Rental Yield Saudi Arabia: 4.5% Median Across 12 Cities

The rental yield Saudi Arabia argues over is never an official number: no ministry, regulator or statistics office publishes one, and the two government files that would make one are published apart and never divided. Omran divides them, REGA's rent indicator over its sale indicator, on the same neighbourhood, quarter and property form. The median gross residential yield is about 4.5%, 4.47% across 753 neighbourhood-quarter-form cells in 12 cities for Q1 to Q3 2025, Riyadh at 4.24% and Jeddah at 5.16%. Coverage matters as much as the median. Sixteen cities publish both legs on the same footprint and twelve survive a ten-observation floor. After Q3 2025 no neighbourhood yield can be built anywhere in the Kingdom, because REGA withdrew the neighbourhood column from its sales file.

Key figures at a glance

What the rental yield in Saudi Arabia is, on the government's own files

The grid holds 753 cells where REGA publishes both a neighbourhood rent and a neighbourhood price for the same quarter and form: median gross yield 4.47% for Q1 to Q3 2025, tenth percentile 3.12%, ninetieth 6.25%, over 228 neighbourhoods. Both legs are REGA's. Only the division is ours.

The rent leg is the contract-weighted mean of REGA's published annual rent per sqm, from Ejar leases. The price leg is transaction value over transacted area, because REGA's published average column is empty on 463 of 677 Riyadh rows in Q3 2025 (REGA sales, Q3 2025). Of the 2,282 neighbourhood pairs carrying both legs, 1,529 fail a ten-observation floor and 753 publish. Thin cells are not propping the median up. Raise the bar to 100 leases and 30 deeds and 273 cells survive, at a median of about 4.78%.

One published row was screened out, and it should be named rather than buried. For Q3 2025 REGA files 14 villa deeds in Jeddah's Al Fayhaa at SAR 13.17 billion over 56,186 sqm, an average of SAR 262,830/sqm and roughly fifty times any other price in that file (REGA sales, Makkah region Q3 2025). The cell clears the observation floor and prints 0.13%. It sits at the floor of the 753, far from the middle, which is why this page quotes percentiles and not a range. The files carry the KSA Open Data Licence, which allows redistribution and derivative works: REGA publishes both inputs, and the division is Omran's, not REGA's (licence terms as republished with the files).

Riyadh at 4.24%, Jeddah at 5.16%, and the spread inside one city

Six cities carry enough cells to print a median for Q1 to Q3 2025, from Riyadh's 428 down to Taif's 13. Six more clear the floor on one to eight cells each. Those are coverage, not market readings, and no percentage is given for them here.

Riyadh carries more than half the grid, 428 of the 753 cells, and prints nearly a point below Jeddah. That is not Riyadh renting badly. A yield is a ratio, and its price leg has run further than its rent leg, the story the Riyadh residential market tells from the price side. The lowest of the six is Makkah at 3.75%, on 34 cells in 16 neighbourhoods.

A city median screens a market. It cannot underwrite an asset. Al Olaya apartments print 2.00% in Q2 2025, SAR 395.1/sqm across 2,548 leases against SAR 19,781/sqm on 31 deeds, while Qurtubah villas print 13.63% in Q1 2025 on 185 leases and 43 deeds: close to a factor of seven inside one city, which is why the question is answerable only district by district. By form the medians are apartments 4.75% (n = 418), villas 4.32% (226), duplexes 4.31% (27) and floors 3.50% (82). That is not a product ranking, for the reason set out below.

The rent leg, and what the Riyadh cap actually froze

Riyadh apartments rented at SAR 266.05/sqm/yr in Q1 2025 and SAR 276.00 in Q4 2025, on 163,891 and then 185,107 registered contracts, and every residential form turned down in that fourth quarter, the first full quarter under the cap: apartments 2.1% lower, villas 3.5%, studios 8.8%, floors 3.4%. District coverage widened from 185 districts in Q3 to 189 in Q4, so part of that fall is composition rather than price (rent levels).

