Hotel Occupancy Rate in Saudi Arabia: 60.8%, City by City

The hotel occupancy rate in Saudi Arabia was 60.8% for licensed hotels in Q1 2026, down 2.1 percentage points from 63.0% a year earlier, on the GASTAT release of 2 July 2026. Serviced apartments went the other way, up 1.0 point to 51.6%. Underneath that one national figure sits a spread 57.7 points wide: Al-Madinah city at 84.0%, Jiddah governorate at 60.8%, Makkah city at 59.9%, Riyadh including Diriyah at 51.0%, Al Bahah at 26.3%. Q1 2026 is the first quarter GASTAT ever published those city rows; every number below was read in its workbook or the Ministry's own report.

Key figures at a glance

Why the hotel occupancy rate in Saudi Arabia fell while most regions rose

Between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026 six of the thirteen administrative regions recorded a fall in hotel occupancy and seven recorded a rise, and the national rate still lost 2.1 points to 60.8% (GASTAT Table 2.22). Both are true, and the weighting is why.

So we recomputed the headline. Weighting the thirteen regional hotel rates by the thirteen regional room counts returns 60.78%, six hundredths of a point off the 60.84% GASTAT prints. Give those same regions equal weight and the answer is 44.4%. Sixteen points sit between the two, and that spread is the finding: the Makkah region holds 365,503 of the Kingdom's 506,005 licensed hotel rooms and Al-Madinah region a further 71,742, so the two pilgrimage regions carry 86.4% of national hotel room stock (Tables 2.2 and 2.22 of the Q1 2026 workbook; both of those averages are Omran arithmetic on those cells, not GASTAT figures).

The declines are concentrated in Ar Riyadh, down 8.9 points from 59.5% to 50.6%, Tabuk down 13.1 and the Eastern region down 5.3, against risers led by Northern Borders at plus 5.4. So the Saudi hotel occupancy rate is arithmetically a pilgrimage number wearing a national label. Benchmark a Riyadh business hotel against 60.8% and you are benchmarking it against the pilgrim towers.

Hotel occupancy by city: Al-Madinah 84.0%, Riyadh 51.0%

Al-Madinah city ran 84.0% in Q1 2026 and Riyadh city, Diriyah included, ran 51.0%, on the first city-level hospitality tables GASTAT has ever published. The Q2, Q3 and Q4 2025 workbooks were each opened for this page and none carries a cities table, so the series is one quarter long in either direction. Occupancy is Table 2.8, rate Table 2.11, stay Table 2.20.

All values Q1 2026, from the Q1 2026 workbook. Read the row labels first: Riyadh includes Diriyah, Dammam is the metropolitan area with Khobar and Dhahran, Jiddah, Al-Ahsa and Taif are governorates, and "Other" is GASTAT's residual for everywhere it does not name, never rankable against a market. Dammam and Al-Madinah tie at SAR 471.

Two numbers that collide. 60.8% is the national hotel occupancy rate (Table 1.2) and also Jiddah governorate's rate (Table 2.8): 0.608443 against 0.607939 at full precision, two measurements agreeing to one decimal by coincidence. The same trap sits on 51.6%, the serviced-apartment occupancy rate in Table 1.2 and their share of the 6,122 licensed facilities in Table 1.1.

Makkah kept its rooms full and gave away the rate

The sharpest thing in the Q1 2026 release is not an occupancy number. Makkah region occupancy fell 1.5 points year on year, from 61.0% to 59.5%, while its hotel ADR fell 17.4%, the largest rate fall of any region in Table 2.24 (GASTAT Table 2.24). Volume held and price did not.

Set that beside where the new supply landed. The Ministry licensed 987 new facilities carrying 76,350 room keys in H1 2025, and Makkah province alone took 44,637 of the 57,619 new hotel keys (Ministry of Tourism, pp.21-22 and p.26). That is 77% of the half-year's new hotel keys landing in one province. Mind the windows before joining them: the licensing count is H1 2025, the occupancy move is Q1 2026 against Q1 2025, and nobody publishes the bridge. Read side by side they still say one thing. A region taking three of every four new keys and holding occupancy within a point and a half of last year is not weak. It is clearing supply on rate.

Makkah city's ADR of SAR 356 prints below Jiddah at SAR 473 and Dammam at SAR 471 in a non-Hajj quarter. Hold the national ADR fall of 11.4% next to that. The Makkah region carries 72.2% of the Kingdom's licensed hotel rooms, so the national rate line and the Makkah rate line are drawn off much the same asset base.

Anyone underwriting a Makkah hotel off a stable occupancy series is reading a price story as a volume story. The assets differ structurally too: about 219 rooms per licensed hotel in the Makkah region against 114 in the Riyadh region, dividing Table 2.2 by Table 2.1 for Q1 2026, on city stays of 5.62 nights against 2.47 (Table 2.20). Large boxes on long stays at thin rates do not price like a corporate market, which is why the Riyadh hotel market needs its own comparables.

