine operator reading the phrase "administrative and support services" has no particular reason to think it means them. All three are on the list.

Working out what you can ask for

The facility size is not negotiated from a blank sheet. QDB describes three components, each tied to a document the company already has.

• Salaries — up to three months of obligations, based on the latest WPS payroll
• Rent — up to three months of obligations, based on valid rental agreements
• Other operational expenses — up to 5 per cent of the last audited annual revenue

That is a computable ceiling, and it can be computed before any conversation with a bank begins. Pull the latest WPS file, total the monthly payroll and multiply by three. Total the monthly rent under leases that are currently valid and multiply by three. Take 5 per cent of the last audited revenue figure.

Two things follow from how those components are defined. The payroll figure is the one the WPS file shows, not the one in the management accounts, so any difference between the two is a difference the bank will see. And the third component is anchored to audited revenue. A company without audited accounts may find that component unavailable, which for a service business with modest premises can be the largest of the three.

Your bank reads first

The application does not go to QDB. It goes to the bank where the company holds its primary account. That bank reviews the request under its own approved credit policies and procedures, and only once it has approved does it coordinate with QDB to secure the guarantee. Disbursement then happens through the bank.

Qatar Central Bank's direction to banks is explicit that the programme operates in a manner that does not conflict with each bank's credit policies. A 100 per cent guarantee changes the bank's loss position. It does not remove the bank's credit assessment, and it does not oblige any bank to lend.

The practical consequence is that the file should be assembled for a bank credit reader rather than for a development bank. That means the WPS and lease evidence reconciled to the amount requested, and a view of how the facility is serviced across the term. The habits are the same ones that apply to any cash flow a lender is going to read closely.

Grace is not free

The tenor is up to four years including a grace period of up to two years. Those two numbers are usually read as two separate concessions. They are not independent, and the relationship between them is fixed arithmetic.

Grace does not extend the term. It consumes it. Take the maximum two years of grace on a four-year facility and the entire principal amortises across the remaining twenty-four months. Take no grace and the same principal spreads across forty-eight. The monthly instalment in the first case is exactly double the second.

This is decided at signing, when liquidity pressure argues for taking every month of grace available and when the company has the least information it will ever have about when conditions normalise. It is worth modelling both ends of the range — full grace and none — before the decision is made rather than after, and worth confirming with the bank how profit is treated during the grace period, since that materially changes the comparison.

The programme is also, by construction, temporary. QDB states the Situation Room will remain operational as long as necessary and that updates will be communicated periodically, and the activity directory is marked version 01. Both are signals that the terms described here have a shelf life.

Before you approach your bank

• Pull the commercial registration and list every activity code on it, not just the first
• Look each code up in QDB's published directory, in full, rather than by its first two digits
• Treat a negative result from the two-digit shortcut as unresolved, not as a refusal
• If the entity is QFC-registered, check the hyphenated permitted activity codes as well
• Compute the ceiling: three months of WPS payroll, three months of rent under valid leases, up to 5 per cent of last audited revenue
• Reconcile the WPS payroll figure to the management accounts before the bank does it for you
• Confirm whether the audited revenue component is available to you at all
• Model the facility at full grace and at no grace, and look at both instalments
• Confirm how profit is treated during the grace period
• Prepare for a commercial credit assessment, because eligibility does not deliver approval

None of this requires a feasibility study. It requires reading two published documents carefully and doing arithmetic on figures the company already holds. It is not quick — the directory runs to 88 pages of bilingual tables with no search function worth the name, and a registration carrying six activities means six lookups. But the alternative, self-disqualifying on a two-digit test that does not work, costs nothing to do and cannot be recovered later.