Riyadh Land Prices per Square Metre, by District (Q2 2026)

Riyadh land prices per square metre run district by district through Q2 2026, and no downloadable file has carried that grain since Q3 2025. On REGA's Real Estate Indicators platform, residential land in Al Malqa carries SAR 8,990/sqm on 20 transactions that quarter, An Narjis SAR 5,979 on 107, Al Arid SAR 4,526 on 123 and Al Khayr SAR 1,310 on 505, against a whole-city SAR 3,163/sqm on 3,769 transactions (REGA). Nineteen districts carry a price and ten more traded without one. One warning comes first: REGA publishes the same quarter twice, on two surfaces that disagree, and the free download is the weaker copy.

Key figures at a glance

Riyadh land prices per square metre, district by district

REGA's Real Estate Indicators platform prices residential land in nineteen Riyadh districts for Q2 2026, its freshest quarter, on transaction counts running from 19 to 505, and withholds a price for ten more that traded. Its stated source of record is the Ministry of Justice and the Real Estate Register, and the aggregates need no sign-in.

Riyadh residential land, Q2 2026, REGA Real Estate Indicators, twenty-nine districts queried one at a time. Ordered by transaction count rather than price, because the count decides whether the price beside it can be used. The ten that traded unpriced: Al Faruq (16 deals), Ad Dar Al Baida (13), Ash Shifa (7), Hittin and Qurtubah (4 each), Al Nada, Al Yasmin and Umm Al Hamam West (3 each), Ar Rawdah and Al Olaya (1 each).

Read the two columns together and the market runs opposite to the search box. The districts people name have almost no deals in them: twenty land transactions in Al Malqa for a whole quarter, four in Hittin, one in Al Olaya. The volume sits outside, 505 deals in Al Khayr and 296 in Urayd. Thin cells lurch. Al Malqa printed SAR 6,512 in Q3 2025 (n=142), SAR 11,267 in Q4 2025 (n=29), nothing at all in Q1 2026 (n=14), then SAR 8,990. Al Arid, at 89 to 124 deals a quarter, fell once and then held between SAR 4,351 and SAR 4,808 (REGA REI, Q3 2025 to Q2 2026). Depth, not postcode, decides whether a cell is quotable.

District grain covers five cities, three districts at a time, out of 192 for Riyadh (REGA), and no link lands a reader on one: the platform hides its state in a base64 blob and its server render returns the same three defaults whatever the parameters say. Assembling all 192 is manual work no authority publishes as a file, so the table above is a compilation of REGA's own cells rather than an estimate of ours (how the platform works).

The same quarter, published twice, at two different prices

For Q3 2025 REGA's downloadable file reports 3,495 Riyadh residential-land deeds worth SAR 3.56bn; its own platform reports 5,606 transactions for the same city, quarter and property type. Where both surfaces price a district they differ by 3% to 20%, and seven of the twenty-five district rows in the file appear on only one of them.

Sources: REGA open data, Riyadh Q3 2025 sales transaction indicators, KSA Open Data Licence, and REGA Real Estate Indicators.

Four quarters reconcile to the unit: Q1 2025 at 15,583 transactions, Q2 2025 at 5,681, Q4 2025 at 4,094, Q1 2026 at 3,280. Q3 2025 does not, and no quarter of 2024 does either (Q4 2024: 17,363 deeds and SAR 21.59bn in the file, 18,876 and SAR 25.20bn on the platform). The disagreement has a pattern. It falls on the thin, expensive northern cells the free file prices and the platform declines to publish, which are the cells a valuation is most likely to quote. Hittin's SAR 12,237 rests on six deeds, on the publication floor, where the platform counts seventeen transactions and prints nothing. Our rule when the two conflict: when the publisher withholds a cell on its own platform and prints it in a downloadable file, trust the withholding.

The file is mechanically weaker too. In Q1 2025, 728 of 975 district by type by class keys appear on more than one row, and 29 districts that cleared six deeds in aggregate went unpriced because each fragment sat under the floor alone. Al Janadriyah that quarter is three rows of 537, 399 and 1,363 deeds at three different prices; the platform prints one, 2,299 transactions at SAR 1,085.92 (REGA open data, REGA REI).

Suppression costs less than it looks. REGA excludes "neighborhoods and cities with fewer than 6 transactions" (REGA), and in Q3 2025 the 60 priced districts, out of 139 with a land deed, still hold 3,288 of the 3,495 deeds (94%) and SAR 3.14bn of the SAR 3.56bn traded (88%) (REGA). What the floor removes is the tail. Six is also a floor rather than a guarantee, because it applies after the outlier trim: Ar Rawdah and Ar Risalah each recorded twelve Q3 2025 transactions on the platform and carry no price.

