KSA compliance · Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development
Nitaqat is not a reporting obligation with a fine attached. The band governs whether you can issue a work visa, renew a permit, keep an expatriate employee from transferring away, or bid for government work at all. It is a licence to operate, assessed continuously.
This page is the regime. The calculator is the number. The weighted ratio, how each employee counts, and how many hires the next band actually takes are on the calculator, where they are sourced and tested. They are not repeated here.
Last reviewed
The bands
Establishments that sat in Yellow were reclassified as Red rather than promoted, so the middle ground a marginal employer used to occupy no longer exists.
Platinum
Fullest access to ministry services, fastest processing, and the strongest position in tendering.
High Green
Compliant. Work permits and transfers proceed.
Mid Green
Compliant, with less latitude than the bands above it.
Low Green
The floor of compliance. The 2026 cycle raised most Low Green floors.
Red
Non-compliant. New work visas blocked, permit renewals blocked, employees free to transfer out, and excluded from government tendering.
The question everybody asks first
There is no table to answer that with, and anyone who hands you one is answering a different question. Under the developed Nitaqat programme the required percentage for each band is derived per economic activity from a curve that scales with establishment size, and the constants behind it are revised each cycle. Two firms in the same sector with different headcounts do not share a threshold.
The percentages that circulate are a different obligation.Engineering at 30%, accounting rising to 70%, procurement at 70%, administrative support at 100% — these are occupational quotas issued under separate ministerial decisions, binding on named job categories within an establishment. They are real and they are not Nitaqat band thresholds. An establishment can satisfy its band and breach an occupational quota, or the reverse, because they measure different things.
Your four band floors are on your own establishment page on Qiwa, specific to your activity and your size, which is the only place they are authoritative. Read them there and the calculator will tell you where you sit and what the next band costs.
Open the Saudization calculator →How it actually works
01
Red closes off new work visas, blocks permit and iqama renewals, allows expatriate staff to transfer their sponsorship away without the employer’s agreement, and excludes the establishment from government tendering through Etimad. For a contractor bidding public work, the band is a prequalification question rather than an HR one — which is why it belongs in workforce planning and not in an annual compliance review.
02
The ministry assesses on a rolling weighted average rather than on a snapshot, precisely so that a burst of hiring before a deadline does not move the band. A person hired this week changes the position months from now. Published sources give both thirteen and twenty-six weeks for the window, so treat the lag as real without relying on its exact length.
03
Only Saudi employees whose employment contracts are documented on Qiwa are included. An establishment that has hired the people and not completed the documentation carries the cost and not the credit, and will read its own payroll as compliant while the ministry does not.
04
A Saudi employee paid below the Nitaqat minimum counts as a half or as nothing while still occupying a place in the denominator. The minimum wage for this purpose is not a labour-law floor — it is the price of being counted, and paying under it is the most expensive way to employ a Saudi national.
05
A new multi-year cycle raised the required percentages across most economic activities and eliminated the Yellow tier, reclassifying establishments that sat in it as Red. An establishment that was comfortably compliant against the previous cycle’s figures may not be against this one, and the position has to be re-read rather than assumed to carry forward.
What is not settled. Published sources disagree on whether the assessment window is thirteen or twenty-six weeks, on the multiplier applied to a Saudi employee with a disability and the cap on it, and on the weight given to flexible-work employees. The calculator flags each of these in its own output and defaults the disability multiplier off. A reported SAR 20,000 fine for employing a non-Saudi in a fully-localised profession comes from secondary reporting rather than from a decision retrieved for this page.
Where the count comes from
Registration is what makes an employee visible to the ratio, so a gap in social insurance registration is a gap in the Saudization position as well. The two obligations read the same payroll from different directions.
GOSI: what the regime requires →The cost of that headcount
The ratio and the contribution bill move together, and a workforce plan that optimises one without the other has only done half the arithmetic.
Open the GOSI calculator →No source here publishes the band thresholds by activity and size, and that is not an omission on our part. The procedural guide is distributed through the ministry and Qiwa, and its constants move each cycle.
For a contractor or a facilities business, headcount rises and falls with the order book and the ratio moves with it — months after the decision that caused it. Knowing the band at quarter end is not planning. Knowing what the next award does to it is.