The March cliff, and why a quarterly average misleads in Riyadh

Riyadh city hotel occupancy ran 66.1% in January 2026, 56.4% in February and 30.6% in March, a fall of 35.5 points inside one quarter. Makkah city went the other way over the same weeks, 58.2% to 56.8% to 64.1%, while Al-Madinah held above 81% in every month of the quarter, at 87.0%, 83.6% and 81.3% (Table 2.8). The national monthly line for hotels reads 62.6%, 58.8%, 61.0% (Table 2.27). Riyadh loses thirty-five points and the Kingdom figure moves by four.

The Q1 2025 workbook shows the same inversion a year earlier at region level: Ar Riyadh 69.1%, 73.7%, 36.3% against Makkah region 60.3%, 55.9%, 65.8%. This is calendar, not incident: the Hijri year walks the pilgrimage season backwards through the Gregorian one, and corporate demand drains out of Riyadh in the weeks Umrah demand fills the holy cities. The shape moved, though. In 2025 February was the peak and the whole fall landed in March; by 2026 it had started in February. Model a cliff whose leading edge moves.

A quarterly average of 51.0% therefore describes no month that happened, and a debt-service test run on it passes on a quarter in which the building emptied. The revenue side reads the same way on its own window. In the Ministry of Tourism's H1 2025 edition, the most recent we have opened, Riyadh including Diriyah recorded hotel RevPAR of SAR 450, down 23.2% year on year, the steepest fall of any major market in that table (p.12).

The denominator is moving faster than the metric

GASTAT counts only facilities holding an active Ministry of Tourism licence, and that base is doubling: 2,802 licensed hospitality facilities in Q1 2024 against 6,122 in Q1 2026, up 118.5%, hotels alone from 1,441 to 2,963 (Table 1.1). Every comparison across quarters is between two different populations of hotels.

Rooms say it more cleanly. Licensed hotel rooms ran 450,074 in Q2 2025, 464,672 in Q3 2025, 491,652 in Q4 2025 and 506,005 in Q1 2026, up 12.4% across those three quarters (Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 workbooks, Table 2.2). Resist a trend reading: the quarter-on-quarter run is plus 3.2%, plus 5.8%, plus 2.9%, one spike between two ordinary quarters, and neither GASTAT nor the Ministry says whether it is construction completing or a licensing backlog clearing. A year-on-year rate cannot be built, because the Q1 2025 workbook has no rooms table.

The register measures licensing, not building. A property trading unlicensed for two years enters the series as new supply the day its paperwork clears, which is the honest reading of falling occupancy against a rising facility count (see Saudi hotel room supply).

Where the record stops, and what we put in its place

Four things a hospitality underwriting turns on are published by neither GASTAT nor the Ministry of Tourism, nor by any other Saudi public body we can read:

• Occupancy by grade, star rating or brand. Published at no geography, so no Saudi "upper upscale" occupancy figure can be quoted honestly.
• Unlicensed and short-let supply. Outside the licensed perimeter by construction, and neither publisher sizes it.
• Rooms under construction. Counted nowhere. The nearest proxy is the 76,350 keys newly licensed in H1 2025 (Ministry of Tourism, p.22), which measures completion into the register, not starts.
• Quarterly RevPAR. GASTAT never publishes revenue per available room in any of its 54 worksheets. The Ministry of Tourism does, but its full-year 2025 edition (April 2026) is not reachable from here, so the latest we have read covers H1 2025.

Omran estimate: national hotel RevPAR. Multiplying GASTAT's own two cells, Q1 2026 national hotel RevPAR is about SAR 257 (0.6084 x SAR 423.20) against about SAR 301 for Q1 2025 (0.6299 x SAR 477.46), a fall of about 14%. The method validates against a published figure: 58.5% x SAR 546 gives SAR 319, and the Ministry prints SAR 320 for H1 2025 hotels on the page those two inputs come from (p.12). Both inputs exclude VAT and municipal service fees.

Omran estimate: city RevPAR, Q1 2026. Same multiplication, city by city: Riyadh including Diriyah about SAR 399 (0.5097 x 783.31), Al-Madinah city about SAR 396 (0.8396 x 471.23), Jiddah governorate about SAR 287, Dammam about SAR 237, Makkah about SAR 213, Tabuk city about SAR 80. Treat the top two as roughly equal, not ranked: three riyals is inside GASTAT's own cross-table precision. The near-identity is the point. A building at 51.0% and SAR 783 and a building at 84.0% and SAR 471 are opposite business models, and they land within one percent of each other on revenue per available room, on different cost bases and with different exposure to a single month of the year. See RevPAR.

Both estimates obey a rule that desk models break constantly: never average published rates to build a period the publisher does not publish. The Ministry's H1 2025 hotel occupancy of 58.5% is not the mean of GASTAT's Q1 and Q2 2025 rates (58.1%), and its H1 ADR of SAR 546 is not the mean of SAR 477 and SAR 643 (SAR 560) (Ministry p.8 and p.12; GASTAT Tables 1.2, 1.3, 2.27 and 2.28). The two publishers are not in conflict, and they are not even reading different data: their January to March 2025 monthly cells match to the decimal. Each weights its own window by room-nights rather than averaging the rates inside it, so splicing one into the other manufactures a number neither would stand behind.

