Non-Oil GDP Share Across the GCC: Diversification Benchmark

Saudi Vision 2030 Non-Oil GDP Target

Saudi Vision 2030’s non-oil GDP target is 65% by 2030, versus roughly 44% in 2016 and about 50-55% in 2025 depending on methodology. That makes non-oil GDP share arguably the single most important metric for evaluating the success of GCC national vision programmes. Every Gulf state has articulated the strategic imperative of reducing hydrocarbon dependence, and the proportion of GDP generated by non-oil sectors provides the most direct measure of progress toward this objective. However, interpreting this metric requires nuance: non-oil GDP share can increase either through genuine diversification growth or simply through oil sector contraction during periods of low prices or production cuts under OPEC+ agreements.

The GCC states display a wide range of diversification outcomes. Bahrain leads the region at roughly eighty-five percent non-oil share, achieved through decades of necessity-driven transformation as the smallest hydrocarbon producer. The UAE follows at over seventy-seven percent, supported by Dubai’s services-led economy and Abu Dhabi’s industrial diversification. Saudi Arabia sits in the middle at approximately fifty-five percent, having climbed materially since 2016 under Vision 2030. Qatar is closer to thirty-six percent given the dominance of LNG, while Kuwait and Oman remain at roughly forty-two and thirty-nine percent respectively. The full picture is shaped by methodology, the inclusion of refining and petrochemical activity, and the volatility of hydrocarbon prices that mechanically alter the denominator.

Saudi Arabia’s non-oil GDP share has risen materially since 2016, representing one of Vision 2030’s most tangible achievements, though significant ground remains to be covered relative to the UAE’s benchmark. For deeper context on the metric itself, see our explainer on non-oil GDP in Saudi Arabia and the broader programme of Saudi Arabia economic diversification.

Comparison Matrix

Sources blend official statistics agencies (GASTAT, FCSC, NCSI, Information & eGovernment Authority) with IMF Article IV consultations and World Bank GCC monitor reports. Methodology differences explain the wider ranges for Qatar and Oman in particular.

Saudi Non-Oil GDP: Where it Stands

Saudi Arabia’s non-oil GDP share has increased by approximately six to ten percentage points since Vision 2030’s launch, depending on methodology. According to GASTAT data published in 2026, non-oil activities accounted for roughly fifty-five percent of real GDP in 2025, with the private sector contributing fifty-one percent. Earlier in the decade the share sat at approximately forty-four percent, meaning the Kingdom has narrowed the gap to the announced 2030 target of sixty-five percent by more than half. Our non-oil GDP growth tracker provides quarterly updates on this trajectory.

The improvement reflects both genuine non-oil sector expansion and periods of oil production restraint under OPEC+ quota agreements that depress the hydrocarbon denominator. Disaggregating these effects reveals that non-oil real GDP has grown above five percent in most years since 2016, with 2024 logging 4.5 percent and 2025 hitting 4.9 percent according to GASTAT’s comprehensive update. Q1 2026 carried the momentum forward with non-oil activity expanding 2.8 percent year-on-year, driven by retail, hospitality, and construction. By absolute size, Saudi non-oil GDP now exceeds five hundred and fifty billion US dollars in annual output, larger than the total GDP of every other GCC state except the UAE.

The composition is broadening. Construction and real estate dominate today because of the mega-project pipeline anchored by NEOM, the Red Sea, Diriyah, Qiddiya, and the New Murabba district in Riyadh, all backed by the Public Investment Fund. PIF’s governor disclosed in 2025 that the fund accounts for approximately one-third of cumulative non-oil GDP growth since Vision 2030’s launch, equivalent to roughly two hundred and forty-three billion US dollars of contribution. Beyond construction, tourism is the fastest-growing services category, with the Kingdom recording over one hundred and twenty-two million domestic and international visits in 2025 and tourism spending of around eighty billion US dollars. Financial services and manufacturing under the National Industrial Development and Logistics Programme add additional layers, while entertainment, mining, and digital services round out the diversification mosaic. The broader picture is captured in our overview of GDP in Saudi Arabia and the related question of oil price impact on the Saudi economy.

UAE Comparison

The UAE remains the GCC’s most advanced major-economy diversification story. According to the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre, non-oil GDP rose 5.3 percent year-on-year in Q1 2025 to AED 352 billion, lifting the non-oil share to a historic 77.3 percent of total output. The Central Bank of the UAE projects real GDP growth of around 5.6 percent for 2026, with non-hydrocarbon sectors carrying the load. Across the federation, financial and insurance services, manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail trade, real estate, and tourism are the engine rooms.

