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Non-Oil GDP Share: 55% 2025 real GDP |Saudi Unemployment: 7.2% Q4 2025 |PIF AUM: $1.21T 2025 actual |FDI Share of GDP: 2.8% Q1 2026 |Female Participation: 33.9% Q1 2026 |Credit Rating: Aa3/A+/A+ Moody's/Fitch/S&P |GDP Growth: 4.5% 2025 actual |Umrah Pilgrims: 18M+ 2025 foreign |Non-Oil GDP Share: 55% 2025 real GDP |Saudi Unemployment: 7.2% Q4 2025 |PIF AUM: $1.21T 2025 actual |FDI Share of GDP: 2.8% Q1 2026 |Female Participation: 33.9% Q1 2026 |Credit Rating: Aa3/A+/A+ Moody's/Fitch/S&P |GDP Growth: 4.5% 2025 actual |Umrah Pilgrims: 18M+ 2025 foreign |
Home Analysis & Editorial The Vision 2030 Annual Report Says 93% of KPIs Were Met. Here Is What the Data Shows.
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The Vision 2030 Annual Report Says 93% of KPIs Were Met. Here Is What the Data Shows.

Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 annual report for 2025 says 93% of KPIs were met or exceeded. The 2024 report said 93% too. An audit of the arithmetic behind the headline, the indicators that are off track, and how the targets themselves have been rewritten.

Donovan Vanderbilt · · 22 min read
The Vision 2030 Annual Report Says 93% of KPIs Were Met. Here Is What the Data Shows. — Analysis — Saudi Vision 2030

Not 93% — 79%. The Vision 2030 annual report for 2025, published in April 2026, says 93% of key performance indicators met or exceeded their annual targets. The breakdown behind that number, as reported by Asharq Al-Awsat on 26 April 2026, is 309 of 390 indicators that met or surpassed target, plus a further 52 indicators that reached between 85% and 99% of target [S2]. The first group is 79.2% of the total. Adding the second produces 361 of 390 — 92.6% — which is the 93%.

That construction is not hidden. The official framing is explicit about it: Asharq Al-Awsat rendered the report’s own language as 93% of indicators having “achieved or exceeded annual targets, or were close to doing so[S2]. The Saudi Press Agency used the same three-part formula for the previous year, describing 93% of indicators as having “met, exceeded, or are close to meeting” their 2024 interim targets [S6]. What has been lost is the qualifier, not the disclosure — most coverage of the Vision 2030 annual report reduced 93% of KPIs to a clean pass rate, and at least one wire report stated that 309 of 390 indicators produced the 93% figure directly [S1], which is arithmetically impossible.

The second observation is the more useful one. 93% appears in both the 2024 and the 2025 annual reports. The 2024 edition reported 374 indicators, of which 299 were achieved and 49 sat in the same 85–99% band — 348 of 374, or 93.0% [S3]. A year later the population had grown to 390 and the answer was 93% again. The fully-achieved share moved from 79.9% to 79.2%: marginally down, not up.

None of this makes the report false, and it is worth being precise about what it actually claims. A framework hitting 93% of annual interim targets is not the same statement as “Vision 2030 is on track for 2030”, and the report does not make the second claim. Several 2030 goals have genuinely been beaten years early. But the data published between April and July 2026 — quarterly GDP, foreign investment, trade and tourism — moves in the opposite direction to the headline, and in one case, Q2 non-oil growth of 0.6%, published on 30 July 2026, it moves a long way [S12].

How the 93% Is Built

Report yearIndicatorsMet or exceeded85–99% of targetHeadline
2024 (published Apr 2025)374299 (79.9%)4993%
2025 (published Apr 2026)390309 (79.2%)5293%

Sources: Arab News, 26 April 2025 [S3]; Asharq Al-Awsat, 26 April 2026 [S2]. The official PDFs at vision2030.gov.sa block automated retrieval [S27], so the breakdowns above are taken from the outlets that read them.

What the Vision 2030 Annual Report 2025 Claims

The report covers calendar year 2025 and was released in late April 2026. Its principal claims are consistent across the wire coverage.

On delivery: 1,290 active initiatives, of which 935 were complete and 225 progressing on schedule — 90% complete or on track [S2]. On indicators: 390 KPIs, 93% met, exceeded or close to it. On the economy: real GDP of $1.31tn, real growth of 4.5% in 2025, non-oil activities at 55% of real GDP, private sector contribution at 51% against 44% at the Vision’s launch, and inflation at 2.0% [S2][S26]. On society: life expectancy at 79.7 years against an 80-year target, home ownership at 66.24%, healthcare services reaching 97.5% of population clusters, and more than 151 million trees planted [S1][S4]. On energy: renewable generation capacity described as rising to 46GW from 3GW in six years [S4].

