Expats Are 78% of Saudi Arabia's Employed Workforce

Expatriates held 14.8 million of the 19.03 million jobs recorded in Saudi Arabia at the end of the fourth quarter of 2025 — 78% of all employment in the Kingdom. Saudi nationals held the remaining 4.2 million, or 22% [S1][S2]. A decade after Saudisation was relaunched as a central pillar of Vision 2030, and after the introduction of levies, quotas, profession bans and a points-based permit system, the expatriate share of employment is higher than it was when the programme began.

That sentence is the finding, and it needs a boundary drawn around it immediately, because this is the single most frequently mangled statistic in coverage of the Saudi labour market. The expatriate share of employment and the expatriate share of population are different numbers measuring different things. Non-Saudis are roughly 44.4% of the resident population [S16] — a figure covered separately in our reference page on the expat population in Saudi Arabia. They are 78% of the employed workforce. The 34-point gap between those two numbers is not an error in either one. It is the most informative thing about the Saudi labour market, and the explanation for it sits at the centre of this analysis.

The direction of travel matters more than the level. Non-Saudis were 73.7% of employment in 2021. They are 78% now [S3]. Over the same period Saudi employment rose too — from 3.34 million to 4.2 million — so this is not a story of nationals being displaced. It is a story of an economy adding jobs so fast, and in such expatriate-intensive categories, that a rising Saudi headcount could not move the ratio. For every additional Saudi in work since 2017, roughly 3.4 additional non-Saudis entered employment.

None of this means Saudisation failed on its own terms. Saudi unemployment fell to 6.4% in the first quarter of 2026, beating the Vision 2030 target of 7% [S4]. Both statements are true simultaneously, and reconciling them is the analytical work this piece sets out to do.

Last verified: 31 July 2026.

What Percentage of Saudi Arabia’s Workforce Is Foreign?

About 78 per cent, on the measure that counts recorded jobs rather than people. The headline ratio comes from the General Authority for Statistics’ register-based labour market series, which is built from administrative records held by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, the General Organization for Social Insurance and the National Information Center [S3]. It counts individuals subject to social insurance regulations and civil service regulations, plus registered domestic workers. It is a headcount of people in recorded jobs.

This is a different instrument from the Labour Force Survey, which GASTAT also publishes and which is the source of the unemployment and participation rates quoted throughout this article. GASTAT is explicit that the two are not interchangeable, noting that there are differences in concepts, calculation methodology and coverage between the two sources, and that absolute numbers drawn from them do not match [S1]. The survey samples about 96,000 dwellings per quarter and captures rates; the register captures headcounts.

Anyone comparing a survey-derived total to a register-derived total will produce a spurious result. The 78% figure is a register number and should be compared only to other register numbers. That constraint is why the time-series below uses a single consistent source across all nine years rather than assembling the highest figure available for each period.

Three further boundaries apply to the 14.8 million:

• It counts jobs held, not people resident. An expatriate who leaves employment generally loses the legal basis to remain, so the register tracks the workforce closely but is not a population count.
• It includes domestic workers employed by households — a category of roughly four million people [S15] that no company quota touches.
• It excludes irregular and undocumented work, which by definition does not appear in social insurance records.

Has Saudisation Reduced the Number of Expat Workers?

Once, and it did not hold. Expatriate employment fell by more than a million in 2018 and bottomed in 2021; it has since risen by 5.4 million. The register series runs from 2017, which is the useful starting point: it captures the labour market immediately before the foreign-worker levy took effect and covers the entire period in which Vision 2030 labour policy has been operating. Figures below are third-quarter observations for each year, giving like-for-like comparison points [S3].

The shape is a shallow U. The expatriate share fell from 77.7% in 2017 to a floor of 73.7% in 2021, then climbed back to 77.6% by the third quarter of 2025 and to approximately 77.8% — the rounded 78% — by the fourth [S2]. Nine years of policy produced a net movement in the ratio of roughly one tenth of one percentage point.