Dubai functions essentially as a pure services economy, with hydrocarbons contributing under five percent of emirate-level GDP. The dominant contributors are wholesale and retail trade, financial services, transport and storage built around Emirates and DP World, real estate, and an expanding tourism cluster anchored on Dubai International Airport’s eighty-million-plus annual passenger throughput. Abu Dhabi tells a different story: a deliberately structured federation of hydrocarbons, sovereign wealth-driven manufacturing through Mubadala, and emerging clusters in clean energy, semiconductors, and AI. The Statistics Centre Abu Dhabi reported that the emirate’s non-oil sector grew 6.6 percent in Q2 2025, lifting overall Abu Dhabi GDP by 3.8 percent — a stronger non-oil contribution than at any point in the past decade.

For Saudi Arabia, the UAE benchmark is instructive but not directly transferable. The UAE achieved its non-oil dominance through three decades of investment in trade infrastructure, free zones, aviation hubs, real estate liberalisation, and financial services. Dubai’s economic gravity rests on geography (the world’s largest Eastern Hemisphere transit hub), light regulation, and labour mobility. Saudi Arabia’s structural endowment is different: a population eight times larger than the UAE’s, a hydrocarbon base several times deeper, and a domestic market of nearly thirty-eight million people that itself supports services growth. The Riyadh-versus-Dubai narrative captured in our GCC tourism benchmark demonstrates how the two economies are converging on services without becoming substitutes.

Qatar Comparison

Qatar presents the most LNG-concentrated economy in the GCC, which makes its non-oil share figure unusually sensitive to definition. Q1 2025 data from the Qatar Planning and Statistics Authority put non-oil sectors at 63.6 percent of real GDP, up from 62.6 percent a year earlier. However, hydrocarbon activities (oil, gas, and downstream petrochemicals combined) still contribute roughly thirty-five to forty percent of GDP and the lion’s share of fiscal revenue and exports. The IMF’s 2024 Article IV concluded that Qatar’s diversification is progressing but remains heavily reliant on the public sector and infrastructure spending tied to mega-projects.

Qatar’s strategy is deliberately different from Saudi Arabia’s or the UAE’s. The North Field expansion programme is set to nearly double LNG capacity from seventy-seven million tonnes per annum to one hundred and forty-two million tonnes by 2030, cementing Qatar’s role as the world’s leading LNG exporter. Diversification, in this context, is about extracting maximum value from hydrocarbons rather than fully replacing them. The non-oil priority sectors under the Third National Development Strategy include financial services centred on the Qatar Financial Centre, education through Education City, sports and tourism leveraging post-World Cup infrastructure, and digital services. Construction remains the largest single non-oil sector at roughly eleven percent of GDP, followed by financial and insurance activities at over eight percent and wholesale and retail trade at nearly eight percent.

For Saudi Arabia, the Qatar comparison underscores a key truth: non-oil share is partly a function of strategic ambition. A country that has chosen to maximise hydrocarbon revenues as the primary source of national wealth will rationally maintain a higher hydrocarbon GDP share. Saudi Arabia’s choice — articulated through Vision 2030 — is to actively reduce that share even where oil revenues remain attractive. The trade-offs differ across the geopolitics of the Gulf, with Qatar’s smaller population and larger gas reserves enabling a strategy that would not work for the Kingdom.

Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain

Kuwait is widely regarded as the GCC’s slowest-moving diversification case. Real GDP grew 1.7 percent year-on-year in Q2 2025, with non-oil growth of 3.1 percent, according to the IMF’s 2025 Article IV concluding statement. Non-oil share of GDP sits at approximately forty-two percent, barely changed from a decade ago. Successive National Development Plans, dating to Kuwait Vision 2035, have struggled to translate ambition into delivery, hampered by parliamentary deadlock, capacity constraints in major projects, and fiscal dependence on hydrocarbons that finance roughly ninety percent of government revenue. Reform momentum has picked up modestly in 2025-2026 with new mortgage and debt laws, but the gap to Saudi Arabia and the UAE has widened rather than narrowed.

Oman’s diversification story is more dynamic. Oman Vision 2040 targets a non-oil sector share of over ninety-three percent of GDP, with private sector contribution exceeding ninety percent and inbound foreign direct investment of more than one hundred billion US dollars. The current non-oil share sits in the high thirties to low sixties depending on methodology — the National Centre for Statistics and Information uses a definition that includes refining and petrochemicals in non-oil, lifting the headline figure to roughly sixty-one percent. Manufacturing is targeted to grow from ten percent to twenty-one percent of GDP by 2040, with manufacturing exports already up 8.6 percent year-on-year in Q1 2025 to USD 4.2 billion. Logistics, anchored on the Duqm Special Economic Zone and Sohar Port, contributes around six percent of GDP. The Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) prioritises manufacturing, tourism, mining, and fisheries.

