Saudi Arabia’s GDP projection for 2040 sits roughly in the USD 2.0-2.5 trillion range if Vision 2030 targets are met and non-oil sectors keep scaling. As of early 2026, the Kingdom’s economy is the seventeenth largest globally, the largest in the Middle East and North Africa, and roughly half of total Gulf Cooperation Council output. The headline number — approximately USD 1.1 to 1.27 trillion depending on the methodology and reference year — masks a more interesting story: a hydrocarbon-driven economy in the middle of the most aggressive structural reform programme in its modern history. Under Vision 2030, the Kingdom is attempting to compress what most diversifying economies do over generations into a single decade, and the GDP series is the cleanest place to read whether that compression is working.
This entry walks through the headline numbers, the oil-versus-non-oil split, the sectoral mix, per-capita comparisons, the macro flow through 2024-2026, the principal risks, and the path to the Vision 2030 targets.
GDP Headline Numbers
The 2024 baseline depends heavily on which dataset you use. The World Bank’s nominal GDP series put Saudi Arabia at approximately USD 1.07 trillion in 2024 on the legacy methodology. In May 2025, the General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) released a comprehensive revision and rebase of the national accounts that lifted the nominal level by roughly 14 percent and improved coverage of services, digital activities, and informal sector output that had been undercounted in earlier vintages. On the rebased series, 2024 nominal GDP came in closer to USD 1.22 trillion.
Real growth in 2024 was negative at roughly minus 0.8 percent, almost entirely a function of OPEC+ production restraint. Crude output averaged about 9.0 million barrels per day for the year, well below the Kingdom’s installed capacity of around 12 million, which meant that oil sector real value-added contracted sharply even as the non-oil economy expanded by roughly 4.3 percent. The decoupling between headline and non-oil performance is one of the cleanest signals that diversification is, at the level of activity, beginning to bite.
2025 was the inflection year. According to GASTAT’s full-year release, real GDP grew 4.5 percent, with oil activities up 5.7 percent and non-oil activities up 4.9 percent. Quarterly readings climbed through the year: 3.4 percent in Q1, accelerating to roughly 3.9 percent in Q2, 4.8 percent in Q3, and 5.0 percent in Q4 — the strongest quarterly print since the post-pandemic rebound of 2022. Nominal GDP for the year reached approximately USD 1.27 trillion. The recovery was driven jointly by the OPEC+ taper, which began returning barrels to the market from April 2025, and by sustained capital spending tied to giga-projects and infrastructure.
The IMF’s 2025 Article IV consultation, concluded by the Executive Board on 28 July 2025, projects real growth of about 3.6 to 4.0 percent for 2025 and 3.9 to 4.6 percent for 2026, depending on the production path. The Fund subsequently revised its 2026 forecast to 4.5 percent in its World Economic Outlook update, citing both faster-than-expected non-oil momentum and the unwinding of voluntary OPEC+ cuts. By the IMF’s WEO data, nominal GDP is projected to reach approximately USD 1.39 trillion in 2026 on the rebased series.
Oil vs Non-Oil
The oil-versus-non-oil split is the single most important decomposition in the Saudi national accounts, and it is the metric Vision 2030 lives or dies on. The split also has more nuance than the headline percentages suggest.
On the rebased 2024 series, oil activities — defined narrowly as crude extraction and natural gas production — contributed approximately 23 percent of real GDP. Add in refining, petrochemicals, and oil-linked transport and logistics, and the broader hydrocarbon complex is closer to 35 to 40 percent of nominal GDP. The narrower 23 percent figure is the one most commonly cited in GASTAT and IMF reporting because it captures the segment most directly exposed to OPEC+ quota decisions and Brent volatility.
Non-oil activities accounted for the remaining 77 percent on the narrow definition, split between non-oil private sector (financial services, real estate, retail, manufacturing, construction, tourism, ICT) at roughly 55 to 57 percent and non-oil government services at about 20 to 22 percent. The non-oil private share has been the fastest-growing component since 2017, and the non-oil GDP growth tracker shows the trajectory: average annual real growth of 4.5 to 5 percent across 2022-2025, materially above the 2.5 percent average in the 2010-2019 decade.
