Contract awards across the Gulf reached $59.4bn in the second quarter of 2026, up from $45.7bn a year earlier and down from $79.6bn in the first quarter. Saudi Arabia accounted for $30bn of it, and oil and gas was the only sector to grow quarter on quarter.
Contract awards across the Gulf Cooperation Council reached $59.4bn in the second quarter of 2026, according to Kamco Invest's projects market update. The figure is 30 per cent above the $45.7bn awarded in the same quarter of 2025 and 25.4 per cent below the $79.6bn awarded in the first quarter of this year.
Both comparisons are informative and they say different things.
The annual increase describes the direction of the regional market: more work is being contracted than a year ago, and the growth is broad enough to survive a quarter in which most individual markets fell.
The quarterly decline describes how this market actually behaves. Project awards are lumpy. A single large package can move a country's quarter by billions, and the absence of one can halve it. Reading a sequential decline as a slowdown is usually a mistake in a market where a handful of contracts dominate the total.
The country split is where the structure shows. Saudi Arabia took $30bn, roughly half the regional total. The United Arab Emirates took $20.5bn, down 5.4 per cent year on year. Between them the two markets accounted for around 85 per cent of everything awarded in the Gulf during the quarter.
Oman recorded $5.9bn, a rise of 341.7 per cent on the same quarter a year earlier. Kuwait recorded $2bn, up 49.1 per cent. Qatar recorded $931m, down 40.8 per cent.
Percentage changes on small bases need care. Oman's increase is real and is driven by a small number of large awards rather than by a broad expansion of its contracting market; the same arithmetic in reverse explains Qatar's fall. Neither figure describes a structural shift on its own.
The sector data carries the more useful signal. Oil and gas was the only category to post quarter-on-quarter growth, with awards rising 269 per cent to $13.7bn. That is consistent with what the region's national oil companies have been contracting: gas processing capacity in Saudi Arabia, the Bab Gas Cap development in Abu Dhabi, and continuing work on Qatar's North Field expansion.
For contractors and suppliers the practical reading is about where capacity should be pointed. A regional market running near $60bn a quarter with half of it in one country and a rising share in oil and gas rewards firms positioned in Saudi Arabia and in process rather than building work. All GCC countries except Saudi Arabia saw quarterly declines, which concentrates the opportunity further.
The figures also set a benchmark for the second half. Awards of $79.6bn in the first quarter and $59.4bn in the second put the region above $139bn for the half year, and the pipeline behind that is dominated by programmes already under way rather than by projects still seeking approval. Whether the annual total keeps its 30 per cent margin over 2025 will depend on how many of the larger packages in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi land before the year closes rather than slipping into 2027.