The rules of 25 September 2025 suspend annual increases in the total rental value of Riyadh lease contracts, residential and commercial, existing and new, for five years, and pin vacant re-lets to the last executed Ejar contract; only property never leased before is left to free agreement (REGA). Read together, those provisions say something sharper than "Riyadh rents are frozen": the only Riyadh rent still set at the market is the first rent on a unit that has never been let. Standing stock is priced off its own contractual history until 2030 and new delivery is not, and no public statistic shows that gap, because Ejar records the contract rather than the age of the building. REGA's board may extend the rules to other cities with the Council of Economic and Development Affairs' approval, so every yield forecast in Jeddah, Dammam or Khobar carries an option nobody prices.

Enforcement looks thin: 268 complaints and 18 landlords in breach, in the announcement REGA published three weeks after the rules took effect (REGA). GASTAT's CPI reads the same market differently again. Riyadh actual rents ran at +15.70% year on year in August 2025 (GASTAT CPI, Aug 2025, table 3.2) and +5.26% in July 2026 (GASTAT CPI, Jul 2026, table 3.2): a deceleration on a matched basket that nobody reconciles with REGA's per-sqm series.

The footprint mistake in most published Saudi yields

The standard shortcut is to divide a neighbourhood rent by a whole-city price, because the neighbourhood price is missing and the city price is right there. Measured like for like, value over area on both sides, REGA's Q4 2025 Riyadh city cell prices 5.2% below the Q3 2025 neighbourhood grid on apartments, 19.7% below on villas and 24.1% below on duplexes (REGA sales, Q3 2025 and Q4 2025). That is a wider and cheaper footprint, so the ratio runs high, and it runs highest on the forms investors quote most.

Built that way, Riyadh villas read 9.01% for Q4 2025: SAR 372.27 of rent (REGA rental, Q4 2025) over SAR 4,132.4 of price (REGA sales, Q4 2025), against a same-footprint 7.45% in Q3 2025, the last quarter one can be built in. Three things move between those two numbers rather than one: the footprint, which is the point being made; the quarter, in which Riyadh villa rent fell 3.5%; and the price definition, since REGA's published average is a mean of ratios while value over area on the same cell gives SAR 4,364.4.

Where the arithmetic stops: Q3 2025

REGA's sales indicator carried a neighbourhood column through Q3 2025 and then dropped it. Thirty-one of the 78 sales files carry it, running Q1 2024 to Q3 2025, and the Riyadh file collapses from 114,785 bytes in Q3 2025 to 6,070 in Q4 2025, aggregated to city, type and usage.

Nothing rebuilds that grain, so a 2026 neighbourhood yield for a Saudi district is an estimate or a mistake. The binding constraint is the price leg, not the rent leg. REGA publishes a per-sqm rent on 52,631 of its 52,641 residential rental rows, Kingdom-wide, while the sales family carries a neighbourhood price for 70 distinct city strings. And 1,627 sale rows across 69 cities file under one pseudo-neighbourhood, أخرى, other, the only one ever published for 49 of them. Other is a category rather than a place, and it cannot be arbitrated into one.

The grid is not REGA's newest reading either, and implying otherwise would be the easiest lie on the page. REGA's Real Estate Indicators platform publishes sale-price and rent indices through Q2 2026 (REGA, read 29 August 2026), on an unstated base, so they date this table without extending it. The CSVs carrying the levels come through a public mirror last refreshed on 22 May 2026, which is why the rent leg here stops at Q4 2025 and the sale leg at Q1 2026. A fresh file would not bring the column back.

What these files cannot measure

Every yield above is gross: rent before service charges, owners-association fees, vacancy, management and tax, none of which any Saudi authority publishes anywhere (gross against net). Ejar registers contracts and not empty units, so a gross yield quietly assumes twelve months of rent nobody can verify.

The subtler gap is the square metre. REGA states no area definition on either leg, and the sizes implied by its own columns say the legs are not measuring the same one. Back the size out of each leg on the 753 cells, published mean rent over published rent per sqm on one side, published area over deeds on the other, and the median unit differs by form: apartments 123 sqm against 158 (1.27x), villas 303 against 441 (1.39x), duplexes 207 against 291 (1.38x), floors 214 against 187 (0.89x). The by-form medians run in the same order as that artefact. The three forms whose sale-side metre is the larger print the higher yields; the one whose ratio falls below one prints the lowest. Anyone telling you that Saudi villas out-yield Saudi apartments may be telling you what REGA measured the area of.

