A decision raising Saudisation in private-sector engineering professions to 30 per cent has taken effect, covering 46 roles at establishments with five or more employees. Counted positions require accreditation from the Saudi Council of Engineers.
Saudi Arabia's requirement that 30 per cent of private-sector engineering positions be held by Saudi nationals has taken effect, covering 46 professions at establishments employing five or more workers in the roles concerned.
The decision, taken by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development with the Ministry of Municipalities and Housing, was issued in January with six months' notice before implementation, according to the Saudi Press Agency. The covered roles include architects, power generation engineers and industrial engineers, and a position counts toward the quota only where the holder is accredited by the Saudi Council of Engineers.
The accreditation condition is the operative part. Saudisation targets have historically been satisfiable by headcount, which allowed a firm to meet a percentage without the roles being professionally equivalent. Tying the count to Council accreditation means a nationalised position has to be a qualified engineering position, and it puts the Council's registration throughput on the critical path of every employer's compliance.
A minimum monthly wage of SAR 8,000 applies to the engineering roles for the purpose of the count, which sets a floor on what a compliant position costs. For contractors and consultancies, that combination — an accredited engineer at a defined minimum wage, in a defined proportion — converts Saudisation from a hiring ratio into a structural cost input that has to be carried in tender pricing.
The shift toward profession-specific quotas is the wider change. Nitaqat has moved from measuring an establishment as a whole toward measuring it role by role across a large number of defined professions, which means a company can sit comfortably above its overall target and still be non-compliant inside a single department. Engineering-heavy businesses are the ones most exposed to that arithmetic, because their professional headcount is concentrated rather than spread.
For the construction and industrial sectors the practical effect falls on project staffing. Design offices, site engineering teams and technical departments are where these professions sit, and the requirement applies to the establishment rather than to a project, so it cannot be managed by allocating nationals to one contract. Firms that grew their engineering capacity through expatriate recruitment during the giga-project ramp-up carry the largest adjustment.
It also creates demand that runs in the other direction. Saudi engineering graduates now have a defined, priced and enforceable market for their qualification in the private sector, and the Council accreditation route becomes the gate that market runs through. The scale of the ambition is visible in the wider programme, which is aimed at localising more than 340,000 additional private-sector jobs by 2028.
The ministry has not published a compliance grace period beyond the six months given at issuance.