Bahrain’s headline diversification ratio is the highest in the GCC. Q2 2025 data from the Information & eGovernment Authority show non-oil sectors at approximately 85.2 percent of real GDP. The non-oil sector grew 3.5 percent year-on-year in Q2 2025, with financial and insurance activities expanding 7.5 percent. Bahrain Economic Vision 2030 targets non-oil contribution above eighty-five percent and a private-sector-led economy. The kingdom’s non-oil base is concentrated in financial services (an offshore banking heritage dating to the 1970s), aluminium production through Alba (one of the world’s largest single-site smelters), tourism leveraging the Saudi causeway, and ICT. The IMF expects non-hydrocarbon GDP to reach roughly ninety percent of the economy by 2029.

The Bahrain case complicates the simple narrative that “high non-oil share = success.” Bahrain’s diversification was forced by limited hydrocarbon endowment rather than chosen as a transformation strategy, and the kingdom continues to face fiscal sustainability challenges because the non-oil sectors do not generate proportionate government revenue. This explains why GCC fiscal support packages — including the 2018 USD 10 billion package and ongoing assistance — remain relevant. For Saudi Arabia, the lesson is that headline non-oil share is necessary but not sufficient: the fiscal sustainability outlook depends equally on whether non-oil sectors generate taxable rents and exportable goods.

Recent Developments 2024-2026

The two-year window from early 2024 through Q1 2026 has produced several material data points reshaping the GCC diversification benchmark. The IMF’s October 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for the Middle East projected GCC growth at 3.3 percent for 2025, up from 1.7 percent in 2024, as members unwound OPEC+ production cuts. Non-oil growth across the GCC averaged 3.7 percent in 2024 and is set to accelerate in 2025-2026, with the UAE expected to lead at around 4.5 percent over the medium term, followed by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Oman in the 3.5-4 percent range, and Qatar and Kuwait at roughly 2.5-3 percent.

Saudi Arabia’s GASTAT comprehensive GDP update in late 2025 was a methodological event in itself. The agency rebased the national accounts and revised the non-oil share upward, capturing previously under-counted activity in tourism, entertainment, and digital services. The revision is consistent with the Kingdom’s tourism boom — over one hundred and twenty-two million visits and roughly eighty billion US dollars of spending in 2025 — and the maturation of NEOM, the Red Sea Project, Diriyah, and Qiddiya into revenue-generating assets rather than purely capital expenditure programmes. The 2026 budget statement disclosed by the Ministry of Finance projected total GDP of approximately USD 1.1 trillion for 2026, of which non-oil activity would generate over six hundred billion US dollars, the highest absolute non-oil GDP figure ever recorded in the Kingdom.

The UAE’s Q1 2025 print of AED 455 billion total GDP, with non-oil at 77.3 percent, set a historic record. Tourism, financial services, and manufacturing each posted growth above five percent. Abu Dhabi’s non-oil share has converged with Dubai’s faster than analysts expected, driven by Mubadala’s industrial portfolio, the Khalifa Industrial Zone, and clean energy through Masdar. Across the federation, the announcement of new free zones in AI, semiconductors, and clean tech further reinforces the diversification trajectory.

Qatar’s data flow remained more conservative. The IMF’s 2024 Article IV report (published in early 2025) maintained Qatar’s non-oil GDP share around mid-thirties to mid-forties depending on methodology and projected non-oil growth above 4 percent for 2025-2026, anchored on the FIFA legacy infrastructure and the Lusail and Education City precincts. Bahrain’s 2025 Q2 figure of 3.5 percent non-oil growth and an 85.2 percent non-oil share confirmed that the kingdom is operating near the upper bound of GCC diversification. Oman’s Q1 2025 non-oil growth of 4.4 percent, with manufacturing exports up 8.6 percent, signalled that Vision 2040 is moving from planning to execution.

Coverage from Reuters, the Financial Times, and AGBI through 2025 emphasised one common theme: the GCC’s non-oil expansion is increasingly real, not just a function of oil sector contraction. The shift is most visible in PIF deal flow, Mubadala’s industrial portfolio, and the cross-border M&A activity emerging from Saudi-UAE-Qatar capital pools.

