Saudi Arabia's railways carried more than 83 million passengers in the first half of 2026, up at least 16 percent year on year, with urban rail accounting for 78 million of them. The figures mark a shift from an intercity and freight railway to a mass daily-transport network, even as SAR expands capacity on the Haramain line and the Riyadh-Dammam corridor.
Saudi Arabia's railways carried more than 83 million passengers in the first half of 2026, up at least 16 percent on the same period a year earlier, according to Transport General Authority figures. It is a number large enough to change how the sector should be read: rail in the Kingdom has become a mass daily-transport business, and only secondarily the intercity and mineral railway it was for most of its history.
The split inside the total makes the point. Urban rail accounted for 78 million of the 83 million journeys. Riyadh Metro alone carried 31 million passengers in the first quarter and 29.7 million in the second, a combined 60.7 million trips in six months. Everything else on the network, including the high-speed line between Makkah and Madinah and the intercity services out of Riyadh, made up the remaining five million or so.
That is a structural shift rather than a good half. Saudi Arabia Railways carried a record of more than 14 million passengers across the whole of 2025, itself well ahead of the 11.2 million recorded in 2023, alongside about 30 million tonnes of freight. Riyadh Metro now moves more people in a single quarter than the national operator carries in two years. The mainline railway remains the strategically important asset for freight and for connecting cities, but it is no longer where the passenger volume is.
The quarterly pattern also shows the growth curve flattening in a predictable way. Passenger numbers rose 29 percent year on year in the first quarter, then 4 percent in the second, against 35 million and 36.5 million in the corresponding quarters of 2025. That is a base effect as the metro's opening year annualises. Growth from here depends on capacity added to existing lines and on services that do not yet exist, not on new stations coming into a network that was empty the year before.
The intercity picture is more about capacity than headline numbers. The Haramain High Speed Railway carried 2 million passengers in the first quarter and 1.6 million in the second, with the seasonal peaks that its route implies. For the 2026 Hajj, Saudi Arabia Railways raised capacity on the line to more than 2.21 million seats, over 210,000 more than the previous season. The line's operational record in peak periods has been strong: during Ramadan it moved 1.2 million passengers across 3,310 trips at 99.5 percent punctuality, and set a single-day record of around 48,000 passengers.
On the east-west corridor between Riyadh and Dammam, the constraint has been rolling stock rather than track. SAR signed a contract with Switzerland's Stadler Rail in February 2024 for ten diesel trainsets, with an option for ten more, intended to roughly double annual capacity on the eastern services to more than 3.8 million passengers and to introduce a direct express service between the capital and the Eastern Province. The line runs through Al-Ahsa and Abqaiq, linking Riyadh to the industrial and administrative centre of the oil sector, and a faster non-stop service changes what a working day between the two cities looks like.
The northern network is being treated similarly. New trains are expected to lift capacity on the northern line almost threefold, to more than 2.4 million seats a year across services calling at Riyadh, Al-Majmaah, Qassim, Hail, Jouf and Al-Qurayyat. Those are towns whose economic connection to the capital has historically been by road, and where a train with real frequency alters the catchment for labour and for retail.
The network itself is set to grow substantially. Saleh Al-Jasser, Minister of Transport and Logistic Services and chairman of Saudi Arabia Railways, has said the Kingdom will expand its rail network beyond 8,000 kilometres, from more than 5,500 kilometres today, an increase of roughly 45 percent, under the National Transport and Logistics Strategy. Alongside it sits the Asasat programme, which aims to localise the railway supply industry in Saudi Arabia and which the ministry has valued at around SR15bn ($4bn) of investment opportunity by 2030.
That last point is the part with the longest economic tail. A network of this size stops being a construction programme and becomes a permanent industrial customer. Trainsets, bogies, signalling, traction power, depots, track renewal and maintenance are recurring purchases with predictable volumes, which is exactly the demand profile a localisation policy needs to work against. A one-off build supports contractors; an operating railway supports manufacturers.
Freight has not stood still either, with about 7.7 million tonnes of minerals and goods moved in the first half of 2026. But the more interesting number remains the passenger one. Eighty-three million journeys in six months puts rail into the same conversation as roads and housing in the Kingdom's cities, and makes the second half of the decade a question of how much capacity gets added rather than whether the demand is there.