Unemployment among Saudi nationals stood at 7.2% at the end of 2025 against 12.3% in 2016 [S2], and foreign direct investment stock at SR293.3bn ($78.2bn), a 119% increase since 2017 [S1].

Set against 2024, the delivery numbers improved: 674 of 1,502 initiatives complete and 85% complete or on track a year earlier, against 935 of 1,290 and 90% now [S3][S5].

What Does “93% of KPIs Met” Actually Mean?

It means 93% of indicators either hit their annual interim target or came within 85% of it. Three separate design choices sit inside that sentence, and each one moves the number.

The first is the inclusion band. An indicator at 85% of target is counted in the same headline as an indicator at 140%. In a portfolio where 257 indicators exceeded their 2024 targets [S3], the aggregate tells you very little about dispersion: a programme overshooting on cheap outputs and undershooting on hard outcomes produces the same 93% as one performing evenly.

The second is the interim target itself. These are annual milestones set inside the Vision’s own planning cycle, not the 2030 end-state goals. Where a milestone is set conservatively, attainment is close to automatic. Nothing in the published material discloses how interim targets are calibrated, by whom, or whether they are revised mid-year.

The third is the denominator, and this is where the two reports diverge most interestingly. The indicator population grew from 374 to 390. The initiative population went the other way, falling from 1,502 to 1,290 — 212 fewer initiatives in the register. Over the same period, completions rose from 674 to 935 (+261) and the “on track” pool fell from 596 to 225 (−371) [S3][S2]. Initiatives that are completed should leave the on-track pool and enter the completed pool, which accounts for much of that movement. What is not explained anywhere in the public reporting is where the 212 net departures from the register went: retired, merged, absorbed into successor programmes, or reclassified. A shrinking denominator raises the completion percentage mechanically, and there is no published reconciliation.

Is Vision 2030 on track for 2030?

The annual report does not say so, and neither should anyone reading it. It reports attainment against annual interim targets — a narrower and more defensible claim than a statement about 2030 outcomes. Our Vision 2030 reality check treats the end-state question separately, and the underlying indicator definitions are catalogued in the Vision 2030 KPIs and targets reference. The full report-by-report briefing sits at Saudi Vision 2030 annual report intelligence. This piece is narrower than all three: it audits the 93% figure and the arithmetic behind it. For the general methodological critique of Saudi performance measurement — output versus outcome, disclosure gaps, verification design — see Vision 2030 KPI credibility, which covers the framework in the abstract rather than this specific claim.

Who Verifies Vision 2030’s KPI Data?

Adaa — the National Center for Performance Measurement. It was established in 2016, on a recommendation of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA), and reports directly to the prime minister [S21]. Its remit is to measure government entities against approved KPIs across four layers: outcome-based indicators tracking Vision 2030 targets, execution data on milestones, service-level data, and beneficiary satisfaction across eight sectors including housing, health, education, labour, transport and Hajj and Umrah [S21]. Husameddin AlMadani has served as its director general.

The governance stack around it is well defined. CEDA sets direction; the Strategic Management Office translates direction into delivery plans; the Vision Realization Programmes own the initiatives; the Ministry of Economy and Planning sits across the planning function; and the General Authority for Statistics produces the macroeconomic series that many of the indicators depend on. The National Transformation Programme remains the largest single delivery vehicle.

What does not exist is external verification. Adaa is an independent government body, not an independent body. Its assessments are reported to CEDA and published in aggregate. There is no equivalent of a national audit office signing off Vision 2030 KPI attainment, no external assurance opinion on the annual report, and no published dataset of indicator-level target-versus-actual figures that would allow a third party to reproduce the 93%.

Andrew Leber, a nonresident scholar in Carnegie’s Middle East Programme and an assistant professor at Tulane University, made the structural version of this point in March 2025: accountability inside the Vision framework is “invariably ‘upward’ accountability to the crown prince” rather than to the public, with limited domestic space for criticism [S7]. That is a description of the system’s design, not an allegation of falsification. The distinction matters. Nothing in the published record suggests the 93% is fabricated. The point is narrower and harder to dismiss: it cannot be independently checked, because the inputs are not published.

Which Vision 2030 KPIs Are Off Track?

The scoreboard below sets each headline indicator against the most recent published reading, the 2030 target where one is defined, and the issuing institution. It is deliberately mixed: the report’s genuine wins sit in the same table as its weakest lines.

