On 27 October 2024, ITV aired a documentary titled “Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia.” It contained a single statistic that the Saudi government has not refuted with a specific alternative number: approximately 21,000 foreign workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017 working on Vision 2030 projects. The breakdown by nationality: more than 14,000 Indian workers, more than 5,000 Bangladeshi workers, and more than 2,000 Nepali workers. A further 100,000 workers were reported missing — a category that includes those who fled their employers, those whose documentation was confiscated and who disappeared into the informal economy, and those whose deaths were never recorded by any authority.
The Saudi National Council for Occupational Safety and Health called the allegations “misinformation” with “unfounded statistics lacking credible sources.” It did not provide its own count. NEOM itself reported 8 workplace fatalities annually, which it claimed was comparable to the United States construction industry rate of 9.6 per 100,000 employees. The comparison would be reassuring if it were credible. It is not credible because the system that produces NEOM’s official death count is the same system that classifies 80 per cent of migrant worker deaths as “natural causes” — a designation that eliminates the employer’s liability, voids the family’s compensation claim, and erases the workplace from the death certificate.
The 21,000 figure is not a precise count. It is an aggregation derived from embassy data, NGO documentation, and investigative reporting. It may be too low. It is certainly not too high. What makes it significant is not its exactness but its scale — and the systematic mechanism by which the scale is obscured.
The Classification Fraud
The single most important fact about migrant worker deaths in Saudi Arabia is not how many people die. It is how the deaths are classified.
Between January and July 2024 — a seven-month period — 884 Bangladeshi citizens died in Saudi Arabia. Eighty per cent of those deaths were attributed to “natural causes.” The Indian Embassy in Riyadh recorded 1,420 Indian migrant deaths in 2023. Seventy-four per cent were classified as “natural causes.” Between 2019 and 2022, 870 Nepali citizens died in Saudi Arabia. Sixty-eight per cent received the same classification.
The term “natural causes” implies that the deaths resulted from pre-existing medical conditions, age-related decline, or diseases unrelated to the working environment. The term does not imply this because the evidence supports it. The term implies this because no one examined the evidence. In the overwhelming majority of cases classified as “natural causes,” no autopsy was performed, no workplace investigation was conducted, and no medical examination established that the cause of death was unrelated to employment conditions.
A 2019 Saudi pathology study — conducted by Saudi researchers and published in a peer-reviewed journal — examined a sample of migrant worker death cases and found that 100 per cent of them had incorrect or absent causes of death on the official documentation. Seventy-five per cent listed no cause of death at all. The study’s findings were not suppressed. They were simply ignored by the administrative system that continued to produce the same classifications the study had documented as fraudulent.
The classification is not a medical finding. It is an administrative act with legal consequences. When a death is classified as “natural,” the employer bears no liability. The family receives no workman’s compensation. The workplace is not investigated for safety violations. The death does not appear in occupational fatality statistics. The worker — his body, his labour, his contribution to the construction of the Kingdom’s future — vanishes from the record as though he had never worked at all.
Human Rights Watch documented this mechanism in its May 2025 report, which examined individual cases in granular detail. A 25-year-old Nepali worker was electrocuted at a construction site and died months later from complications. His death was classified as “natural” — despite the workplace electrocution that caused it. His body was buried in Saudi Arabia without his family’s permission. The family received no compensation and no explanation. The worker’s death certificate stated what the system required it to state: that a 25-year-old man died of natural causes, as though electricity were a natural phenomenon that selectively targets construction workers.
The Report: “Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”
In December 2024, Human Rights Watch published “Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later,” a 79-page report based on 156 interviews with migrant workers employed on Saudi giga-projects. The report’s title is a direct quotation from a worker who asked his manager for payment and was told: “Die first, and I’ll pay you later.”
The report documented a systematic architecture of exploitation across the giga-project supply chain. Its findings cannot be summarised without loss, but the numerical core is this:
Of 112 workers interviewed in detail, 69 experienced payment delays and 71 experienced non-payment or underpayment. Workers promised 1,200 riyals per month received 800. Workers promised 1,000 riyals per month received 800. The shortfall was consistent across employers and projects — not an individual failing but a structural practice.
One hundred and twenty-eight out of 130 workers surveyed reported paying illegal recruitment fees to reach Saudi Arabia. Only two paid nothing. The average fee paid by Bangladeshi workers was $3,715 — money borrowed at usurious interest rates or secured against family assets. Some workers borrowed at 42 per cent interest. Others pledged their homes. The debt they carried from their home countries became the mechanism that bound them to employers who could not be left without the employer’s consent.
Upon arrival, 47 workers were assigned jobs different from what had been promised in their recruitment contracts. Many were forced to sign contracts in Arabic that they could not read. The bait-and-switch — promise one job, deliver another, force a signature on a document the worker cannot understand — is not an isolated practice. It is the standard onboarding procedure for the construction labour supply chain in Saudi Arabia.
