Jeddah Real Estate Market: Deeds, Rents and the 2% Fee Zone

Jeddah registered 7,685 residential deeds worth SAR 8.53 billion in Q1 2026, 15.5% of the Kingdom's residential deeds and 20.6% of their value, and it sold more apartments than Riyadh in the same quarter: 4,307 against 3,133, at SAR 3,876.00 per square metre against Riyadh's SAR 5,861.71 (REGA). The Jeddah real estate market has no price index of its own, no published yield and no neighbourhood table after Q3 2025. Its newest hard fact is legal: since the executive regulation was gazetted on 3 July 2026, Jeddah governorate is one of four places in the Kingdom where a non-Saudi pays 2% of value to dispose of a real right (Umm Al-Qura).

Key figures at a glance

How big the Jeddah real estate market is

Second in the Kingdom on count and value: 15.5% of national residential deeds and 20.6% of their value in Q1 2026, against Riyadh's 22.0% and 35.9% (REGA). Volume fell 26.3% from Q4 2025, and the calendar carries most of that: Ramadan 1447 fell inside the quarter, and Q1 has been the thin quarter in this series every prior year.

The mix travels further than the total: apartments were 56.0% of Q1 2026 residential deeds, land 40.8%, villas 142 deeds in the whole city. The census says why. 72.5% of Jeddah's 1,081,908 occupied dwellings are apartments, against 46.7% in Riyadh (GASTAT Census 2022, Census-2022-Housing-Type.csv; the census portal serves no link). So when the national villa sub-index prints 94.89, down 9.7% year on year in Q2 2026 (GASTAT), it lands softly here and hard in the capital (Riyadh residential).

Two government files disagree about Q4 2025, and neither states its deed universe: REGA counts 10,427 Jeddah residential deeds worth SAR 11.51 billion (REGA), the Ministry of Justice extract 7,600 worth SAR 9.42 billion (MOJ-Sales-2025-Q4.csv).

Jeddah property prices per square metre, and the figure analysts misread

REGA's Q1 2026 city prints are apartments SAR 3,876.00/sqm on 4,307 deeds, residential land SAR 2,383.22 on 3,134 and villas SAR 3,481.25 on 142 (REGA).

The trap is in how that average is built. REGA's published figure is not value divided by area. Recompute the Q1 2026 Jeddah land row that way and you get SAR 931.18/sqm against a published SAR 2,383.22, a 156% gap; do the same on the Q4 2025 apartment row and the two agree to 1.1%. The published number behaves like a mean of per-deed metre prices, so the smallest plot in the file weighs as much as the largest, and land is where plot size spreads widest. Two analysts working from one file can quote Jeddah land at either end of a 2.5x range and both believe they quote REGA (the indicators platform, Riyadh land by district).

One row inflates the whole city. Al Fayha villas, Q2 2025: 19 deeds, SAR 15,991,942,105, published at SAR 284,023.22/sqm, SAR 842 million per villa. Strip it and Jeddah's residential value that quarter falls from SAR 26.82 billion to SAR 10.82 billion; strip its Q3 2025 twin and Q3 falls from SAR 17.11 billion to SAR 3.95 billion. Aggregate the file without outlier screening and you publish a market twice its real size, the error disguised as growth.

Nobody publishes a Jeddah growth rate. GASTAT's index stops at the region, and its Makkah leg (102.43 in Q2 2026, up 0.4% year on year against 1.3% nationally) blends Jeddah with the sixteen other cities REGA's own Makkah file names, so "Jeddah prices rose 0.4%" is a scope error (GASTAT, prices by region).

Jeddah districts: the last quarter with a neighbourhood grain

REGA dropped the neighbourhood column after Q3 2025, so 3,647 Jeddah neighbourhood, type and quarter rows covering 78,120 deeds (Q1 2024 to Q3 2025) are the whole district record (REGA). Of 120 Jeddah land rows in Q3 2025, 62 carry a price. A selection from the top and bottom of those, not a ranking:

Ash Sharai is the cheapest cell with a hundred deeds behind it, not the cheapest cell: Al Masarrah prints SAR 358 on 7. Two mechanics matter: REGA suppresses any price below six deeds, and its largest Jeddah land label that quarter is not a district but أخرى, "other", on 169 deeds.