IndicatorLatest reading2030 targetStatusSource
KPIs met or exceeded309 of 390 (79.2%), 2025Annual interim targetsHeadline 93% only after adding 52 indicators at 85–99%Asharq Al-Awsat [S2]
Initiatives complete or on track1,160 of 1,290 (90%), 2025Register fell by 212 from 2024; departures unexplainedAsharq Al-Awsat [S2]
Real GDP growth−4.8% y/y, Q2 2026Reversed by oil disruption; −4.9% q/qGASTAT via Arab News [S12]
Non-oil GDP growth+0.6% y/y, Q2 20264–5% post-conflict norm (Moody’s)4.9% (2025) → 2.9% (Q1) → 0.6% (Q2)GASTAT [S11][S12]
Non-oil share of real GDP55%, 2025Structural gain, holdingArabian Business [S26]
Private sector share of GDP51%, 202565%Behind, but improving from 44%Arab News [S1]
Net FDI inflowsSR23.1bn ($6.2bn), Q1 2026, −2.4% y/y$100bn a yearGross annualises to ≈$28bn; outflows +50%Arab News, Saudi Gazette [S9][S10]
Non-oil exports, excl. re-exports−27.3% y/y, May 202650% of non-oil GDPSharply negativeArab News [S15]
Inbound visitors8.3m, Q1 2026, −13% y/y70m internationalFalling; domestic +16% carries the headlineGulf Business [S14]
Total visitors122m, 2025150m (revised from 100m)Near target on a widened definitionArab News [S25]
Saudi unemployment6.4%, Q1 20267% met 2024; retargeted to 5%Beaten six years earlyGASTAT via Gulf News [S22]
Saudi female participation33.9%, Q1 2026, −0.6pp q/q30% (met)Above target; 2.3pp below the Q3 2024 peak of 36.2%People Matters ME [S16], GASTAT [S17]
Home ownership66.24%, 202570%On trackArab News [S1]
Life expectancy79.7 years, 202580Essentially metSaudi Gazette [S4]
Renewable capacity12.3GW grid-connected, end-2025130GWReport cites 46GW; see belowRenewables Now [S18]
Sovereign ratingAa3, stable, affirmed May 2026Held through the conflictMoody’s via Arab News [S20]

Last verified: 31 July 2026.

Four lines deserve expansion.

Foreign investment is the clearest miss. GASTAT reported gross FDI inflows of SR26.6bn ($7.1bn) in Q1 2026, up 2.4% year on year — the number most coverage led with. Net inflows, which subtract Saudi capital going the other way, fell 2.4% to SR23.08bn ($6.2bn), because outflows rose 50% to SR3.52bn ($940m) [S9][S10]. Against Q4 2025 the deterioration is starker: gross inflows fell from SR50.6bn to SR26.6bn, roughly a halving, and net inflows fell 51.9% [S10][S23][S24]. Annualising the Q1 gross figure gives about $28bn against a $100bn-a-year target for 2030. The inbound FDI tracker carries the full quarterly series and the GCC comparison sets it against regional peers; the minister who took the investment portfolio in February 2026 inherited the file at this point in the series.

Non-oil exports are contracting. National non-oil exports excluding re-exports fell 27.3% year on year in May 2026 [S15]. This is the indicator that most directly tests diversification, because it measures whether the non-oil economy sells anything abroad rather than simply absorbing domestic spending. It is tracked at non-oil exports, and from 24 July 2026 those shipments have faced an additional US duty on Saudi-origin goods on top of whatever demand conditions apply.

Inbound tourism is falling while the headline rises. Q1 2026 brought 37.2 million total visitors, up 8%. Inside that figure, inbound visitors fell 13% to 8.3 million while domestic tourists rose 16% to almost 29 million [S14]. Domestic travel now accounts for 78% of all visitors. Total spending of SAR82.7bn ($22bn) is a real number, but the composition has shifted, and the tourism priority scorecard shows why the distinction matters for the 70-million international target.

Female participation has come off its peak. At 33.9% in Q1 2026 it is down 0.6 percentage points on the quarter and 2.3 points below the 36.2% GASTAT recorded in Q3 2024 [S16][S17]. It remains far above the 2016 baseline and comfortably above the 30% Vision target, and female unemployment simultaneously fell to a record 9% [S22] — which means the participation decline cannot be read as women losing jobs. It is women leaving the measured labour force. The female labour participation tracker and our women in the Saudi workforce analysis carry the longer series.

How many renewable gigawatts does Saudi Arabia actually have?

