Indian Nurses Going to the UAE: Emigration Clearance and the 2025 Rules

Passing the MOHAP exam and signing a contract is not the last step for an Indian nurse. Since 2015 the Government of India has required emigration clearance (EC) from the Protector of Emigrants for every nurse going to work in any of the Emigration Check Required countries — and the UAE is one of them. That applies even if your passport is ECNR, as most nurses' are. What changed in August 2025 is who may recruit you: the old restriction to state agencies and employer-specific orders is gone. This guide sets out the rules as the orders state them.

MOIA order of 12 Mar 2015; MEA OM of 25 Aug 2025; eMigrate; MOIA order of 7 May 2015.

Nurses whose qualification is recognised under the Indian Nursing Council Act are among those whose passports are not stamped ECR — so they usually hold ECNR passports. But a specific order of 12 March 2015 overrides this for nurses: "the emigration of nurses for Overseas Employment in 18 ECR countries will require emigration clearance from POE offices", effective from 30 May 2015 after a date change. The MEA's order of 25 August 2025 confirmed that nurses emigrating to any ECR country "would continue to require the emigration clearance (EC) from the Protector of Emigrants (PoE)". We found nothing later that reverses it.

The practical upshot since August 2025 — our reading of the orders — is that a UAE employer may recruit an Indian nurse directly, or through any recruiting agent registered with the MEA, not only through NORKA Roots, ODEPC or OMCL. The clearance itself has not gone away, and neither has the ban on charging nurses recruitment fees. A genuine agent can show an original Registration Certificate issued by the Protector General of Emigrants — the MEA tells emigrants to ask for it.

The eMigrate site carries one UAE-specific document: a 2016 MEA memo enclosing MOHAP's letter of 27 June 2016 to the Indian Embassy. It explained that under MOHAP's rules then, diplomas of 18 months to three years were licensed as assistant nurses only, and the minimum for a registered nurse was a 3½-year diploma in nursing and midwifery. Today's rulebook — the Unified PQR, 3rd version, April 2025, section 14 — is stricter again: a registered nurse needs a bachelor's degree in nursing. Before accepting a UAE offer for a "staff nurse" post, a GNM nurse should confirm the title the employer will license — it decides the salary, the scope of practice and which exam is booked.

The Pravasi Bharatiya Bima Yojana is mandatory for ECR-category workers going to ECR countries: ₹10 lakh of cover for a premium of ₹275 (two years) or ₹375 (three years). eMigrate does not spell out whether it is mandatory for an ECNR nurse, but the 2025 nurse workflow includes buying a PBBY policy for each emigrant in both routes. The 30-year minimum age for women on ECR passports does not apply to nurses. And the 2015 order is unambiguous on money: agencies "shall not charge any fees to meet the recruitment expenses from the nurses under any circumstance", and employers may not recover recruitment costs during the contract.

Two further documents sit behind UAE recruitment. eMigrate lists an India–UAE MoU on cooperation in the field of manpower, dated there 11 February 2018. And the Emigration Act, 1983 remains the law under which clearance is issued and agents are registered; the MEA's 2018 advisory warned that action under Section 24 can be taken against agents and employers who send nurses on visit visas to evade clearance. The practical rule is simple: travel on an employment visa, with emigration clearance approved on eMigrate first.