What a Jeddah apartment rents for, on the Q4 2025 print

REGA recorded 120,352 registered apartment leases in Jeddah in Q4 2025, averaging SAR 24,589 a year, or SAR 211.6 per sqm, 20.7% below Riyadh's SAR 31,014 (REGA). That is the Q4 2025 print, the newest rental file obtainable, not a current reading.

Two readings of it are routinely wrong, both flattering the city. The first is the series itself: rent per metre rose every quarter of 2025 (SAR 205.2, 207.2, 210.7, 211.6) while rent per contract went SAR 23,840, 24,765, 25,036, then back to 24,589, so the Q4 print sits below Q2 and Q3. Quote the endpoints alone and you write something true and misleading. The second is the contract count: registrations rose from 17,180 in Q1 2019 to 111,106 in Q4 2024 while average rent moved 13.7%. That 6.5x curve is compliance, not demand: REGA restricted rent payment on new residential leases to Ejar's digital channels from 15 January 2024 (REGA).

The comparison that decides an underwriting: over those six years Jeddah's apartment rent rose 13.7% and its villa rent 3.7%; Riyadh's rose 44.2% and 49.7%. Riyadh is also where increases are frozen for five years from 25 September 2025, residential and commercial, inside its urban boundaries (REGA). The legal ceiling sits on the expensive, fast-growing side of the pair, and the cheap, flat side has no cap. Carry Riyadh escalation into a Jeddah model and you contradict six years of data; carry it into a Riyadh model and you assume an increase the landlord cannot lawfully collect.

Within Jeddah, on that same Q4 2025 file, the spread is 4.52x: SAR 567.6/sqm/yr in Al Khalidiyah on 139 contracts against SAR 125.5 in Al Mahamid on 141, the two ends of the 109 district cells carrying 30 contracts or more (REGA).

Jeddah is one of four named 2% fee zones

The Real Estate Ownership System for Non-Saudi Nationals came into force on 22 January 2026 (REGA). The Council of Ministers, meeting in Jeddah on 23 June 2026, approved its regulation and, separately, the geographical zones in which non-Saudis may own (Umm Al-Qura); it was gazetted on 3 July 2026. Article 9 sets a fee of 2% of value on a non-Saudi's disposal of a real right, all right types and all uses, in Riyadh city, Makkah city, Madinah city and Jeddah governorate; Article 10 sets nil everywhere else (Umm Al-Qura).

Two details in that table change how a Jeddah deal is written. The fee attaches to disposal, not acquisition, so it belongs in the exit line of the model, where it is easiest to omit and most expensive to discover. And Jeddah is the only one of the four defined at governorate level, the other three as cities, so its zone reaches wider than Riyadh's.

Two other regimes stop at the capital. Jeddah has no rent cap: the freeze extends beyond Riyadh only by a REGA board decision approved by the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, and none has been published in either language. Nor does Jeddah have a Real Estate Registry phase: the commencement notices name Riyadh, Qassim, the Eastern Province, Madinah and Makkah city, whose window ran from 19 January to 24 April 2025 and covered 19,239 properties (REGA). That phase closed in April 2025, and through the notices read for this page no later one names Jeddah: the Kingdom's second deed market has no registry phase of its own.