The asymmetry between oil and non-oil cycles has become a defining feature of Saudi macro. In 2023, real oil GDP contracted by approximately 9 percent on OPEC+ cuts while non-oil real GDP grew 4.6 percent — a gap of nearly 14 percentage points. In 2025 the relationship reversed: oil GDP grew 5.7 percent on the production taper while non-oil grew 4.9 percent. For the oil price impact on the broader economy, the practical consequence is that the headline GDP figure has become a less reliable read on domestic demand than it was a decade ago. Markets now look first at non-oil prints to gauge underlying activity.
The Vision 2030 numerical target — non-oil GDP at 65 percent of total GDP by 2030 — is on the rebased series largely already met depending on how oil-linked manufacturing is classified. The more meaningful operational target is sustaining non-oil real growth at or above 5 percent through the rest of the decade while increasing the non-oil share of fiscal revenue, which remains the harder challenge.
Sectoral Composition
Within the non-oil economy, the sectoral mix as of 2025 looks roughly as follows. These shares are approximate and differ by 1 to 2 percentage points across IMF, GASTAT, and World Bank presentations.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the largest non-oil non-government sector at approximately 13 to 14 percent of GDP, anchored by petrochemicals (SABIC, Sipchem, Advanced Petrochemical), basic metals (Hadeed, Ma’aden), and a fast-growing automotive and industrial machinery cluster tied to the National Industrial Strategy. The sector grew 6.2 percent in real terms in 2025, reflecting both base effects and new capacity coming online in NEOM, Ras Al-Khair, and the Eastern Province industrial corridor.
Wholesale and Retail Trade
Wholesale and retail trade, restaurants, and hotels account for approximately 10 to 11 percent of GDP, lifted in 2025 by record tourism inflows and continued domestic consumption strength. Religious tourism alone contributed an estimated USD 30 billion in direct activity, with broader tourism spend exceeding USD 90 billion when leisure, business, and entertainment categories are included. The share is up sharply from 2019, when tourism was closer to 3 percent of GDP.
Government Services
Government services contributed roughly 12 percent of nominal GDP in 2025. The category includes public administration, defence, education, and public health output measured at cost. The share has been broadly stable through Vision 2030 even as private sector growth has accelerated, reflecting both continued fiscal expansion and the reclassification of some former government activity into commercialised entities like NEOM Co. and the Royal Commission for Riyadh City.
Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate
Financial services, insurance, and real estate together contribute approximately 11 to 12 percent of GDP. The Saudi banking sector, supervised by SAMA, held consolidated assets exceeding SAR 4.5 trillion at end-2025 and posted return on equity above 13 percent. The Tadawul exchange is the largest in MENA by market capitalisation, with Saudi Aramco alone accounting for the majority of listed market value. Real estate has been buoyed by giga-project construction and the Sakani housing programme, with home ownership reaching approximately 65 percent of Saudi households.
Construction
Construction is approximately 6 to 7 percent of GDP and one of the most cyclically sensitive sectors. Active project pipelines under NEOM, The Line, Diriyah, Qiddiya, and the Red Sea exceed USD 1 trillion in announced capital commitments. Sector growth in 2025 was approximately 5.5 percent in real terms, with execution risk remaining the principal swing factor for the back half of the decade.
Transport, Storage, and ICT
Transport and storage contribute roughly 6 percent of GDP and are growing rapidly on the back of the Saudia and flynas fleet expansion, the Riyadh Metro launch, and logistics investment tied to Saudi Arabia’s ambition to become a global hub. Information and communications technology adds approximately 4 to 5 percent of GDP, with the digital economy broadly defined now exceeding 14 percent of non-oil GDP per Communications, Space and Technology Commission estimates.
Agriculture, Fishing, and Mining
Non-oil mining and agriculture are smaller components at roughly 3 percent combined, though mining is targeted for substantial scale-up under the National Mineral Strategy as the Kingdom develops its estimated USD 2.5 trillion in mineral wealth.
Per Capita & Comparisons
With a resident population of approximately 36.4 million as of mid-2025 — up sharply from 32 million in 2020, driven primarily by expatriate inflows — Saudi Arabia’s nominal GDP per capita is roughly USD 32,000 to 35,000 depending on the GDP vintage. On the rebased series, 2025 nominal GDP per capita is approximately USD 35,000.
Adjusted for purchasing power parity, GDP per capita is materially higher. The World Bank’s most recent PPP series shows Saudi Arabia at approximately USD 71,000 per capita in 2024 international dollars, placing the Kingdom above Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom on a PPP basis and broadly comparable to upper-tier OECD economies. The PPP figure better reflects the standard of living given subsidised energy, the absence of personal income tax, and lower housing costs in many parts of the country.
