Saudi Rental Price Index: What REGA's 1.22 Actually Measures

The Saudi rental price index is REGA's, it is quarterly and national, and at Q2 2026 the general residential series stood at 1.22 against a Q2 2022 base of 1.00, down 0.81% on the quarter (REGA). The card's data source line reads "Ejar Network", and that is a registration network, not the publisher: Ejar produces the contracts, REGA produces the index, and the "rental price indicator" REGA lists among Ejar's own features is a tool for the two parties to a lease rather than this series (REGA, 29 Sep 2024). Two properties of the series decide whether a number lifted from it survives review. On our count of REGA's published points, the general index sits outside the range of its three commercial sub-indices in 8 of the 12 published commercial quarters, which no set of weights over that universe can produce, and on apartments it disagrees in direction with the Kingdom's other official rent measure: REGA down 4.13% in the year to Q2 2026, GASTAT up 5.02% to July 2026.

Key figures at a glance

REGA's bulletins and rental open-data files are cited at the public mirror that served them. REGA's own bulletins page returned HTTP 200 with no PDF link in either language, and the national open-data portal answered with a bot check rather than a file. Those are blocked routes, not missing documents, and REGA is the publisher of every figure below.

Who publishes the Saudi rental price index, and what it measures

REGA publishes the Rental Price Index on its Real Estate Indicators platform, quarterly, on a Q2 2022 base of 1.00, and at Q2 2026 it read 1.22 residential (REGA) and 1.20 commercial (REGA). Of the four data sources the platform names for the whole site, only Ejar feeds the rental leg.

The construction is a Fisher Ideal index, the geometric mean of a Laspeyres leg weighted on base-period rented units and a Paasche leg weighted on current-period units, over average rents by property type after extreme values are cleaned out (REGA methodology). Its own page opens by calling the indicator Laspeyres before the same sentence specifies Fisher. The quantity variable is rented units, not contracts.

Both the window and the published family are narrower than the claim. REGA states coverage from Q1 2019 and serves a fixed roll of Q3 2023 to Q2 2026; a 2019 start comes back rewritten to 07/01/2023, series unchanged. Six of the eight rental property types in REGA's FAQ get a sub-index, leaving duplexes and studios with none (REGA FAQ). At Q2 2026 offices and floors are joint highest at 1.36 and showrooms the weakest at 1.01, the only sub-index in either family to have traded below its base, while over the window villas rose fastest at 28.71%, ahead of offices at 25.93%. The rest of the platform is mapped card by card in our REGA indicators field guide.

What registering a lease on Ejar actually does

Since 25 September 2025 a landlord whose lease is not on Ejar must apply to register it, a tenant may apply too, and the other party then has sixty days from notification to object to the recorded details before REGA; if that window closes without an objection, the details are deemed valid (REGA). That is why a registered rent can be treated as the rent rather than as one party's assertion, and non-registration carries a fine of up to twelve months' rent.

Volume does the rest: more than 10 million registered rental contracts at about 19,000 a day, 8.3 million of them residential, on REGA's last published cumulative of 29 September 2024 (REGA). Single months mislead. February 2026 ran 37% above the prior year on residential lease contracts and 85% on rental value, which REGA's March bulletin attributes to a documentation surge under the new provisions; by March the count was back to 1%. An average across it mixes new tenancies with old ones registered for the first time.

The two counts under the word "average"

REGA's bulletins print two lines in the same table: number of lease contracts, and number of rental transactions. Summed across the January, February and March 2026 issues, and counting residential and non-residential together, Q1 2026 gives 918,170 lease contracts against 1,141,127 rental transactions, 24.3% apart (Omran sum of REGA's monthly bulletins). The larger number circulates as a contract count. It is not one.

REGA divides by both. The platform card defines average rental value per unit as total rental values over rented units, the sales card beside it divides by transactions, and the open-data catalogue calls the rental files a count of contracts while the files head that column عدد الصفقات, number of transactions. No published rule says which denominator governs which surface.