Where the Jeddah record runs out

No authority publishes a Jeddah price index, a Jeddah yield, a vacancy rate for any asset class here, an off-plan licence count or a city mortgage figure. On credit the finest grain published is national: bank real-estate lending stood at SAR 951.3 billion in SAMA's Q4 2025 print, up 7.7% on Q4 2024 (SAMA monthly bulletin, table 12e). Forward supply has exactly one publisher with real unit counts: Jeddah Central, a PIF company, publishes 5.7 million sqm, 17,000 residential units and 2,700 hotel rooms, phase 1 due end 2027 (Jeddah Central); every other Jeddah stock or pipeline total in circulation traces to a private brokerage survey. Commercial rent is dark too: REGA registered 94,919 Jeddah commercial leases across 2025 and priced none of them, all 1,184 rows printing zero, and the last priced series ends at Q4 2024.

Omran estimate: the Jeddah gross yield band. Both legs are REGA's own, one city, one quarter, the Q4 2025 print. Per square metre, SAR 211.6 of rent over SAR 3,697.03 of price gives 5.72%. Per unit, SAR 24,589 of rent over a SAR 592,814 average apartment deed gives 4.15%. The 157 basis points between them is a denominator mismatch, not a disagreement about Jeddah: the average sold apartment is 162.1 sqm, the average leased one 116.2 sqm, so the two files describe different products. Riyadh on the identical method returns 4.81% and 3.81%. Publish the range with its reason, never a point.

Omran rebuilds this city from the registries themselves, cell by cell, with the deed or contract count on every one (the national series). Ask for the Jeddah district tables, including the 3,647 neighbourhood rows REGA no longer publishes.

FAQ

What is the average price per square metre in Jeddah? On REGA's Q1 2026 city file: apartments SAR 3,876.00/sqm on 4,307 deeds, land SAR 2,383.22 on 3,134, villas SAR 3,481.25 on 142. That average is a mean of per-transaction metre prices, not value over area; on land the two differ by 156%.

Is Jeddah cheaper than Riyadh, and by how much? On the Q1 2026 print the Jeddah apartment metre is 33.9% below Riyadh's, SAR 3,876.00 against SAR 5,861.71, and its Q4 2025 registered apartment rent 20.7% below, SAR 24,589 against SAR 31,014. Jeddah still registered more apartment deeds than Riyadh in both quarters.

Have Jeddah rents actually risen? Barely. The average registered apartment contract went from SAR 20,902.83 in Q1 2019 to SAR 23,767.91 in Q4 2024, up 13.7% in six years against Riyadh's 44.2%. The 6.5x rise in contract count is Ejar compliance from 15 January 2024, not demand.

Can a foreigner buy property in Jeddah? Yes, and Jeddah is one of only four places the rules single out. The regulation gazetted on 3 July 2026 sets a 2% fee on a non-Saudi's disposal of a real right in Riyadh city, Makkah city, Madinah city and Jeddah governorate, nil elsewhere. A non-resident buyer needs a Ministry of Interior digital identity, a Saudi bank account and a Saudi phone number first (Article 2).

Sources

• REGA open data, sales transaction indicators (deeds, values, SAR/sqm, districts) and rental indicators back to Q1 2019, Makkah and Riyadh regions: link
• Ministry of Justice, quarterly deed extracts (MOJ-Sales-2025-Q4.csv), cited by file name: the ministry's portals do not respond to this infrastructure
• GASTAT, Real Estate Price Index Q2 2026 (region legs, villa sub-index): link
• GASTAT, Census 2022 housing tables (occupied dwellings, dwelling type), cited by file name
• SAMA monthly bulletin table 12e (bank real-estate credit, Q4 2025 print), cited by file name
• Umm Al-Qura, Council of Ministers session of 23 June 2026 (geographical zones approved): link
• Umm Al-Qura, Executive Regulation of the Non-Saudi Real Estate Ownership System, 3 July 2026 (Articles 2, 9, 10): link
• REGA, non-Saudi ownership system enters into force, 22 January 2026: link
• REGA, Riyadh five-year rent freeze, 25 September 2025: link
• REGA, rent payment on new residential leases restricted to digital channels from 15 January 2024: link
• REGA, Real Estate Registry commencement for 28 Makkah neighbourhoods (19,239 properties): link
• Jeddah Central Development Company, project scope, unit counts and phasing: link