The 2018 contraction is the one period in which the policy visibly bit. Expatriate employment fell by 1,116,265 between the third quarters of 2017 and 2018, a 10.4% drop, as the foreign-worker levy took effect and smaller firms shed staff [S3]. The 2021 trough compounded that with pandemic departures. Neither reversal held.

What followed was the largest labour import in the Kingdom’s modern history. From the 2021 floor, expatriate employment rose by roughly 5.4 million in four years — a 58% increase — as giga-project construction, tourism build-out and the general non-oil expansion pulled in workers faster than any localisation measure could offset. Saudi employment over the same four years rose by about 860,000, a creditable 26%, and was still swamped in absolute terms.

Why Is the Expat Share Rising If Saudisation Is Working?

Because the economy added jobs faster than the domestic labour pool could fill them. Four mechanisms explain the paradox. None of them involves Saudisation failing to place Saudis in work — it demonstrably did.

The denominator grew faster than any quota could absorb

Total employment rose from 13.76 million in 2017 to 19.03 million at the end of 2025 — an increase of about 5.3 million jobs. Saudi nationals could not have filled a majority of those posts under any plausible scenario. The entire Saudi population is roughly 19.6 million people, including children and the elderly [S16], and Saudi labour force participation stood at 49.5% in the fourth quarter of 2025 [S1]. The domestic labour pool simply does not contain 5.3 million additional available workers.

Proportionally, the two groups grew almost identically. Saudi employment rose 35.3% between 2017 and the third quarter of 2025; non-Saudi employment rose 34.6%. When two populations grow at the same rate from vastly different bases, the ratio between them does not move. To shift a 78/22 split meaningfully, Saudi employment would have to grow several times faster than expatriate employment for a sustained period — not merely faster.

Why is the expat employment share above the population share?

Because residency is tied to work. That is the mechanism behind the gap between the 44.4% population share and the 78% employment share, and it is routinely missed: expatriates are admitted to the country in order to hold a job, and losing it generally means losing the right to stay. The visa system therefore mechanically guarantees that almost every working-age expatriate in the country is in recorded employment.

The non-Saudi unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2025 was 1.7%, against 7.2% for Saudis [S1]. Non-Saudi labour force participation was 82.1%, against 49.5% for Saudis. Saudi nationals, by contrast, can be students, unemployed jobseekers, retirees, or outside the labour force entirely while remaining resident. A national population of 19.6 million yielding 4.2 million workers and an expatriate population of roughly 15.7 million yielding 14.8 million workers is not an anomaly — it is the arithmetic consequence of employment-linked residency.

Four million domestic workers sit outside the quota system

Domestic workers numbered 3.97 million as of the third quarter of 2024 — 2.73 million men and 1.25 million women — and about 234,000 foreign domestic workers joined the market in the preceding twelve months alone [S15]. They constitute roughly 23% of all employment in the Kingdom [S10], and they are essentially entirely non-Saudi.

Nitaqat regulates private-sector establishments. Domestic workers are employed by households. No quota band, no profession reservation and no localisation target applies to them. Close to a quarter of the denominator in the 78% calculation is therefore structurally untouchable by the main policy instrument, and it has been growing.

Quota compliance is measured per firm, not economy-wide

Nitaqat assesses each establishment against a band determined by its sector and size. A firm that meets its band is compliant regardless of what the aggregate ratio does. There is no economy-wide cap on total expatriate headcount, and no mechanism by which a national ratio target propagates down to individual hiring decisions.

The consequence is that the system can be working as designed at every individual firm while the aggregate moves in the opposite direction — because new establishments keep forming, and because sectors with high expatriate intensity keep expanding faster than sectors with high Saudi intensity. Compliance and outcome have been decoupled by construction. Our assessment of whether the programme is meeting its qualitative goals is set out in is Saudisation working.

Which Sectors Employ the Most Foreign Workers in Saudi Arabia?

