We present a systematic simulation campaign to investigate the pairwise interaction of two mobile, monodisperse particles submerged in a viscous fluid and subjected to monochromatic oscillating flows. To this end, we employ the immersed boundary method to geometrically resolve the flow around the two particles in a non-inertial reference frame. We neglect gravity to focus on fluid–particle interactions associated with particle inertia and consider particles of three different density ratios aligned along the axis of oscillation. We systematically vary the initial particle distance and the frequency based on which the particles show either attractive or repulsive behaviour by approaching or moving away from each other, respectively. This behaviour is consistently confirmed for the three density ratios investigated, although particle inertia dictates the overall magnitude of the particle dynamics. Based on this, threshold conditions for the transition from attraction to repulsion are introduced that obey the same power law for all density ratios investigated. We furthermore analyse the flow patterns by suitable averaging and decomposition of the flow fields and find competing effects of the vorticity induced by the fluid–particle interactions. Based on these flow patterns, we derive a circulation-based criterion that provides a quantitative measure to categorize the different cases. It is shown that such a criterion provides a consistent measure to distinguish the attractive and repulsive arrangements.