What REGA's average price per square metre actually measures

REGA's methodology page, last modified 25 June 2026, defines the figure as a mean of per-transaction metre prices, "calculated by dividing total square meter prices by the number of transactions after excluding outliers", trimmed by an IQR filter (REGA). It is not total value divided by total area, and the platform says so itself: the page "does not show the actual price per square meter of the property, but rather the average prices of sale or rental transactions" in the chosen scope (REGA). About 45% of the raw deed record is excluded before publication, from a base of 3,847,193 transactions going back to 2006 (REGA).

That definition carries the most expensive misreading in the dataset, and the Q3 2025 file measures it. Al Arid publishes at SAR 6,095/sqm on 32 deeds while the same row's SAR 225,989,904 divided by 272,644.5 sqm gives SAR 829/sqm (REGA). Al Malqa runs the other way, 6,847 published against 7,589. Across that file, 22 of the 76 priced land rows have a value per area falling outside the row's own printed low to high band.

Omran estimate. The gap between those two definitions is a size gauge rather than an error, and it is the cheapest read of whether a district traded plots or parcels. Divide each Q3 2025 row's traded area by its deed count: Al Arid's 32 deeds average about 8,520 sqm each, Al Malqa's 63 average about 675 sqm (REGA). Al Arid is where the two diverge by a factor of roughly seven; Al Malqa is where they sit 11% apart. An average built from deals describes the metre of a typical deal, so in a parcel market it overstates the metre of a large site. Capitalise a hectare-scale Al Arid plot at the district average and the land line in a residual moves by a multiple rather than a margin (see residual land value). Nobody publishes price by plot-size band, so this gauge substitutes for one.

Prices, volumes and the SAR 1,500 cap

GASTAT's Real Estate Price Index puts the Riyadh region at 115.98 in Q2 2026, up 4.2% year on year, after a Q1 2026 print of 109.83 that was 4.4% down on the year. Kingdom residential land reads 107.65, up 6.3%, against villas at 94.89, down 9.7% (GASTAT). The weights decide how much that split matters: residential plots carry 45.849% of the national index and land of all three uses 70.6% (GASTAT, Q2 2026), so a sentence about Saudi property prices is mostly, by weight, a sentence about plots (see the regional prints). Volume moved further than price: Riyadh city residential land ran 5,606 transactions in Q3 2025, 3,280 in Q1 2026 and 3,769 in Q2 2026 while the city metre price held between SAR 3,116 and SAR 3,224 (REGA REI).

Policy sets the boundary conditions. On 29 March 2025 the Crown Prince lifted the ban on sale, subdivision and permitting over two more tracts north of Riyadh, 17 km² bounded east by Al Arid and 16.2 km² bounded west by Al Qairawan. Add the 48.28 km² freed earlier and 81.48 km² of the city is back in play. The same directive ordered 10,000 to 40,000 serviced plots a year for five years at no more than SAR 1,500 per sqm, for married citizens or citizens over 25 with no prior property (SPA). Set that ceiling against the table. Seven of the nineteen priced districts already trade under SAR 1,500, from Badr at 1,484 down to Ar Risalah at 285, so the cap concedes nothing there. It bites in the release zones, beside districts printing SAR 4,526 and SAR 6,838 that quarter, a discount of roughly two thirds to four fifths on the adjacent market. Neither the size of that transfer nor the count of plots allocated is published.

The other half of the policy charges for sitting still. The white land fee gazetted on 22 August 2025 takes 10%, 7.5%, 5%, 2.5% or nil of assessed value a year by priority tier, applies once an owner's holdings in a city reach 5,000 sqm, and must be settled before ownership transfers (Umm Al-Qura); Riyadh invoicing began 1 January 2026 (MOMAH, and see the fee in detail). Rents inside the urban boundary are frozen for five years from 25 September 2025 (SPA). Capped income on the built asset and an annual charge on the unbuilt one push the same way.

Where the deed record runs out

Everything above is a cell some government surface actually prints. The Q2 2026 table above prices nineteen of the 192 Riyadh districts REGA's own selector offers, and REGA excluded 45% of the raw deed record before publishing any of it (methodology page of 25 Jun 2026). Five things that decide a Riyadh land deal are printed nowhere:

• No median and no distribution. REGA prints a mean and a low to high band, so any median is somebody's derivation.
• No price by plot-size band, though the Al Arid gap shows size is what moves the metre.
• No serviced against raw split, and no official stock of developable land inside the urban boundary.
• No count of plots allocated under the SAR 1,500 programme from any public route, so that stays n/a.
• No district rent. REGA's rental platform does not answer us, so the yield work sits at Riyadh rental yield by district. Deal-level deeds are behind a Nafath sign-in.