Construction and infrastructure, retail and wholesale trade, hospitality, and domestic service — the four blocks inside the two largest sector categories. The distribution of employment by sector, as of the third quarter of 2024, ran: private sector 66%, domestic workers 23%, government 7%, and other public sector 3% [S10]. Saudi nationals are heavily concentrated in the two government categories; expatriates dominate the two largest.

That distribution implies a private-sector expatriate share of roughly 80%, consistent with the figure generally cited by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development. The calculation is straightforward: if government and public sector together account for about 10% of 19.03 million jobs and are overwhelmingly Saudi-staffed, then of the roughly 12.6 million private-sector posts, approximately 2.4 million are held by Saudis and 10.2 million by expatriates. This is a derived estimate rather than a published figure, but it brackets the official number closely.

The wage data explains the persistence of that split more directly than any policy analysis can. Average monthly wages at the end of 2025 stood at SAR11,103 ($2,961) for Saudi employees and SAR4,131 ($1,102) for foreign employees [S2] — a ratio of 2.7 to one. The two groups are not competing for the same jobs at the same price. They occupy substantially different segments of the labour market, and roughly 70% of Saudis employed in the private sector work in occupations classified as high-skill [S2].

The sectoral concentrations follow from that wage gap. Construction and infrastructure — the labour demand created by the giga-project programme — is the largest expatriate-intensive block, and it is expanding on a schedule set by project delivery deadlines rather than by labour policy. Retail and wholesale trade, hospitality, and domestic service are the other high-intensity categories. Healthcare and information technology present a different profile: expatriate-heavy but at the skilled and high-skill permit tiers, where the Kingdom is actively competing for international talent rather than seeking to displace it. Further detail on origin, sector and legal status is in our reference page on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia.

The Policy Machinery and What Each Instrument Does

Four instruments operate simultaneously, and they pull in partially different directions.

Nitaqat quota bands. Establishments are rated against sector-specific localisation thresholds. The critical detail for 2026 is the wage condition: a Saudi employee counts as a full unit toward the quota only if the salary subject to social insurance is at least SAR4,000 ($1,067) per month; below that threshold the employee counts as half a unit. Profession-specific quotas now apply across 269 roles, meaning a company can pass its headline Nitaqat assessment and still fail on a single occupation. The framework is set out in full in our guide to labour law and Saudisation, and the wage floor itself in minimum wage in Saudi Arabia.

The SAR4,000 threshold sits almost exactly at the average expatriate wage of SAR4,131. A firm choosing between a Saudi hire that counts fully toward its quota and an expatriate hire faces a decision in which the compliance-relevant Saudi wage floor is roughly the same as the prevailing expatriate wage — but the Saudi average across the economy is 2.7 times higher. The quota is binding precisely where the wage gap is narrowest.

The foreign-worker levy. This is the instrument most often described inaccurately. Two separate charges exist. The employer levy on foreign workers, introduced in 2017, ran at SAR300–700 ($80–187) per worker per month where expatriates did not outnumber Saudi staff, and SAR400–800 ($107–213) where they did. A separate dependants’ levy of SAR400 ($107) per dependant per month has applied since 2020, escalating from SAR100 at introduction in 2017.

The employer levy is the one that produced the 2018 exodus — and it has been substantially unwound. It was suspended in January 2020 after proving burdensome to manufacturers and construction firms, and on 17 December 2025 it was formally cancelled for licensed industrial facilities, explicitly to support the sector’s sustainability and global competitiveness and to expand non-oil exports [S9]. The single measure that demonstrably reduced expatriate employment has been withdrawn from the sector where it bit hardest.

Skill-based work permits. Since 1 July 2025 for incoming workers, and 18 June 2025 for reclassification of those already resident, expatriates are sorted into three tiers — high-skill, skilled and basic — through a points-based assessment on the Qiwa platform covering qualifications, experience, technical ability, wage level and age [S8]. The stated intent is to encourage a gradual shift away from reliance on low-skilled labour and to attract international expertise. It is a composition instrument, not a volume instrument: it changes who comes, not how many. Automated audits flagging mismatches between recorded job titles and actual duties are part of the same enforcement layer. Permit categories and process are covered in work visa in Saudi Arabia.