The isolation of NEOM’s construction sites compounded every other abuse. Workers described the conditions in testimony that HRW documented verbatim: “We are in the middle of nowhere. Embassies are very far away. If something goes wrong, there is nowhere we can go. There is also fear. Where do we go? Who do we tell?”
Workers at The Line reported 16-hour work days, unpaid three-hour bus commutes each way, and approximately four hours of sleep. They described themselves, in the ITV documentary, as “trapped slaves” and “beggars.” The language was not metaphorical. It described a condition in which the worker cannot leave his employer, cannot leave the country, cannot access legal assistance, and cannot communicate his situation to any authority with the power or willingness to intervene.
The Heat
Saudi Arabia bans outdoor work between noon and 3 PM from 15 June to 15 September. The regulation is presented as a protective measure. Research has demonstrated that it is inadequate by design.
Extreme heat conditions in Saudi Arabia frequently occur outside both the banned hours and the banned months. The morning hours — when workers begin shifts — can produce dangerous heat-humidity combinations. Evening hours retain heat accumulated during the day. The banned period covers three hours out of a potential sixteen-hour work day and three months out of a potential six-month extreme heat season. The regulation protects the appearance of regulation. It does not protect workers.
Worker testimony in the HRW report described the daily toll: “Every day, one or two workers faint, including during mornings and evenings. Sometimes on the way to work. Sometimes while working.” The fainting was routine — so routine that it was absorbed into the rhythm of the work day rather than treated as a medical emergency requiring systemic intervention.
Deaths from heat exposure are classified as “natural causes” or “cardiac arrest” — designations that sever the causal link between the work environment and the death. A worker who dies of cardiac arrest after working in 48-degree heat for twelve hours did not die of “natural causes.” He died of heat exposure. But the death certificate records the cardiac arrest, not its cause. The employer is absolved. The construction schedule is maintained. And the death is filed in the same administrative category as an 80-year-old dying in his sleep.
FairSquare, a UK-based human rights organisation, published its “Underlying Causes” report examining 17 Nepali men who died in Saudi Arabia. The men ranged in age from 23 to 57. Five died from workplace accidents. Twelve died from diseases or conditions that FairSquare’s medical consultants linked to occupational exposures. Eight of the twelve disease-related deaths had no medical documentation accompanying the death certificate. The system did not fail to document these deaths. The system documented them as intended: with the minimum information necessary to process the administrative requirements and the maximum opacity necessary to prevent accountability.
The Named Dead
The statistics describe a system. The individuals describe what the system does to people.
Abdul Wali Skandar Khan, 25, Pakistani, civil engineer, father of two. Died 28 December 2023 when a metal gate being installed at NEOM’s healthcare centre fell on him. Employed by China Communications Services through a subcontractor, Falcon Group. Neither the employer nor Saudi authorities conducted an investigation. No police report was filed. The hospital in Tabuk refused to release the body without one. His brother, Meer Wali Khan, a dual British-Pakistani citizen, travelled to Saudi Arabia at his own expense to retrieve the body. The company deposited a small compensation amount to the Pakistani embassy without consulting the family, who were unable to access the funds. ALQST documented his death as the first formally recorded death of a migrant worker on a NEOM construction site.
Badri Bhujel, 39, Nepali, machine operator. Worked for Samsung C&T constructing tunnels for NEOM. Died 11 April 2024. Five days before his death, he vomited large amounts of blood at work and was taken to hospital by ambulance. The hospital death certificate listed “alveolar and parietoalveolar conditions” and pulmonary tuberculosis — diagnosed two days before his death. The Ministry of Interior death certificate stated only “natural death” — no medical information included. The gap between what the hospital recorded and what the state recorded is the gap between medicine and administration.
A 48-year-old Bangladeshi worker fell from the fifth floor of a construction site. His safety belt failed. He died. A 36-year-old Bangladeshi was crushed by falling construction blocks. His body required a crane for removal. A 46-year-old Bangladeshi’s head was caught in an operating machine while attempting repairs. His head separated from his body upon repatriation to Bangladesh. A 43-year-old Bangladeshi was killed when a blade in a concrete-cutting machine severed his head. A 33-year-old Bangladeshi fell from a third-floor window during demolition work. No assistance was provided due to concerns about liability.
These cases were documented by Human Rights Watch in its May 2025 report. Each case followed the same pattern: workplace death, classification as “natural causes” or minimal documentation, no investigation, no compensation, family left to navigate the aftermath without assistance.
The Wall Street Journal’s investigation of NEOM documented additional incidents that had not been captured by human rights organisations: medical reports from NEOM documenting instances of gang rape, attempted murder, and suicide among workers. Children as young as 8 were found driving trucks on NEOM construction sites. A McKinsey consultant died in a head-on nighttime crash. The incidents were documented in internal records. They did not produce systemic changes.