Omran estimate. Restate each form's price onto the rent leg's square metre and the ranking inverts. A gross yield is rent per sqm over price per sqm, so a sale-side metre 1.27 times the rent-side one overstates it by roughly that factor. Each published median divided by its own ratio: apartments 4.75 / 1.27 = 3.74%, villas 4.32 / 1.39 = 3.11%, duplexes 4.31 / 1.38 = 3.12%, floors 3.50 / 0.89 = 3.93%. The spread narrows from 1.25 points to about 0.8 and floors move from last to first. It applies a median ratio to a median yield, so treat it as an illustration, not a corrected table. What it settles is the rule: the pooled median is publishable, villa against apartment is not.

Omran estimate. What a buyer books after transaction tax. RETT is 5%, in force since 10 April 2025 (ZATCA), and a buy-side cost: it leaves the gross yield untouched while lowering the going-in return on money spent, 4.47% / 1.05 = 4.26% on the median cell, before one riyal of running cost.

No Saudi policy or mortgage rate was verified at a primary source here, so 4.47% is quoted against no cost of money; the one financing figure read at source is a stock, bank real-estate lending at SAR 970.9 billion, 28.9% of all bank credit, end-Q1 2026 (SAMA). And with the rental family starting at Q1 2025, there is no pre-cap baseline.

Omran does not hold the freshest Saudi data, and this page names the quarter its own arithmetic stops at. What it holds is a yield table with both denominators printed on every cell and the point of failure marked. Ask for the 753-cell yield table, or scope a briefing on the cities and quarters you need.

FAQ

What is the average rental yield in Saudi Arabia, and who says so? No authority says so, because none publishes a yield. The defensible answer is computed: a median of about 4.5% (4.47% on 753 cells) across 12 cities for Q1 to Q3 2025, from REGA's own files, both denominators printed.

Did the September 2025 rent freeze stop Riyadh rents? It bent the curve rather than flattening it: Riyadh's CPI actual-rent index still printed +5.26% year on year in July 2026, against +15.70% in August 2025. The rules suspend annual increases for five years. They do not cut a level.

If rents are capped in Riyadh, do yields fall? Only if prices keep rising, and the publishers disagree about whether they did. GASTAT's REPI for Riyadh region fell 4.4% year on year in Q1 2026 and rose 4.2% in Q2 2026, on an all-sector index whose largest weight is residential land. REGA's own Riyadh city prices moved the other way in that Q1: apartments +2.3% and villas +4.0% on the quarter. Nobody publishes a bridge between the two.

Can I get a yield for my city? Probably not, and the constraint is the price leg. Sixteen cities carry both a neighbourhood rent and a neighbourhood price on the same quarter and form; twelve survive the floor. A further 49 cities file their only sale "neighbourhood" as أخرى, other, which cannot be placed on a map.

Sources

• REGA quarterly rental indicators, Riyadh Q4 2025 (rent leg, 2025 series by form): link
• REGA quarterly rental indicators, Riyadh Q1 2025 (file family, residential fill, header variants): link
• REGA quarterly sales indicators, Riyadh Q3 2025 (neighbourhood grain, null price column): link
• REGA quarterly sales indicators, Riyadh Q4 2025 (city cells, published average against value over area): link
• REGA quarterly sales indicators, Riyadh Q1 2026 (latest prices on the serving route): link
• REGA quarterly sales indicators, Makkah region Q3 2025 (the Jeddah Al Fayhaa villa row, screened out): link
• REGA quarterly indicator files, both families as published (the grid joins all 78 sales files to all 52 rental files): link
• KSA Open Data Licence terms as republished with the REGA files (redistribution, derivative works): link
• REGA Real Estate Indicators platform (both legs published as indices to Q2 2026): link
• REGA, five-year suspension of annual rental increases in Riyadh (25 September 2025): link
• REGA, rental violations enforcement announcement (16 October 2025): link
• ZATCA, Real Estate Transaction Tax at 5%, in force 10 April 2025: link
• GASTAT, Real Estate Price Index Q2 2026 (residential index, Riyadh region series): link
• GASTAT, Consumer Price Index July 2026 (actual rentals, national series, Riyadh at +5.26%): link
• GASTAT, Consumer Price Index August 2025 (the Riyadh actual-rent rate of +15.70%, table 3.2): link
• SAMA, Key Economic Developments Q1 2026 (real-estate loans SAR 970.9bn): link