The Saudi Contractors Authority says about 140,000 local and foreign contracting companies are now registered with it, including 1,648 foreign firms that have entered since the authority was created. It expects the value of projects to exceed SR3 trillion over the next three years, in a market where packages are getting larger and cash flow is the binding constraint on smaller firms.
The Saudi Contractors Authority says the number of local and foreign contracting companies registered with it has reached about 140,000, of which 1,648 are foreign firms that have entered the Kingdom since the authority was established.
The authority's chairman, Mohammed Al-Ajlan, expects the value of projects in the Saudi market to exceed SR3 trillion ($800bn) over the next three years. Contracting already accounts for around 8 percent of Saudi gross domestic product, making it one of the largest sectors in the economy by output and comfortably the largest by headcount. The authority counted 365,120 establishments operating across the sector in 2025.
Most of that register is very small. A six-figure company count in a market that awarded 472 projects in a full year describes an industry dominated by micro-enterprises doing finishing, maintenance and single-trade subcontract work, not by main contractors. Fragmentation of that kind is normal in construction everywhere. It does mean the registration figure says very little on its own about the country's capacity to deliver an SR3 trillion pipeline: the binding constraint is the number of firms able to hold a billion-riyal package, and that number grows slowly.
Those two numbers describe the central tension in the Saudi contracting market. The forward pipeline is enormous, and it is being procured through packages that most of the firms in the register cannot bid for.
The trend of the past two years has been toward fewer and larger awards. The authority recorded 472 projects worth about SR233.2bn across the Kingdom in 2025; through the first seven months of 2026 it has logged 97 projects worth more than SR111.3bn. Value is holding up considerably better than volume, which is another way of saying the average package has grown substantially. Contracts of that size are written for firms with the bonding capacity, plant and balance sheet to carry them, and the number of Saudi companies in that category runs to dozens, not thousands.
The authority's response has been to work on qualifying small and medium contractors for roles on major projects, on the reasoning that a firm which delivers a subcontract package on a giga-project acquires the record it needs to bid for a main contract later. Its own diagnosis of what holds those firms back is unsentimental: inadequate project feasibility studies, inaccurate pricing and poor cash flow management.
Cash flow is the one that decides outcomes. Delayed interim payments, disputed certifications and withheld retention are the recurring risks for contractors and subcontractors working on Saudi projects, and cash flow disruption is what turns a slow job into a suspended one and then into a dispute. Rising construction costs through the current cycle have lengthened payment waits for consultants and contractors on some of the larger developments. A subcontractor with thin reserves does not fail because it priced the work badly; it fails because the money for work it has already done arrives two quarters late.
The authority has been digitising and standardising contract forms to reduce the ambiguity those disputes feed on, and the government has pushed to release delayed payments to ease pressure through the supply chain. Standard forms will not fix a client's liquidity, but they narrow the space in which a certification can be argued about for six months.
The foreign entrants are the other structural change. The 1,648 companies that have come into the market since the authority's creation include the Chinese state contractors that now hold some of the largest packages in the Kingdom — China Harbour Engineering Company on ROSHN's Sedra and Warefa housing, China Railway Construction Corporation on the Jeddah Central stadium, China State Construction Engineering Corporation on the Royal Diriyah Opera House — alongside Egyptian, Italian, Turkish, Qatari and Indian firms. They bring capacity the domestic market could not have supplied on its own, and they compress margins for everyone bidding against them.
Localisation policy pulls against that concentration. Public Investment Fund portfolio companies have been attaching local-content commitments to their procurement, which obliges the large contractors winning the headline packages to place work with Saudi subcontractors and suppliers. In practice that is how most of the register touches the giga-projects at all — not as main contractors, but as the second and third tier the main contractors are required to use.
Where that capacity is needed is shifting. On the authority's own figures the largest pool of awarded value in 2025 was not vertical construction but water and energy, with oil and gas and infrastructure between them accounting for a further substantial share. A contractor building a capability for the next five years is better served investing in process, utilities and heavy civil work than in another concrete frame division.
The register, meanwhile, keeps growing faster than the number of firms able to win what is actually being let. That gap is the real condition of the Saudi contracting market: an industry that has never had a larger pipeline in front of it, and has rarely been more concentrated in who gets to build it.