Visa throttling. Temporary Work Visa issuance has been used as a valve rather than a settled policy. The TWV quota option was removed from Qiwa for all nationalities on 28 April 2025, reinstated for most nationalities on 29 July 2025 with eligibility tied to a firm’s Nitaqat status, and then suspended from 6 February 2026 for nationals of 17 countries including India, Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria and Türkiye [S14]. Reporting that describes temporary work visas as currently paused for all nationalities is describing the April 2025 position, not the present one.

April 2026: The Largest Expansion of Restricted Professions

On 5 April 2026 the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development issued a ministerial decision subjecting 69 administrative support professions to 100% Saudisation in the private sector — secretarial work, translation, data entry and related administrative roles, applying to establishments with one or more workers in the covered occupations [S5][S6].

The decision is phased in two groups. Group A, comprising 19 professions, took effect immediately on issuance with no grace period. Group B, covering the remaining 50, carries a six-month transition with a compliance deadline of 4 October 2026 [S5].

A parallel decision taken with the Ministry of Tourism localises 41 tourism and hospitality professions — hotel manager, hotel operations manager, travel agency manager, tourism development specialist, tour organiser, hospitality specialist and hotel receptionist among them — across three phases beginning 22 April 2026, with the second on 3 January 2027 and the third on 2 January 2028 [S7].

Together these form part of a three-year plan to localise more than 340,000 additional private-sector jobs between 2026 and 2028. Measured against a 14.8 million expatriate workforce, full delivery of that target would move the expatriate employment share by under two percentage points — and only if total employment stopped growing, which it will not. The April 2026 package is the largest single expansion of restricted categories in the programme’s history and is still an order of magnitude too small to reverse the ratio. That is a statement about the arithmetic, not about the policy’s merit: its purpose is to place Saudis in specific occupations, and on that measure it may well succeed.

The Women’s Participation Question

There is a plausible and underexamined link between the April 2026 decision and Saudi women’s employment, and it cuts both ways.

Saudi female labour force participation peaked at 36.2% in the third quarter of 2024 [S13]. It stood at 34.5% in the fourth quarter of 2025 — 1.7 percentage points below that peak, though up 0.8 points on the previous quarter [S1]. The trajectory since 2024 has been a retreat from the high-water mark rather than a continuous decline, and Vision 2030’s original 30% target remains comfortably exceeded. Movement is tracked in our female labour participation KPI.

Administrative support occupations — secretarial work, reception, data entry, coordination roles — are precisely where a large share of newly employed Saudi women entered the private-sector workforce during the participation surge. Reserving those 69 professions for nationals is therefore, in practical effect, as much a female-employment policy as a Saudisation policy, whether or not it was framed that way.

The risk runs in the other direction and deserves stating plainly. Where a role is made exclusive to nationals at a wage floor materially above the prevailing expatriate wage, firms have three responses available: hire the Saudi, automate the function, or eliminate it by redistributing duties. Administrative support work is unusually exposed to the second and third options. If employers choose those routes at scale, a measure aimed at expanding Saudi women’s employment could compress the very occupational category in which they are most concentrated. There is no evidence yet either way — the Group B deadline has not passed — and readers should treat this as a hypothesis to test against fourth-quarter data, not a finding. The structural barriers are examined in women in the Saudi workforce and female employment in Saudi Arabia.

Why This Matters for Vision 2030

Vision 2030’s labour targets were framed in terms of Saudi outcomes — unemployment down to 7%, female participation to 30%, more nationals in productive private-sector work. Judged against those, the programme has delivered. Saudi unemployment reached 6.4% in Q1 2026, below target and at a record low, with female unemployment at 9% [S4]. Both metrics are tracked in unemployment rate in Saudi Arabia and the unemployment KPI tracker.