The cost of getting this wrong is narrow and expensive. A Saudi hotel model that quotes 60.8% has quoted Makkah and Al-Madinah. A Riyadh model that quotes 51.0% has quoted a quarter containing a month at 30.6%. Omran keeps these rows at the precision the workbook carries, dates them to the release rather than to the reading, and marks every estimate as an estimate, alongside the Saudi hotel ADR series. Ask for the underlying city table scoped to the market you are pricing.

FAQ

What is the hotel occupancy rate in Saudi Arabia, and what date does that number actually refer to? 60.8% for licensed hotels in Q1 2026, which means January to March 2026, published by GASTAT on 2 July 2026 and down 2.1 points from 63.0% a year earlier. Serviced apartments and other licensed facilities ran at 51.6% in the same quarter. GASTAT releases this product about three months after quarter end (Q3 2025 on 8 January 2026, Q4 2025 on 9 April 2026, Q1 2026 on 2 July 2026), which puts the Q2 2026 print in the first ten days of October 2026.

Which Saudi city has the highest hotel occupancy, and which the lowest? Al-Madinah city at 84.0% and Al Bahah at 26.3%, both Q1 2026, GASTAT Table 2.8. Makkah city sits at 59.9%, just below Jiddah governorate's 60.8%, so Makkah is not the Kingdom's highest-occupancy pilgrimage market. Several rows in that table are governorates or metropolitan areas rather than cities.

Which regions actually fell, if the national rate fell? Six of thirteen: Ar Riyadh down 8.9 points, Tabuk down 13.1, Eastern down 5.3, Aseer down 2.3, Makkah down 1.5 and Al-Madinah down 0.2. Seven rose, led by Northern Borders at plus 5.4 points. The national rate still fell because it is room-weighted onto Makkah and Al-Madinah, which hold 86.4% of licensed hotel rooms.

Why does Riyadh occupancy collapse in March, and does it happen every year? Riyadh city ran 66.1% in January 2026, 56.4% in February and 30.6% in March. The Q1 2025 release shows the same inversion a year earlier at region level: Ar Riyadh fell from 73.7% in February to 36.3% in March while the Makkah region rose to 65.8%. The Hijri calendar moves the pilgrimage season through the Gregorian year, and the leading edge of the fall shifted earlier between 2025 and 2026, so model a moving cliff, not a fixed month.

Does GASTAT's series cover all hotels in Saudi Arabia, or only licensed ones? Only facilities holding an active Ministry of Tourism licence, and that base went from 2,802 in Q1 2024 to 6,122 in Q1 2026, so two quarters are never the same population of hotels. Unlicensed and short-let rooms sit outside it entirely. One reassurance on the other side: GASTAT labels every table preliminary, yet the Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 workbooks carry identical values across eight overlapping quarters, two facility types and three metrics, 48 value pairs and no differences.

Can I compare these figures with a private benchmarking subscription I already pay for? Only after four adjustments, and it matters where each is written down. Three are GASTAT's own: length of stay divides room nights by guests rather than by bookings and the universe is licensed facilities only, both in the methodology report; the ADR excludes VAT and municipal service fees, which is stated in the note under Table 1.3 of the workbook and nowhere in that report. The fourth is ours to flag rather than GASTAT's to state: its published period averages do not reproduce as means of their sub-periods, so a quarterly rate is not the average of three monthly rates.

Sources

• GASTAT, Tourism Establishments Statistics Q1 2026 workbook (occupancy, ADR, stay, rooms, city tables 2.8, 2.11, 2.20, regional change tables 2.22 and 2.24): link
• GASTAT, Tourism Establishments Statistics Q1 2026 bulletin (60.8%, 51.6%, SAR 423, 6,122 facilities): link
• GASTAT, Tourism Establishments Statistics Q1 2025 workbook (regional monthly 2025, no city table): link
• GASTAT, Tourism Establishments Statistics Q2 2025 workbook (450,074 hotel rooms, 544,879 rooms in all): link
• GASTAT, Tourism Establishments Statistics Q3 2025 workbook (464,672 hotel rooms, revision test): link
• GASTAT, Tourism Establishments Statistics Q4 2025 workbook (491,652 hotel rooms, no city table): link
• GASTAT, Tourism Establishments Statistics Q4 2025 bulletin (57.3%, released 9 April 2026): link
• GASTAT, Methodology and Quality Report for Tourism Establishments Statistics V-4.1 (definitions, register basis, no microdata): link
• GASTAT English news feed (release cadence; Q3 2025 item dated 8 January 2026): link
• Ministry of Tourism, Hospitality Sector Performance H1 2025 (RevPAR, city KPIs, newly licensed keys, room-key stock): link
• Arab News, dating the GASTAT Q1 2026 release to 5 July 2026 (every figure read in the workbook first): link
• Al-Madina, 18 April 2026, that a full-year 2025 hospitality report was issued by the Ministry of Tourism: link