Omran estimate. One numerator, two denominators, both REGA's own. Q1 2026 residential rental value of SAR 17,381,529,301 divided by the same quarter's 857,111 residential rental transactions gives SAR 20,279; divided by its 729,266 residential lease contracts, SAR 23,834. All three inputs are our sums of the residential lines in the January, February and March 2026 bulletins, so the comparison stays inside one class. Same quarter, same source, 17.5% apart, and neither is wrong. Read each as value per registered item, not an annual rent: the bulletins publish no contract term. A Saudi rent average quoted without its denominator carries a 17.5% error bar nobody printed.

The other question is how many transactions sit under a district cell. REGA publishes a floor excluding districts with fewer than six, but it is written for the Ministry of Justice sales chain and the rental files ignore it: 1,630 of the 3,430 cells in the Riyadh region's Q4 2025 file carry fewer than six, and 820 carry exactly one (REGA open data). A cell is usable only beside its count, which is how we built the Riyadh district rent table.

There is no Riyadh rental index, and the freeze has to be read elsewhere

The Rental Price Index card on the Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam city pages serves the identical national series, point for point across all four residential series and all twelve quarters to Q2 2026 (REGA). Anyone publishing "the Riyadh rental index" is publishing a national number under a city label.

Those same pages remove the obvious excuse. The Rent to Income Ratio card beside it serves three genuinely different city series at Q2 2026, 15.38% for Riyadh, 17.84% for Jeddah and 12.35% for Dammam as a share of average household income (REGA). The platform serves city data when REGA chooses to publish it. District search covers five cities and sits behind a national ID sign-in. A district rent can therefore be sourced to REGA and still not be shown to a reader who follows the link.

For Riyadh you go to GASTAT, whose CPI rent leg is regional. Riyadh actual rentals stood at 142.366 in July 2026, 19.9 points above the national index on the same 2023 base, and the year-on-year rate fell from 15.703% in August 2025 (GASTAT, Aug 2025) to 13.822% in the month the freeze took effect and 5.258% by July 2026, the monthly rate collapsing from 0.896% to 0.161% (GASTAT, Jul 2026). The mechanism is in the rules, not the index: a vacant re-let inside Riyadh's urban boundary is pinned to the last executed Ejar contract, leaving new stock as the only route to a higher recorded Riyadh rent (the freeze, rule by rule).

Where the two official rent measures split

Over the identical window, Q2 2022 to Q2 2026, REGA's rental index rose 22.0% and GASTAT's actual-rentals index rose 35.9%, from 89.846 to 122.131: 13.9 percentage points on four years, GASTAT running 1.63 times REGA's rate (Omran arithmetic on REGA and GASTAT).

The gap is not spread evenly, and where it concentrates is the useful part. By dwelling type at each publisher's latest print, apartments differ in sign and not merely in size: REGA apartments down 4.13% year on year against GASTAT apartments up 5.02% (Omran arithmetic on REGA's published Q2 2025 and Q2 2026 levels, REGA; GASTAT's own year-on-year print, GASTAT). Villas run the other way, REGA up 16.07% against GASTAT up 2.66%. Apartments carry 4.075 of GASTAT's 6.881 points of actual-rentals weight, so 59% of the actual-rentals basket rests on the one dwelling type where the two cannot agree on direction. The universes explain it. REGA prices newly registered Ejar contracts, which makes it the series for underwriting a re-let; GASTAT prices rents actually paid by a household sample that includes sitting tenants, which makes it the series for indexing a tenancy in place. Neither publishes a crosswalk, and on apartments the choice sets the sign of your assumption rather than its size.

What REGA has built and does not serve

REGA publishes a general index and its sub-indices side by side and publishes no weights for either. The commercial leg is where that shows.

Omran estimate. REGA's general index cannot be rebuilt from its own published parts. In 8 of the 12 published commercial quarters it lies outside the range of shops, offices and showrooms, seven times below all three and once above; Q2 2026 is one, general up 2.56% against shops up 2.59%, offices up 3.82% and showrooms up 5.21%. REGA's FAQ defines exactly three commercial rental property types and all three carry a published sub-index, so a weighted index over that universe cannot fall outside their range. The residential family does it in 7 of 12 quarters, where the unpublished duplex and studio series are at least an explanation. The commercial family has none. Treat the general index and the sub-indices as two publications, not two views of one calculation, and never explain a move in one by a move in the other.

The other misreading is the zero the freeze quarter printed.