The Missing
The 100,000 workers reported missing represent a category that is more disturbing than the deaths precisely because it is less defined. The missing include workers who fled their employers and entered the informal economy — undocumented, without legal status, and without the ability to leave the country. They include workers whose documentation was confiscated by employers and who could not prove their identity to any authority. They include workers who died in circumstances that produced no record — no death certificate, no embassy notification, no family contact. They include workers who exist in the administrative gap between the employer’s records and the state’s records, uncounted by both.
The missing are a function of the system’s design, not its failure. The kafala system ties a worker to a specific employer. If the worker leaves that employer without permission, he becomes undocumented. He cannot seek new employment legally. He cannot access healthcare. He cannot leave the country. He exists in a legal void — present in the country but absent from every system that tracks, protects, or accounts for human beings.
At NEOM specifically, the construction workforce of 140,000 is housed in isolated camps — vast settlements of identical housing blocks in the desert, surrounded by fences and accessed through guard houses, hundreds of miles from the nearest town. The camps sit outside the planned boundaries of the luxury development itself. Google Maps images show sparse, shared rooms with multiple bunk beds. The camps are designed for containment, not comfort. A worker who leaves the camp without authorisation is in the desert, without transport, without documentation, and without any destination that would accept him.
The Families
The families of the dead receive, in the best case, a body and a death certificate that does not describe how their relative died. In the worst case, they receive neither.
HRW documented cases in which employers pressured families to bury their relatives’ bodies in Saudi Arabia rather than repatriate them — conditioning compensation on local burial. Workers with expired labour approvals were excluded from welfare fund eligibility, meaning their families were ineligible for the limited support mechanisms that exist. There is no mandatory life insurance requirement for employers of migrant workers in Saudi Arabia.
Compensation processing delays span 10 to 15 years. Saudi Oger, one of the Kingdom’s largest construction firms, collapsed owing an estimated 2.6 billion riyals — approximately $693 million — in unpaid wages to at least 21,000 workers. As of February 2024, only 69 million riyals had been distributed. Of 8,830 Filipino claimants, only 1,352 had received anything.
The families who lose workers to Saudi construction sites are, overwhelmingly, among the poorest communities in South Asia. The recruitment fees that workers paid to reach the job — averaging $3,715 for Bangladeshis — were borrowed. When the worker dies, the debt remains. The family loses the income the worker was supposed to send home and retains the debt the worker incurred to reach the job that killed him. The economic arithmetic is devastating: a family pays $3,715 to send a worker to a job that pays $213 per month. The worker dies. The family receives no compensation. The debt remains.
The widow of Surya Nath, one of the 17 Nepali men whose death FairSquare documented, was left with 1 million Nepali rupees — approximately $7,250 — in debt. The debt was incurred to fund the recruitment fees that sent her husband to a job in Saudi Arabia. He died there. She received nothing from the employer. The debt is hers.
The Prediction
FairSquare’s report concluded with a prediction that the available evidence makes difficult to dispute: the construction surge required for NEOM’s remaining components and the 2034 FIFA World Cup will produce “thousands of unexplained deaths.”
The World Cup alone requires 11 new stadiums, 4 refurbished venues, 185,000 new hotel rooms, and substantial airport, road, and rail infrastructure. Building and Wood Workers’ International estimates that 70,000 construction workers will be required for stadium development alone. The Saudi migrant workforce has grown approximately 40 per cent since Vision 2030’s launch, reaching 13.2 million.
The conditions that produced 21,000 deaths since 2017 have not been structurally altered. The kafala system persists in practice despite its formal abolition. The heat regulation covers three hours of a sixteen-hour day. The classification system that converts workplace deaths into “natural causes” operates without reform. The recruitment fee pipeline continues to deliver indebted workers to employers who hold their passports and their exit permits. The ILO forced labour complaint filed by BWI in June 2024 was upheld for admissibility in January 2025. Saudi Arabia has not publicly responded to its substance.
The construction will continue. The workers will continue to arrive. The deaths will continue to be classified as natural. And the number — 21,000 as of October 2024 — will continue to grow, counted by embassies and NGOs because the state that employs the workers does not count them, and by the time the count is revised upward, the distance between the number and the name of any individual worker will be so great that the number itself will have become the only memorial the dead receive.
Twenty-one thousand workers dead. One hundred thousand missing. Zero criminal prosecutions of employers. Zero systemic reforms to the classification system. Zero autopsies in the majority of cases. And a $50 billion construction programme that reported eight workplace fatalities per year while embassies counted the dead in thousands.
The number is 21,000. The names are mostly unknown. The graves are mostly unmarked. The city they were building does not exist. And the next construction cycle is beginning.
This investigation draws on the ITV documentary “Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia” (October 2024); Human Rights Watch (“Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later,” December 2024; migrant worker death investigation, May 2025); FairSquare (“Underlying Causes,” May 2025); Building and Wood Workers’ International (ILO Article 24 complaint, June 2024); ALQST (briefing papers and political prisoner documentation); the Wall Street Journal (NEOM investigation, September 2024); embassy mortality data from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal; Saudi pathology research on death classification accuracy; Middle East Eye; the Architect’s Newspaper; The B1M; and Together for Justice. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.