ICV certification
ICV certificate Qatar: what's mandatory now, and what's coming in 2027
An ICV — In-Country Value — certificate is a scored, dated document issued by a Tawteen-approved certifier, stating how much of a supplier's cost base is genuinely local. Whether it is mandatory to hold one depends on which tender is being bid on, and that is about to change.
Per the Ministry of Finance notice published on the Monaqasat portal, mandatory submission of an ICV certificate as a condition of participating in government tenders is postponed to the beginning of 2027, with the exact date still to be announced. The linking of tender financial ceilings to a company's classification level is also postponed, on the same notice, specifically to give more companies time to meet the classification requirements that will eventually gate the larger tenders. The Ministry is encouraging suppliers to begin certification now, ahead of the deadline rather than at it.
One sector does not get the postponement. Per the icv.qa FAQ, ICV is already mandatory for Energy Sector tenders. A supplier with no ICV score on the bid closing date is disqualified during commercial evaluation — not scored low, removed from consideration entirely, regardless of price.
How the score is built
Per icv.qa, the formula is:
ICV Score = (Eligible Local Cost ÷ Total Cost) + Bonus
Eligible local cost is broader than most suppliers expect: local goods and services, manpower compensation and overhead, training and supplier development, and fixed-asset investment all count toward it, not only the price of locally sourced materials. The bonus sits on top of that ratio and rewards growth, Qatarization, exports, R&D and sustainability — meaning two suppliers with an identical cost base can still land at different scores depending on how they perform against those five levers.
Certification itself is done at arm's length. Certifiers must be Tawteen-approved, must remain independent of the companies they certify, and are explicitly barred from also consulting for their certification clients. Disputes over a score escalate to Tawteen directly, not to the certifier that issued it.
The bar is rising while the deadline approaches
The 2027 mandate is not arriving into a static field of scores. Among the 518 companies in our corpus with a scored ICV in both 2024 and 2025, the median score moved from 15.3 to 24.1 — 89% of that same cohort scored higher in 2025 than the year before. A certificate that looked competitive when it was issued can already be behind the market by the time a company next needs it, well before 2027 forces the question. What that gap is worth on price, and why it compounds arithmetically rather than gently, is worked through in what your ICV score is actually worth in a Qatar tender .
For a supplier already certified, the practical question is not whether to certify but whether the certificate on file still reflects where the market has moved — and, for a certificate approaching its own expiry, what happens during the interval before it is renewed. That is covered in what a grace period does and does not protect .
Sources: Ministry of Finance notice on the Monaqasat portal (mandate postponement, classification-linkage postponement); icv.qa FAQ (Energy Sector mandate, scoring formula, certifier rules). Cohort figures: fixed cohort of 518 companies scored in both years compared, coverage 2020–2026. We do not hold reliable certificate-expiry counts in this build and none are stated here.
See where your own bids sit
Get the same cohort analysis for your company's ICV history, benchmarked against the tenders you actually bid on.