We attempted to advance understanding of surface bonding in metal oxides for improved prediction of oxidative catalysis. By decomposing the integrated crystal orbital Hamiltonian population (ICOHP) to individual bond contributions, we have uncovered a non-local and magnetic c effects in transition metal oxides. Our comprehensive analysis highlights the limitations of using solely the active bond and/or bulk ICOHP, especially for d 0 systems with weak bonding or for cases with large structural changes. The size extrapolated scheme using ΔICOHP leads to strong linear correlation with adsorption energies which is close to unity for 4d and 5d and half that value for 3d. From this perspective the electronic-structural properties of oxidative adsorption in metal oxides are well captured by this descriptor. The most difficult cases are when localized 3d electrons in high-spin change under adsorption, which we argue cannot be captured by covalent bond descriptor such as ICOHP. Inclusion of crystal field stabilization energy corrections helps to capture these effects but need to improved for better qualitative accuracy.