The 78% ratio was never itself a Vision 2030 target. That is the honest reading, and it is why “Saudisation has failed” is the wrong conclusion to draw from this data. What the ratio does reveal is the shape of the economy the transformation has actually built: one whose growth engine — construction, hospitality, logistics, domestic service — runs on imported labour at roughly a third of the national wage, and whose nationals are being channelled toward the high-skill segment above it.

That has three consequences the targets do not capture. Remittance outflows scale with the expatriate wage bill, and a workforce of 14.8 million foreign workers represents a permanent current-account leakage. Domestic consumption growth is weaker than headline employment growth implies, because the marginal job created accrues to a worker on SAR4,131 with dependants abroad. And the knowledge-transfer objective — the assumption that expatriate expertise would progressively be absorbed by nationals — remains substantially unresolved, as examined in Saudi expat dependency and knowledge transfer.

Risks, Contradictions and Open Questions

The levy has been unwound where it worked. The 2018 contraction is the only evidence that any instrument reduced expatriate employment at scale. Its cancellation for industrial facilities in December 2025 [S9] suggests competitiveness has been prioritised over localisation where the two conflict. Whether that trade-off extends to other sectors is unknown.

Compliance data is not published at the level needed to assess this. Establishment-level Nitaqat band distributions, profession-level compliance rates across the 269 regulated roles, and the number of firms downgraded for non-compliance are not in the public domain. Without them, it is not possible to say whether the April 2026 decision is being met by hiring or by role elimination.

Labour conditions remain contested and should not be elided. In the 2026 Global Rights Index the International Trade Union Confederation rated Saudi Arabia 5 — its worst category — for workers’ rights [S12]. On 29 April 2026 UN special rapporteurs, including Gehad Madi on the human rights of migrants and Siobhán Mullally on trafficking in persons, urged the Kingdom to effectively abolish the kafala sponsorship system, stating that despite legal reforms the system has not been effectively dismantled and continues to expose migrant workers to significant risk of abuse including forced labour [S11]. The Kingdom has enacted reforms permitting job transfer and exit without employer consent; the dispute between the government and these organisations concerns whether those reforms function in practice, particularly for domestic workers, who fall outside the standard labour law. Any account of a 14.8 million-strong migrant workforce that omits this is incomplete. It now carries a trade consequence too: the Kingdom’s missing forced-labour import prohibition is the legal trigger for the additional US duty on Saudi-origin goods imposed in July 2026.

One widely circulated figure could not be verified. A monthly non-Saudi employment total of 15,168,982 for March 2026, against 14,822,784 for December 2025, is in circulation. The direction it indicates is consistent with the verified register series, but the specific monthly figures could not be confirmed against a GASTAT publication or a credible outlet, and they are not relied on here. The most recent independently verified data point remains Q4 2025.

The two GASTAT series will keep producing contradictory headlines. Because register and survey outputs differ by construction [S1], coverage will continue to report incompatible totals. Readers should check which instrument a given figure comes from before comparing it to anything.

What to Watch Next

• 4 October 2026 — compliance deadline for Group B of the administrative support decision, covering 50 of the 69 reserved professions. The first hard test of whether reservation produces hiring or role elimination.
• Q3 2026 GASTAT register release — the first quarter to capture the April 2026 decisions in the headcount data. Watch whether the non-Saudi total continues rising past 15 million.
• Q4 2026 Labour Force Survey — whether Saudi female participation recovers toward the 36.2% peak or settles at the mid-34% level.
• 3 January 2027 — phase two of the tourism localisation decision, covering the next tranche of the 41 professions.
• Industrial levy precedent — whether the December 2025 cancellation is extended to construction or logistics, which would signal that competitiveness has decisively displaced localisation as the binding constraint.
• Temporary Work Visa policy — whether the 17-nationality suspension of February 2026 is lifted, extended, or made permanent.

