Permanent status here is not earned but bought: there is no other way to it in the country.
Saudi Arabia takes in workers, not residents. Entry through an employer is open, the salary bar is modest, there is no income tax and iqama renewals are quick and online. But there is no permanent status for length of stay at all: you can live on an iqama for twenty years and remain temporary. Permanent status is sold as Premium Residency.
Agency performance is hard to judge: there are no legal processing deadlines, and the state does not publish refusal statistics. Before entry a foreigner goes through degree verification directly with the university, document attestation, an in-person visa appointment and a medical.
The main pressure on residents comes through Saudization. In two years the required shares of citizens on staff went up: engineering 30% from July 2025, dentistry 55% from January 2026, accounting from 40% in October 2025 to 70% by 2028, and localisation now covers 269 professions. Employers who miss the quota lose access to ministry services, including permit renewals, so a foreigner already in the job has to be replaced. We found no retroactive revocation of existing status.
The 2021 reform softened the sponsorship system (kafala) but did not abolish it: press reports of abolition in October 2025 are not backed by a legal act, and HRW's 2026 report says employers keep broad control over workers. You can move to another employer without the current one's consent after a year of work, when the contract ends, or in case of violations. Once a contract ends you have 60 days to transfer or leave, after which that right lapses.
Not everyone can bring a family: the sponsor needs a professional job title and a salary from SAR 3,500-4,000, and processing takes 3-6 months. Since September 2025 family members can get a work permit, so far in certain sectors only. State schools teach in Arabic, so newcomers' children usually attend paid private schools.
The index score ignores nationality. This is what changes for citizens of specific countries.
The tourist eVisa is available: multiple entry, valid for a year, stays of up to 3 months. To live and work, the same employer route as everyone else.
Enter visa-free with a national ID card and work without an iqama or sponsor.
Work visa quotas and short-term visas for them are suspended regularly, formally around the Hajj season, so the employer route is sometimes closed. Entry on an Israeli passport is banned.
The tourist eVisa is available: multiple entry, valid for a year, stays of up to 3 months. To live and work, the same employer route as everyone else.
There are no permanent nationality bans on work visas, and Russia is not on the list of countries with temporary visa suspensions. The tourist eVisa is available: multiple entry, valid for a year, stays of up to 3 months; it does not allow work.
There are no permanent nationality bans on work visas. When we checked on 1 October 2026, Belarus was not on the list of countries eligible for the tourist eVisa.
The place interval 72-86 shows where the country lands when the data is nudged and the index is recalculated. One place of difference in the table means nothing; a difference of a league means something.
The thin mark on each bar is the average across 97 countries
The strongest category here is Settling in: 72 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 69.5. The weakest is Path to citizenship: 7 against 57.1. Above the world average: 2 out of 7.
All 97 states are calculated for one applicant: 35 years old, income of $2,500 and $3,856 a month before tax, passport not counted, the most accessible route that is actually in use.
Your passport, your income and your family do not change the table. They change which of its lines apply to you. A different income makes entry read differently, a family makes the family category read differently, and your passport makes everything read differently.
There is no legal deadline. In practice about 12-14 weeks pass from the employer's visa request to the iqama, of which degree verification takes 15-21 working days.
Only through Premium Residency (the annual version at SAR 100,000 a year or the unlimited one at SAR 800,000) or by registering a company with an investment licence. There is no remote-work visa.
Not by length of stay: there is no permanent status for years lived on an iqama. Unlimited Premium Residency costs SAR 800,000; citizenship is formally possible after 10 years but granted at the authorities' discretion and rarely used.
Yes, the iqama rests on your job. When a contract ends you have 60 days to move to another employer or leave; after that the right to transfer lapses. Saudization quotas can force an employer to replace a foreign worker.
Yes, if you hold a professional job title and a salary from SAR 3,500-4,000 in an attested contract; processing takes 3-6 months. The worker pays a monthly fee for each family member.
As a workforce: entry through an employer is open and there is no income tax, but you cannot put down roots, and Saudization quotas rise every year. Rights groups report that the sponsorship system still gives employers broad control.
97 states, 26 indicators, seven categories, 2,522 scores. Every score has a source and a source class: primary means the texts of laws and government portals; reliable secondary means reports by international organisations, tax reviews by audit firms and specialist legal publications; weak means community posts and single secondary sources. The classes add up to a confidence level for the country, and a country with low confidence gets neither a score nor a place.
Every indicator is scored against a fixed ruler, not against its neighbours. Adding new countries therefore does not move the old ones, and a change in a score means a change in policy and nothing else.
A high place does not mean a good country. It means one thing: the state machine treats newcomers predictably and by the rules. Living there may be expensive, dull or hot; that is not our question.
Checked 01/10/2026. Facts come from the country's index card and official websites.
We make mistakes and we will go on making them: policy changes faster than any database. Our answer is not a pose of infallibility but a visible trail of corrections. Every correction is published: what it was, what it became, the source and the reason for the error. The corrections log opens with the second issue, together with the first block of changes.