Saudi Real Estate Prices by Region: All 13 Read 100.00

Saudi real estate prices by region cannot be ranked on the official index, because all thirteen regional series print exactly 100.00 for their 2023 annual average. Riyadh at 115.98 and Al Baha at 77.91 on the Q2 2026 index are two distances from two different starting points, not a price gap (GASTAT). Only rates of change compare, and on 2023 to 2025 annual averages Riyadh rose 11.7% while the Eastern Province fell 3.8%. Riyal levels come from a second publisher measuring a different thing: REGA's Q1 2026 deed files put a Riyadh apartment at SAR 5,862 per sqm on 3,133 deeds, against SAR 3,876 in Jeddah (REGA).

Key figures at a glance

Why the thirteen regional indices cannot be ranked

Sheet 3 of the Q2 2026 workbook has a row labelled Annual average for 2023, and in it the Kingdom and all thirteen regions read 100. Nothing in the file normalises one region against another. So Al Baha at 77.91 sits 22% below where Al Baha stood in 2023, while Riyadh sits 16% above where Riyadh stood, and the 38 points between them are two histories, not a price gap.

The methodology report states the base once and never says each region carries its own. Under Comparability it says the data "are fully comparable geographically as the data used cover all regions of Saudi Arabia" (GASTAT). That line is about coverage of the transaction universe, and it is the one careless readers turn into permission to rank levels. Nor is there any city in the release: one Makkah region print covers seventeen governorates, Jeddah, Makkah city and Taif among them (REGA), which is why the Jeddah page prices that city off deeds instead (how REPI is built).

Saudi real estate prices by region on the Q2 2026 index

On the Q2 2026 index the regions run from Al Jouf at +10.4% year on year to Hail at -10.1%, 20.5 percentage points apart in one quarter, against a national general index of 106.34 and +1.3%. On the window that genuinely compares, 2023 to 2025 annual averages, eight of thirteen sat below their own base.

GASTAT, Q2 2026 workbook. The rate columns compare across regions. The level column does not.

Two of those rows get swapped wherever the quarter is quoted. The -5.4%, and the 92.22 that rides with it, are Al Qaseem's, not the Eastern Province's, which printed 95.73 and -2.5%. GASTAT's bulletin settles it in prose: Al-Jawf 10.4%, Hail -10.1%, Qassim -5.4% (bulletin). The workbook writes Al Qaseem where the bulletin writes Qassim, and that spelling gap is how a column read one place out of line ends up in somebody's model.

One quarter describes nothing here either. The Eastern Province printed +6.9% in Q1 2026 and -2.5% three months later, and the figure to forecast off is -3.8% across 2023 to 2025. Tabouk is the giga-project test and fails it. Its annual averages run 90.60, 91.52, 100, 100.34 and 102.93 from 2021 to 2025, then -1.7% in Q2 2026: two years of peak NEOM construction moved the region 2.9%.

The most expensive city in Saudi Arabia, on deeds and on rent

No Saudi authority publishes a most expensive city ranking. The nearest defensible one is REGA's own average apartment price per square metre for each region's principal city, on registered deeds in Q1 2026, and it runs from Riyadh at SAR 5,862 down to Najran at SAR 1,716.

Apartments, residential use, Q1 2026 (REGA). Riyadh is 3.4 times Najran. Apartments are the only unit type where the comparison is roughly honest, the unit being roughly homogeneous; the villa row is suppressed in five of these fifteen cities, and Al Baha files no villa row at all.

Omran finding. REGA documents no suppression rule, so we counted one. Across the 21,985 rows of the 78 quarterly sales files we hold, every row with five or fewer transactions carries a null price per metre, and 61% of rows publish no price at all. That is why Al Bahah (3 deeds) and Sakaka (10) come back blank, and why a small-market price quoted without n is usually the few rows that cleared an undocumented floor.