Within the GCC, Saudi Arabia is the largest economy in absolute terms but not the wealthiest per capita. Qatar (approximately USD 75,000 nominal GDP per capita) and the UAE (approximately USD 53,000) lead on a per-capita basis due to smaller populations relative to hydrocarbon endowment. The GCC non-oil GDP benchmark is the more relevant comparison for Vision 2030 purposes — on that metric, Saudi Arabia has been closing the gap with the UAE since 2020 and is projected to surpass Emirati non-oil GDP per capita by approximately 2032 if current trajectories hold.
Globally, Saudi Arabia ranks 17th by nominal GDP between Indonesia and Switzerland, having moved up from 19th in 2020. The Kingdom is comfortably the largest economy in the Arab world, exceeding the combined GDP of the UAE (approximately USD 580 billion), Qatar (approximately USD 230 billion), and Kuwait (approximately USD 165 billion). Among broader regional comparators, Türkiye sits at approximately USD 1.34 trillion (a touch above Saudi Arabia in nominal terms but below on PPP) and Iran at approximately USD 410 billion.
Recent Developments 2024-2026
The 2024-2026 window is the most consequential in the Vision 2030 macro story to date. Several distinct threads are running in parallel.
OPEC+ taper and oil sector recovery
The voluntary 1 million barrel per day production cut that Saudi Arabia maintained from July 2023 was extended in stages through Q1 2025, then unwound in tranches starting April 2025. By Q4 2025, Saudi crude production had returned to approximately 9.7 million barrels per day, and the Kingdom is on track to lift production to roughly 10.0 to 10.2 million barrels per day in 2026. The taper was the principal driver of the 5.7 percent oil GDP growth in 2025 and is expected to add approximately 1.0 to 1.5 percentage points to headline growth in 2026.
Fiscal expansion and the 2025-2026 budgets
The 2025 budget, approved in November 2024, projected total expenditure of SAR 1.285 trillion against revenue of SAR 1.184 trillion and an estimated deficit of SAR 101 billion (about 2.3 percent of GDP). Actual outturn for 2025 was materially higher on both sides. Expenditure ran closer to SAR 1.39 trillion as Vision 2030 capex accelerated, while revenue came in at approximately SAR 1.18 trillion. The realised deficit for 2025 was approximately SAR 277 billion, or roughly 5.6 percent of GDP — wider than budgeted but financed entirely through debt issuance and capital market instruments without drawing on government reserves. The 2026 budget continues the expansionary stance, with planned expenditure of SAR 1.31 trillion and a projected deficit of approximately SAR 102 billion.
Debt issuance and the rise in public debt
The wider deficits have driven a deliberate expansion in public debt. Central government debt-to-GDP rose from approximately 26 percent at end-2024 to roughly 32 percent at end-2025 and is projected by the IMF to reach 35 to 40 percent by 2028 before stabilising. The trajectory is comfortable by global standards — Saudi Arabia remains rated A or A+ by the major agencies — but represents a structural shift from the near-zero net debt position of a decade ago. The National Debt Management Center has actively diversified the issuer mix, including local-currency sukuk, dollar Eurobonds, and green and sustainability-linked instruments.
SAMA reserves and the current account
The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) reported net foreign assets of approximately USD 415 billion at end-2024, equivalent to roughly 15 months of imports and 187 percent of the IMF’s reserve adequacy metric. Reserves drifted modestly lower through 2025 as the current account swung from a 2.9 percent of GDP surplus in 2023 to a 0.5 percent of GDP deficit in 2024 and a wider deficit estimated at 2.0 to 2.5 percent of GDP in 2025. The IMF projects the current account deficit to peak at approximately 3.9 percent of GDP in 2027 before narrowing to about 3.4 percent by 2030 as Vision 2030 import demand normalises and tourism receipts continue to scale. The deficit is fundamentally an investment-driven phenomenon — high import content of giga-project capex — rather than a consumption-led erosion of competitiveness, which the IMF has flagged as the appropriate read.
Riyal stability
The Saudi riyal peg to the US dollar at SAR 3.75 has been intact since 1986 and remains a foundational anchor of macro policy. Spot pressures during the 2014-2016 oil price collapse and again briefly in 2020 did not require formal repricing, and the peg is comfortably defended by SAMA’s reserve buffer. Vision 2030 financing strategy assumes peg continuity, which is the consensus market view through at least the end of the decade.