Risks and Challenges

Three categories of risk could derail the GCC’s non-oil GDP trajectory. The first is oil price volatility. Most GCC vision programmes implicitly assume Brent will average in the high USD 60s to low 80s through the decade. If oil prices fall below USD 60 sustainably, mechanically the non-oil share rises, but the fiscal capacity to sustain non-oil capital expenditure programmes weakens — particularly for Saudi Arabia, where giga-project funding still partly relies on oil revenues, PIF transfers, and government capital injections. Conversely, if oil prices spike well above USD 100, the denominator effect drags the headline non-oil share lower even if non-oil sector growth remains robust. Our explainer on oil price impact on the Saudi economy details these dynamics.

The second risk category is execution. Mega-projects in Saudi Arabia have already shown signs of phasing and rescoping, with NEOM’s The Line scaled back relative to its original 170-kilometre vision and Trojena timelines compressed. Each scope adjustment changes the non-oil GDP run rate, since construction-related activity is the largest component of the diversification engine today. Kuwait demonstrates the cost of execution failure: a decade of declared diversification ambitions has produced minimal change in the non-oil share. For Saudi Arabia and Oman, the question is whether implementation discipline can match planning ambition.

The third risk category is the structural composition of non-oil growth itself. Construction-heavy diversification creates GDP today but does not necessarily build sustainable export industries. The test of long-term diversification success is whether non-oil tradables — manufacturing exports, tourism receipts, financial services exports, digital services — can grow faster than non-oil non-tradables (construction, retail, government services). Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Oman are all leaning into manufacturing and tradable services, but the policy environment around foreign direct investment, labour mobility, and export financing will determine whether the tradable sectors achieve scale. Bahrain’s case illustrates the trap: high non-oil share but limited tradable export base, leaving fiscal sustainability vulnerable.

A fourth, more recent risk is regional geopolitics. The continuing volatility in the broader Middle East has compressed regional risk premia at certain moments and inflated them at others. While the GCC has remained largely insulated, sustained insurance and shipping cost pressures, particularly through the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz, could undermine the logistics and tourism elements of diversification. The geopolitics dimension of GCC diversification is increasingly inseparable from the economic one.

Outlook to 2030

Non-oil GDP share across the GCC is expected to continue increasing through the remainder of the decade, driven by maturing transformation investments, the likely plateau of regional oil production growth, and structural demographic and tourism tailwinds. Saudi Arabia’s target of sixty-five percent non-oil GDP by 2030 appears ambitious but achievable. Reaching it requires non-oil real growth averaging at least four percent per year through 2030 — close to the trajectory currently observed — and oil production growth remaining moderate, which OPEC+ discipline and depleting easy reserves both make likely. Vision 2030’s final phase is now under way, and the 2026 budget statement projects a total GDP path consistent with the sixty-five percent objective.

The UAE will likely approach eighty percent non-oil GDP by 2030, further establishing its benchmark status. The combination of Dubai’s near-complete services transformation, Abu Dhabi’s accelerated industrial diversification, and federation-wide growth in financial services, AI, semiconductors, and clean tech makes the eighty-percent threshold plausible. Qatar’s outlook is shaped by the North Field LNG expansion, which will mechanically raise the hydrocarbon share through 2030 even as non-oil sectors grow — an unusual dynamic in the GCC. Bahrain is set to drift toward ninety percent non-oil GDP by 2029, near the upper bound of what is structurally possible for any state.

Oman’s Vision 2040 implies sustained non-oil acceleration through 2030 and beyond, with manufacturing, logistics, and tourism each scaling. Whether the ninety-three percent target by 2040 is realistic depends on private investment response, but the medium-term trajectory through 2030 is solid. Kuwait remains the structural laggard. Without a meaningful reform breakthrough — passage of the long-stalled mortgage law has been a positive 2025-2026 development — the non-oil share is likely to stay near forty-two to forty-five percent through the decade.

The key structural question for all GCC states is whether non-oil growth can be sustained without continued reliance on government capital injection, transitioning from state-led to private sector-driven economic expansion. The IMF, the World Bank, and major sell-side analysts converge on the view that the next phase of GCC diversification depends on the productivity of the non-oil capital stock that has been built since 2016, not on additional capital expenditure. Saudi Arabia’s FDI inflows, the UAE’s free zone licence growth, Qatar’s QFC asset base, and Oman’s manufacturing export response will be the leading indicators. By 2030, the diversification benchmark will likely shift from non-oil GDP share — a still-important but increasingly saturating metric — to non-oil productivity and non-oil tradable export growth. The GCC will, by then, have moved beyond the question of whether diversification is happening, and toward the question of how productive and self-sustaining it has become.