About 12.3GW. The annual report describes renewable generation capacity rising to 46GW from 3GW [S4]. Independent tracking puts 12.3GW connected to the national grid at the end of 2025, roughly 43.2GW awarded or contracted, and around 64GW tendered [S18]. The 46GW in the report therefore sits close to the contracted pipeline, not to operating capacity — a distinction of nearly four to one. Against a 130GW target for 2030, the two framings tell entirely different stories: 35% of the way there on contracts, 9% on electrons. Both are defensible statistics; only one describes power actually flowing. The renewable capacity reference sets out the project-by-project position.

Are Vision 2030 Targets Being Revised?

Yes, and in both directions — which is why “target revision” is not by itself a criticism.

The clearest upward revision is tourism. The Vision’s original goal was 100 million annual visits by 2030. Saudi Arabia recorded more than 106 million in 2023, passing the target seven years early, and promptly raised it to 150 million, comprising 70 million international and 80 million domestic visitors [S19]. Leber notes that the international component alone was revised up from an original 27 million to 70 million [S7]. By 2025 the total reached 122 million [S25].

The clearest downward revision runs the other way. Saudi unemployment fell from 12.3% in 2016 to 7.0% in Q4 2024, meeting the 2030 target six years early — after which the target was tightened from 7% to 5% [S6]. That is a government making its own goal harder, and it belongs in any honest account.

What makes the tourism revision analytically different is the definition underneath it. The 100-million figure counts total visits, including domestic day trips and border crossings that would not qualify as international tourist arrivals under standard statistical definitions. Expanding the count and then raising the target against the expanded count is category expansion, not performance. The 2030 goal of 150 million is a larger number measured on a broader base; the 70-million international sub-target is the one that tests the underlying claim, and it is the one currently moving backwards.

How Saudi Arabia Counts a Tourist — and Why the 93% Depends on It

Tourism is the single largest source of Vision 2030’s early wins, so how a visit is classified propagates directly into indicator attainment.

Leber’s March 2025 Carnegie study set out the mechanism using Saudi Arabia’s own data [S7]. Official statistics classified only 12% of 2023 international visits as “religious”. Yet approximately 60% of the increase in overnight stays and more than 80% of the increase in visitor spending occurred in Mecca. The reconciliation is administrative rather than mysterious: the Ministry of Hajj’s own material acknowledged that “the tourist visa is preferred for beneficiaries wishing to perform Umrah”. A pilgrim entering on a tourist visa is counted as a tourist. The religious share of visits is therefore understated by the visa category, and the growth in “non-religious” international tourism is smaller than the headline implies.

Umrah performers reached more than 18 million in the 2025 reporting period against 6.2 million in 2016 [S1], and religious travel remains the structural engine of Saudi inbound tourism — the subject of our religious tourism sector analysis. The point is about attribution, not about whether the visitors exist. A diversification narrative built on tourism growth that is substantially Umrah growth describes the pilgrimage economy scaling: a real achievement, but a different one.

Leber returned to the theme on 7 May 2026, noting that spending by foreign tourists increased by only around 4% in 2025 after years of double-digit post-pandemic growth, and that most international visits remain concentrated in Mecca and Medina [S8]. In the same piece he set out a spending contrast that is harder to explain away: “Government spending is up 67 percent overall since 2015, but education spending is up by less than 3 percent over the same time period.” [S8] For a transformation whose binding constraint is human capital, that allocation is a more informative indicator than most of the 390 — and it is not one of them. Our education spending reference carries the budget detail.

What the Vision 2030 Annual Report Gets Right

An audit that only found problems would be a bad audit. Several of the report’s claims survive independent checking without qualification.

Unemployment. The 7% target for 2030 was met in 2024 and fell further to 6.4% among Saudi nationals in Q1 2026, with male unemployment at 4.9% and female unemployment at a record 9% [S22]. This is the strongest indicator in the framework, tracked at unemployment rate and profiled in the Saudi unemployment reference.

Structural diversification. Non-oil activities at 55% of real GDP and private sector contribution at 51%, up from 44% at launch [S26][S1], are a genuine change in the composition of output rather than a definitional one — see the private sector GDP tracker.

Female participation remains above its 30% target despite the recent slippage, having started from roughly 17–20%.

Life expectancy at 79.7 years against an 80-year goal is close to met, and is measured by an international standard [S4]. Our life expectancy tracker notes that older figures still circulating are stale. Not every health indicator is measured that way: the distance between the self-reported obesity rate and the measured estimates is the clearest case in the framework.

Home ownership at 66.24% against a 70% target is credible progress from 47% at launch [S1], tracked at home ownership rate.