Risks and Challenges
The principal risks to the GDP trajectory are fairly well understood and have been articulated repeatedly by the IMF, sell-side analysts, and Saudi authorities themselves.
Oil price volatility
A sustained Brent price below USD 60 per barrel would meaningfully widen fiscal deficits, slow the pace of giga-project execution, and drag on oil sector real GDP. The fiscal breakeven oil price for 2025 was estimated by the IMF at approximately USD 92 per barrel, materially higher than the USD 80 to 85 range cited a year earlier, reflecting both expanded expenditure and the recent OPEC+ taper. Saudi Arabia retains substantial fiscal space to absorb a low-price episode, but a multi-year low-price scenario would force decisions on giga-project sequencing.
Execution risk on giga-projects
The combined capital commitment to NEOM, The Line, Qiddiya, the Red Sea, Diriyah, and adjacent programmes exceeds USD 1 trillion. Even partial slippage in execution would reduce the construction sector’s contribution to GDP, lengthen the path to Vision 2030 targets, and complicate the fiscal arithmetic. Public commentary from senior Saudi officials in late 2024 and 2025 acknowledged that some giga-project timelines are being recalibrated, with NEOM’s first-phase delivery scope reportedly tightened. The realised growth path through 2030 will be sensitive to how this rephasing flows through.
Demographic and labour market frictions
Population growth driven by expatriate inflows has run ahead of forecasts, lifting nominal GDP but compressing per-capita figures. The Saudi unemployment rate fell to a record low of 7.0 percent in Q3 2025, but female labour force participation, while up sharply from 17 percent in 2017 to approximately 36 percent in 2025, remains a Vision 2030 swing factor. Sustained per-capita GDP gains require continued productivity growth and labour participation expansion in parallel.
Geopolitical and regional shocks
Regional security developments — Yemen, Iran, Israel-Gaza spillovers — remain a tail risk. Insurance markets, shipping lanes through the Red Sea and the Gulf, and tourism flows are all exposed. The Kingdom has actively pursued de-escalation, including the Iran-Saudi diplomatic restoration in 2023 and continued engagement on the Yemen file, but residual exposure cannot be eliminated.
Climate transition risk
Long-dated demand for Saudi crude is the existential macro question. The IEA’s net-zero scenario implies global oil demand peaks before 2030 and declines thereafter; Saudi Arabia’s own scenarios are more sanguine, projecting continued demand growth into the 2030s. The Kingdom’s strategy is to be the lowest-cost barrel left standing while diversifying revenue streams — a credible plan but one with long time horizons and substantial capital intensity.
Outlook to 2030
The Vision 2030 GDP target — total nominal output of USD 1.5 to 1.8 trillion by 2030 — is now within range under most reasonable scenarios. On the rebased GASTAT series, the Kingdom enters 2026 at approximately USD 1.27 to 1.39 trillion. To reach the lower bound of the target, nominal GDP needs to grow at a compound rate of roughly 3 to 4 percent annually through 2030, a pace comfortably below the IMF’s projected real growth of 3.5 to 4.5 percent and which assumes only modest inflation and Brent prices in the USD 70 to 80 range. The upper bound — USD 1.8 trillion — requires both faster real growth and higher oil prices, but is still consistent with consensus forecasts.
Beyond 2030, longer-range projections from the IMF, World Bank, Bloomberg, and Goldman Sachs converge on Saudi GDP reaching USD 2.0 to 2.5 trillion by 2040, predicated on sustained 4 to 5 percent real growth, continued non-oil expansion to 70 percent of GDP, and a managed transition for the oil sector. The Kingdom’s relative ranking would likely move into the global top 12 to 14 economies on this path, overtaking the Netherlands and approaching the size of South Korea or Australia.
The structural verdict is that the Saudi GDP trajectory is now less hostage to oil prices than at any point in the past forty years, but it is not yet decoupled. Non-oil real growth above 5 percent is now a consistent feature of the post-2022 expansion. Fiscal space, while narrower than in 2014, remains substantial. Reserves and the riyal peg provide credible macro anchors. The remaining work is execution — on giga-projects, on labour market reform, on the fiscal-mix shift toward non-oil revenue, and on threading the climate transition without sacrificing the hydrocarbon cash flow that funds the diversification itself. The next four years will determine whether Vision 2030 lands its targets or settles into a creditable but partial transformation.