Omran estimate. What the named idle land is worth, and the fee it should carry. The Ministry of Municipalities and Housing puts 2.3 million sqm of serviced but unbuilt land in Al Narjis and more than 1.6 million sqm in Al Arid, over 4 million sqm together and enough for more than 13,500 homes (MOMAH, 8 Jun 2026). At REGA's own Q2 2026 cells, An Narjis at SAR 5,979/sqm (n=107) gives roughly SAR 13.7 billion and Al Arid at SAR 4,526/sqm (n=123) roughly SAR 7.2 billion, about SAR 21 billion across the two. At the gazetted tiers of 2.5% to 10%, the annual fee on that stock runs SAR 525 million to SAR 2.1 billion. The band is that wide because MOMAH does not publish which priority zone either district sits in, and the estimate leans high: both cells are means of deals, and multi-hectare parcels trade under them.

Omran assembles these tables from the primary record cell by cell, with the count on every one and the disagreements between two government surfaces documented rather than averaged away. Ask for the full 192-district table, or scope a briefing against your own site list.

FAQ

What is the price per square metre of land in Al Malqa? REGA's Real Estate Indicators platform prices Al Malqa residential land at SAR 8,990/sqm on 20 transactions in Q2 2026, after SAR 11,267 on 29 in Q4 2025 and no published price at all in Q1 2026 on 14. Always quote the quarter and the surface it came from, with the count beside it.

Where does the newest official Riyadh district land price come from? From REGA's Real Estate Indicators platform, which runs to Q2 2026 at district level for five cities. What stopped is the download: REGA removed the neighbourhood column from its quarterly sales-indicator files from Q4 2025, so the free files now stop at city grain. The grain did not disappear, the file did.

Is REGA's average price per square metre the same as total value divided by total area? No. REGA divides the sum of per-transaction metre prices by the number of transactions, after an IQR outlier cut. In the Q3 2025 Riyadh file the two disagree by more than the row's own printed range on 22 of 76 priced land rows, and by a factor of about seven in Al Arid, whose row covers 272,644 sqm across 32 deeds, so the average deed there runs to roughly 8,500 sqm.

How many transactions does a district need before REGA publishes a price? At least six, and six is often not enough. REGA's data-verification page states the six-transaction floor, and no priced row in seven quarterly Riyadh files falls below it. The test runs after an IQR outlier trim, so a district can show a healthy raw count and still print nothing: on the platform's Q3 2025, Hittin carries 17 transactions and no price, Ar Rawdah and Ar Risalah 12 each, Al Nada 11.

Did Riyadh land prices fall in 2026? On GASTAT's index the Riyadh region fell 4.4% year on year in Q1 2026, then rose 4.2% in Q2 2026 to 115.98. Kingdom residential land went from minus 3.9% to plus 6.3% across the same two quarters while villas fell 9.7%. Riyadh city land volume tells a different story: 3,280 deals in Q1 2026 against 5,606 in Q3 2025.

The open-data file says Hittin is the most expensive district in Riyadh. Should I use that number? No. The file prints SAR 12,237/sqm on six deeds, on the publication floor, while REGA's own platform publishes no Hittin price for that quarter against 17 transactions, nor for any quarter since. Its last published Hittin figures are SAR 7,085/sqm on 86 transactions in Q3 2024 and SAR 9,692 on 40 in Q1 2025.

Sources

• REGA Real Estate Indicators, Riyadh city page (district land prices and transaction counts to Q2 2026): link
• REGA Real Estate Indicators, cities and definitions (five-city district grain, the disclaimer on what the number is): link
• REGA, Data Refinement and Verification Mechanism (six-transaction floor, IQR trim, 45% of records excluded): link
• REGA open data, quarterly Riyadh sales transaction indicators built on Ministry of Justice and Real Estate Register deeds, Q1 2024 to Q1 2026, KSA Open Data Licence: link
• GASTAT, Real Estate Price Index Q2 2026 (Riyadh region 115.98, residential land 107.65, item weights): link
• GASTAT, Real Estate Price Index Q1 2026 bulletin (Riyadh region down 4.4%, residential land down 3.9%): link
• Saudi Press Agency, Riyadh directives of 29 March 2025 (81.48 km² released, SAR 1,500/sqm plot cap): link
• Saudi Press Agency, Riyadh rent freeze from 25 September 2025: link
• Umm Al-Qura official gazette, white land fees executive regulation of 22 August 2025 (tiers, 5,000 sqm threshold): link
• Ministry of Municipalities and Housing, Riyadh white land zones and 1 January 2026 invoicing: link
• Ministry of Municipalities and Housing, idle land in Al Narjis and Al Arid (2.3M sqm and 1.6M sqm): link