Rent keeps the same three cities on top and spreads far less. In REGA's Ejar-based city files a Riyadh apartment averaged SAR 28,324 a year in Q4 2024 on 176,769 contracts, against SAR 23,768 in Jeddah and SAR 12,895 in Buraidah (REGA): 2.2 times, where the metre price is 3.4 times. Below those three the two orders come apart. Najran prints the cheapest metre of the thirteen cities REGA publishes a price for and ranks ninth of fifteen on rent; Buraidah has the cheapest rent in the file and the eleventh metre price of thirteen. Riyadh rent rose 48.2% over the five years to Q4 2024 while Abha fell 8.7%, so four regional capitals were cheaper to rent in 2024 than in 2019. Then the rule changed. Riyadh froze annual increases on residential and commercial leases for five years from 25 September 2025, and the same announcement lets REGA's board extend that freeze to other cities with the approval of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (REGA). Every regional rent forecast in the Kingdom now has that switch in it. The city rent files above end at Q4 2024, but a second REGA rental family, district grain rather than city, runs a year further in the files we hold, to Q4 2025.

Why a land price per square metre is a plot-size statistic

In the Q1 2026 files a metre of Riyadh city residential land reads SAR 373 against SAR 2,383 in Jeddah (REGA), and Riyadh is not six times cheaper. The average Riyadh land deed that quarter covered 2,306 sqm against Jeddah's 1,888. On land, the rate per metre mostly reports the size of what changed hands.

The open files put Riyadh city residential land at SAR 2,437.33/sqm in Q4 2025 on 4,094 deeds worth SAR 6.93bn, then SAR 372.72 in Q1 2026 on 3,280 deeds worth SAR 5.20bn: total value fell a quarter while average deed area jumped from 1,268 sqm to 2,306 sqm. REGA's indicators platform, a quarter ahead of the newest file we hold, prints the same cell at SAR 579.08 on 3,769 deeds, average deed area back down to 1,850.5 sqm, in Q2 2026 (REGA platform). Stop at Q1 2026 and a two-quarter excursion gets booked as a new price level.

Omran hypothesis. Plot mix rather than repricing is the likeliest driver. On 29 March 2025 Riyadh lifted the suspension on two further tracts north of the city, 17 km2 and 16.2 km2, on top of 48.28 km2 already released, for a total of 81.48 km2, with a directive to supply 10,000 to 40,000 serviced plots a year at no more than SAR 1,500 per sqm (SPA). Large peripheral plots entering the register lift average deed area and pull the rate per metre down with nothing having repriced, and the Q2 2026 reversal fits. No publisher explains the break, so it stays a hypothesis.

Omran arithmetic. Which surface a figure came off matters as much as which quarter. For that Q1 2026 Riyadh land cell, on identical deeds and identical value, the open file says 372.72, the platform says 397.42, and value divided by area gives a third answer, 687. Run those same definitions on apartments and REGA's published average is SAR 5,862/sqm against SAR 5,856 on value divided by area, a gap of 0.1%. On land the same two definitions sit 84% apart, 372.72 against 687. The one REGA sales file that states a definition calls its metre price a weighted average with interquartile trimming, which is invisible on a homogeneous unit and decisive on a register that mixes small infill plots with large peripheral ones. On apartments the published number is safe to lift; on land it answers a question about the middle of the distribution while your model asks about all of it (the platform, card by card). Run our arithmetic back across vintages and Riyadh apartments go from SAR 6,058/sqm in Q1 2024 to SAR 5,856 in Q1 2026, down 3.3% over eight quarters.

It is also why the regional index is not a house price index. The basket is 70.62% land by weight at Q2 2026, residential plots alone 45.849% (GASTAT). Over the eight quarters in which those Riyadh flats lost 3.3%, the Riyadh regional index rose 8.6% in 2024 and a further 2.9% in 2025 (GASTAT). Same market, two baskets: the land moved and the flats did not.

Where the regional record stops

Five things a regional brief needs are missing from the public record. There is no city-level GASTAT index, so a city figure attributed to REPI is attributing something that does not exist. There are no regional weights, only weights by property type, so the national +1.3% cannot be split into regional contributions and "Riyadh drove X% of the national move" is unsupportable. There is no riyal price of any kind in the price index, and no non-residential record at thirteen-region coverage after 2023, REGA's general sales file stopping at Q3 2023 and the 2026 quarterly files being residential only. Population by region is absent from the GASTAT Population Estimates Publication 2024 we checked, so per-capita normalisation from it is n/a.