Omran estimate. REGA publishes to two decimals and computes its change field from those rounded values: across all 44 residential points the printed change matches a recomputation from the rounded index to within 0.005 percentage points. At a level of 1.21 to 1.22 the smallest expressible move is 0.82% to 0.83%, so the 0.00% printed for Q4 2025 says only that two consecutive quarters round to the same two decimals, consistent with any true move inside roughly plus or minus 0.8%. Q4 2023 printed 0.00% too, before any freeze existed, and in that same Q4 2025 all three published residential sub-indices fell: apartments 1.65%, floors 1.53%, villas 5.17%. That is the resolution of the file talking, not the market.

Disclosure is asymmetric between REGA's two chains. The sales data gets an outlier test, a six-transaction floor and an exclusion rate (REGA); the Ejar leg gets the phrase "after excluding extreme values" and nothing else. Four rental indicators, a Rental Yield Index among them, carry descriptions and formulas in the platform bundle and render no card, which is why our Saudi rental yield work rests on two independent official series rather than one official ratio.

One claim we will not make, and nor should anyone else: that no Saudi rent level exists for 2026. The redistributable record of rent levels stops at Q4 2025, while REGA's Average Rental Value per Unit card declares a monthly series running to Q2 2026 behind filters we could not resolve (REGA). An empty default view is not evidence that nothing is published. Which surface carries which number, and on what licence, is mapped in how we source Saudi real-estate data.

Ask for the rental series with its denominators and counts attached if you need the chain rather than the headline.

FAQ

Is there an official Saudi rental price index, and who publishes it? Yes. REGA publishes the Rental Price Index on its Real Estate Indicators platform, quarterly, on a Q2 2022 base of 1.00, with the data source given as the Ejar network. Ejar registers the contracts and REGA builds the index; at Q2 2026 it read 1.22 residential and 1.20 commercial.

Does the index tell me what is happening to rents in Riyadh? No. The card on the Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam pages serves the identical national series, so the city label there is decoration. Use GASTAT's regional CPI rent leg instead: Riyadh actual rentals rose 5.258% in the year to July 2026, against 4.266% nationally.

Why do REGA's index and GASTAT's rent index disagree? They price different populations. Over Q2 2022 to Q2 2026 REGA rose 22.0% against GASTAT's 35.9%, and on apartments the two disagree in direction, REGA down 4.13% year on year against GASTAT up 5.02%. REGA measures newly registered Ejar contracts, GASTAT measures rents paid by a household sample including sitting tenants, and neither publishes a crosswalk.

Why do two REGA sources give different average rents for the same market? Because they divide by different things: the platform card by rented units, the open-data catalogue by what it calls contracts, and the bulletins publish contracts and transactions as separate lines that were 24.3% apart across both classes in Q1 2026. Take that quarter's residential rental value of SAR 17,381,529,301 and the two residential denominators give SAR 20,279 per transaction and SAR 23,834 per contract.

What does registering a lease on Ejar legally do? Since 25 September 2025 an unregistered lease must be submitted for registration by the landlord, and the tenant may apply as well. The other party has sixty days from notification to object to the recorded details before REGA, after which they are deemed valid. Non-registration is punishable by a fine of up to twelve months' rent.

Sources

• REGA, Real Estate Indicators platform (index level, base, sub-indices, cards): link
• REGA, commercial rental toggle (offices, shops, showrooms): link
• REGA, Rental Indicator Development Methodologies (Fisher construction, coverage claim): link
• REGA, platform FAQ (eight rental property types, platform data sources, district search): link
• REGA, Data Refinement and Verification Mechanism (outlier test and floor, sales chain): link
• REGA, Riyadh city page (identical national series, rent to income): link
• REGA, Ejar registers over 10 million contracts (29 Sep 2024): link
• REGA, landlord and tenant provisions (60-day objection, Riyadh freeze, vacant re-lets, penalties): link
• REGA, monthly bulletins January to March 2026 (contract and transaction lines, rental values): link
• REGA, open-data catalogue (rental files described as contracts): link
• REGA, Riyadh region rental indicators Q4 2025 (cell and transaction counts): link
• GASTAT, CPI tables July 2026 (actual rentals, regional and by dwelling type): link
• GASTAT, CPI tables August 2025 (pre-freeze Riyadh rent inflation): link