Fiscal credibility held through a war. Moody’s affirmed Saudi Arabia at Aa3 with a stable outlook in May 2026, citing resilience against regional geopolitical risk and export flexibility through the East-West pipeline and Red Sea terminals [S20]. Retaining that rating through a conflict that cut oil output by a quarter is not a small thing. See credit ratings and the Saudi sovereign rating reference.

Why This Matters for Vision 2030

The gap between a 93% attainment rate and a contracting non-oil export base is not primarily a credibility problem. It is a measurement design problem with a credibility consequence.

Vision 2030’s indicator set is weighted towards outputs the government controls — licences issued, services digitised, facilities opened — and lighter on outcomes it influences but does not command: foreign capital deciding to arrive, foreign buyers deciding to purchase Saudi non-oil goods, foreign visitors deciding to come for reasons other than pilgrimage. Output indicators clear their interim targets reliably. Outcome indicators do not, because they depend on decisions made outside the Kingdom.

That is why the sequence in the scoreboard matters more than any single line. Non-oil growth ran at 4.9% in 2025, decelerated to 2.9% in Q1 2026, and fell to 0.6% in Q2 2026 [S11][S12]. Monica Malik, chief economist at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, put the cause plainly on 30 July: “While Saudi has been relatively less impacted by regional developments, you can see a further slowing in non-oil GDP. So the regional crisis is having an impact.” [S13] Nicolas Crittenden of Capital Economics was more cautious still: “There were signs of a recovery taking hold in June, but the renewed closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Houthi threats on Saudi’s Red Sea oil exports mean it’s likely to be a bumpy path” — with zero annual growth forecast for 2026 [S13].

The fairness point cuts hard here. Much of the 2026 deterioration is war, not policy failure. Q2 real GDP fell 4.8% year on year because oil activities fell 24.7% after the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz [S12]. Moody’s expects non-hydrocarbon private sector growth to return to around 4–5% once the conflict subsides, among the strongest rates in the GCC [S20]. A KPI framework that reported 93% for 2025 was reporting on a year that ended before most of this happened.

But that is precisely the structural issue. The 2025 annual report is a lagging document published four months into a year that has since diverged sharply from it, using a headline metric that has now printed 93% twice regardless of what the underlying economy did. An indicator system that returns the same answer in a strong year and a decelerating one is not measuring the thing readers assume it measures.

Risks, Contradictions and Open Questions

Where did 212 initiatives go? The register fell from 1,502 to 1,290 between the two reports, and no public reconciliation explains whether they were retired, merged, cancelled or moved to successor programmes. Until that is published, the improvement from 85% to 90% complete-or-on-track cannot be attributed to delivery rather than denominator.

The 46GW figure is unresolved at source. vision2030.gov.sa blocks automated retrieval, so we cannot confirm which capacity definition the report applies. What is confirmable is that grid-connected capacity at end-2025 was 12.3GW [S18]. Anyone citing 46GW should state the definition alongside it.

The 2025 near-target split is one source deep. The 309/52 breakdown comes from Asharq Al-Awsat [S2] and is consistent with the arithmetic; the 2024 equivalent, 299/49, is independently reported by Arab News [S3]. The pattern is well supported, but the 2025 split would be better carried by a second outlet.

Female participation needs another quarter. A 0.6-point quarterly fall alongside record-low female unemployment is an unusual combination, and one print cannot distinguish discouraged withdrawal from demographic composition or survey revision.

Interim target calibration is undisclosed. Nothing published shows how annual milestones are set or whether they move during the year. This is the single disclosure that would settle most of the argument about the 93%, in either direction.

The report is not audited externally. This is a statement about institutional design, not about honesty. Adaa reports to the prime minister; CEDA receives its assessments; no body outside the Saudi government issues an opinion on Vision 2030 KPI attainment.

What to Watch Next

  • GASTAT Q3 2026 GDP flash estimate, expected late October 2026. Whether non-oil growth recovers from 0.6% is the most informative number for the 2026 annual report.
  • GASTAT Q2 2026 labour market release, expected late September 2026. A second consecutive fall in female participation would make the Q1 print a trend rather than noise.
  • GASTAT Q2 2026 FDI, expected late September 2026. A second negative quarter puts the $100bn goal beyond arithmetic reach without a step change.
  • The Vision 2030 annual report for 2026, expected April 2027. Check whether the headline is 93% for a third year, whether the initiative register moves again, and whether the KPI count changes from 390.
  • Any Adaa disclosure of indicator-level target-versus-actual data. This would resolve the central question and is the reform most likely to strengthen the framework’s standing.

Sources