Omran estimate: average residential deed value by region, Q1 2026. Summing REGA's published regional totals (REGA) gives SAR 41.38bn on 49,607 deeds, so the average residential deed runs about SAR 834,000 nationally: roughly SAR 1.13m in Riyadh (SAR 15.72bn, 13,927 deeds), SAR 1.03m in Makkah (12.42bn, 12,098), SAR 894,000 in the Eastern Province (6.95bn, 7,772), SAR 488,000 in Al Baha (0.10bn, 205) and about SAR 219,000 in Northern Borders (0.14bn, 640). Two warnings. It is a mix statistic, not a price: it says as much about what a region buys, land or flats or villas, as about what those cost. And the small regions' totals are published rounded to two decimals of a billion, so their per-deed figures carry real rounding error. We publish it because it is the closest comparable riyal level by region the record supports, and it is ours, not an authority's.

Omran inference. Those counts also say the thirteen indices are not thirteen equal instruments. Three regions carried 84.8% of national residential deed value in Q1 2026, and Al Baha registered 205 residential deeds against Riyadh's 13,927. An index stratified on that order of magnitude swings on mix alone, which is what Al Baha's run from 123.54 in Q2 2021 to 77.91 in Q2 2026 (GASTAT) looks like close up. Keep the publishers apart, though: 205 is REGA's residential count for a quarter, while GASTAT counts every registered transaction. The step from one to the other is our judgement.

Two cautions if you rebuild any of this. The Q3 2025 sales vintage is partial in every region that ships a district-grain file, and nothing in the files says so: Riyadh carries 9,210 deeds against 21,927 in Q2 2025 and 14,710 in Q4 (REGA), so charting it unflagged shows a hole in the data as a collapse in the market. And the newest sales file we hold is Q1 2026, which describes the routes that answered us rather than what REGA has published.

The two policies most likely to move regional prices next are written on city boundaries, not the thirteen-region grid: the Riyadh rent freeze, and the non-Saudi ownership system in force from 22 January 2026, which regulates Riyadh, Jeddah, Makkah and Madinah as cities and promised a Geographical Zones Document in Q1 2026 (REGA). No official index is drawn on those boundaries. Omran keeps this record as two aligned tables, one for change and one for level, with n, vintage and publishing surface on every cell, plus the city cuts the official grid does not carry. Ask for the regional table behind this page, or name a region and a quarter and we will show you what the deeds support. The national view sits in the residential pillar.

FAQ

Which is the most expensive city in Saudi Arabia? On the one measure comparable across regions, REGA's published apartment price per square metre for Q1 2026: Riyadh at SAR 5,862/sqm on 3,133 deeds, ahead of Jeddah at 3,876 and Al Khobar at 3,712. Riyadh leads on rent too, SAR 28,324 a year in Q4 2024 against SAR 12,895 in Buraidah.

Can I rank Saudi regions by GASTAT's price index? No. Every regional series is rebased to its own 2023 = 100, so Al Baha at 77.91 and Riyadh at 115.98 in Q2 2026 measure distance from two different starting points. Rates compare, levels do not, and on rates eight of the thirteen regions were below their own 2023 base in 2025.

Why does Riyadh land look cheaper than Jeddah land? A price per square metre on land deeds is largely a plot-size statistic: Riyadh's average residential land deed in Q1 2026 covered 2,306 sqm against Jeddah's 1,888. The next quarter makes the point, Riyadh's average deed area falling to 1,850.5 sqm on REGA's platform as the rate rises from SAR 397.42 to SAR 579.08.

Where does the government publish an actual riyal price by region? Not in the price index, which carries no price levels at all. It is REGA's quarterly sales-transaction files, one per region, with deal count, total value, total area and an average price per metre by city and property type. The newest we hold is Q1 2026, and REGA's platform computes its average differently: the same Riyadh land cell reads 372.72 in the file, 397.42 on the platform.

Sources

• GASTAT, Real Estate Price Index Q2 2026 workbook (regional series, the 2023 = 100 row, basket weights): link
• GASTAT, REPI Q2 2026 bulletin (regional rates named in prose and in Figure 3): link
• GASTAT, REPI methodology and quality report (base period, comparability wording): link
• REGA, open data (quarterly sales and rental indicator files by region; publisher REGA, read by us from a public mirror of the national portal, which does not answer our servers): link
• REGA, Real Estate Indicators platform, Riyadh (Q2 2026 land print, deed areas, platform average): link
• REGA, Riyadh five-year rent freeze from 25 September 2025 and its extension clause: link
• REGA, non-Saudi property ownership system in force 22 January 2026: link
• Saudi Press Agency, 29 March 2025 Riyadh land directive (81.48 km2 released, serviced-plot programme): link