Related Vision 2030 Context

• Expat population in Saudi Arabia — the population share (44.4%), the distinct measure this article deliberately does not cover
• Saudi expat dependency and knowledge transfer — the structural dependence behind the employment ratio
• Nitaqat — how the quota bands are calculated and enforced
• Saudisation — the programme’s origins, objectives and instruments
• Is Saudisation working? — quality versus quantity in localisation outcomes
• Employment in Saudi Arabia 2025 — the broader labour market overview
• Foreign workers in Saudi Arabia — origins, sectors and legal status
• Population of Saudi Arabia — the demographic base underlying participation rates
• Priority scorecard: employment and labour market — Vision 2030 labour KPIs in one view

Sources

• [S1] General Authority for Statistics, Labor Market Statistics Q4 2025, official press release, February 2026. https://www.stats.gov.sa/documents/d/guest/lms-q4_2025_pr_en-press-release-1-pdf
• [S2] Argaam, Saudi Arabia Employment Hits 19M in Q4 2025, news report, 2026. https://www.argaam.com/en/article/articledetail/id/1900191
• [S3] Gulf Labour Markets, Migration and Population Programme, Saudi Arabia: Employed Population by Nationality and Sex, Q1 2017–Q3 2025, database table citing GASTAT register-based statistics. https://gulfmigration.grc.net/saudi-arabia-employed-population-by-nationality-saudi-non-saudi-and-sex-q1-2017-q3-2025/
• [S4] Gulf News, Saudi Unemployment Falls to 6.4% in Q1 2026, news report, 2026. https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/saudi/saudi-unemployment-falls-to-64-in-q1-2026-1.500592445
• [S5] Saudi Press Agency, HRSD Updates Saudization Decision to Include 69 Administrative Support Professions, official statement, April 2026. https://www.spa.gov.sa/en/N2553750
• [S6] EY, Saudi Arabia Sets 100% Saudization for Administrative Support Professions, tax and immigration alert, April 2026. https://www.ey.com/en_gl/technical/tax-alerts/saudi-arabia-announces-100-saudization-for-certain-administrative-support-professions
• [S7] Saudi Gazette, Saudi Arabia to Localize 41 Professions in Tourism Sector, Including Hotel Manager and Receptionist, news report, 2026. https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/651134/SAUDI-ARABIA/Saudi-Arabia-to-localize-41-professions-in-tourism-sector-including-hotel-manager-and-receptionist
• [S8] Arab News, Saudi Arabia Rolls Out Skill-Based Work Permits to Attract Global Talent, news report, 2025. https://www.arabnews.com/node/2607118
• [S9] Xinhua, Saudi Arabia Cancels Foreign Worker Levy for Licensed Industrial Facilities, news report, 18 December 2025. https://english.news.cn/20251218/3b223dd494524765ae3d20d5f6ba0df5/c.html
• [S10] Argaam, Saudi Arabia’s Workforce Hits 17.2M by Q3 2024, news report, 2024. https://www.argaam.com/en/article/articledetail/id/1781674
• [S11] Human Rights Watch, UN Experts Sound Alarm Over Saudi Arabia’s Abusive Labor Governance System, news release, 19 May 2026. https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/05/19/un-experts-sound-alarm-over-saudi-arabias-abusive-labor-governance-system
• [S12] International Trade Union Confederation, 2026 Global Rights Index, annual report, June 2026. https://www.ituc-csi.org/global-rights-index
• [S13] General Authority for Statistics, Labor Force Participation Rate of Saudi Females Reaches 36.2%, news release, 31 December 2024. https://www.stats.gov.sa/en/w/news/6
• [S14] Fragomen, Saudi Arabia: Temporary Suspension of Temporary Work Visas for Select Nationals, immigration alert, February 2026. https://www.fragomen.com/insights/saudi-arabia-temporary-suspension-of-temporary-work-visas-for-select-nationals.html
• [S15] Saudi Gazette, 234,000 Domestic Workers Joined Saudi Employment Market in a Year, news report, 2025. https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/648417
• [S16] Saudi Gazette, Saudi Arabia’s Population Crosses 35 Million, With Non-Saudis Constituting 44.4%, news report, 2025. https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/649191