You log in to your establishment account on Qiwa to issue the Saudization certificate before a government tender deadline, and the issue button is not there. You search for the reason and find articles offering to help you "prepare the documents" and "gather employee contracts", quoting a waiting time somewhere between three days and two weeks, some of them selling a paid service to speed the process up.
None of that is true.
The Saudization certificate is an instant service on Qiwa. No documents are uploaded, and no official reviews your request. The certificate is not a transaction — it is a printout of a number the ministry already holds about you. If the issue button is missing, it is because the number does not clear the threshold, not because your file is incomplete. Every piece of advice about paperwork is pointing you away from the only thing you can actually change.
This article covers the four conditions as Qiwa publishes them, then the number behind them, and why no fixed table can tell you the rate your establishment needs.
The four conditions, as Qiwa publishes them
Qiwa states the conditions for issuing the Saudization certificate explicitly. There are four:
- The establishment must be active.
- The establishment's band must be Low Green or above, or Green for very small entities.
- The establishment must have achieved the required Saudization rates under the Nitaqat programme.
- The establishment must be compliant with the Wage Protection System.
Qiwa's certificates page adds two more constraints that drop out of most summaries:
- The Nitaqat Saudization rate must be above zero.
- The establishment's band must not be excluded from the programme.
The first of those is what catches small businesses out. A very small entity can sit in a green band without employing a single Saudi, because a different rule applies to it. That entity is green and still cannot issue the certificate, because its rate is zero. Colour alone is not enough.
The fourth condition is the one that matters most in practice, because it ties together two files most owners never see in the same place: your Wage Protection compliance gates your Saudization certificate. An establishment that is spotless in Nitaqat but late filing its wage file will not get the certificate. If that is your situation, the problem is not Saudization at all — and we covered the three distinct ways a wage file gets rejected in why your WPS file is rejected in Mudad.
The fixed-percentage myth
Most of what you will read about this certificate offers you a table like this one: Platinum from some figure up to one hundred, High Green from here to there, Low Green from roughly sixteen to nineteen per cent.
That table does not exist.
Nitaqat Motawar abolished the fixed percentage table and replaced it with a curve computed per entity. The programme's own procedural guide, published by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, prints the formula in full:
Y = M × ln(X) + T
Where Y is the minimum rate for the band, M is a curve constant per activity and band, T is a levelling constant per activity, band and year, and X is the entity's total workforce. The logarithm is the natural one — the guide specifies "the natural logarithmic value".
The band is then assigned by comparing your actual rate against the computed ones: red below the Low Green figure, Low Green once you reach it but not the Medium Green figure, and so on.
Three consequences follow, and each of them breaks the fixed table:
The rate varies enormously by activity. The Low Green T constant in Annex 1 runs from about 4.38 for one activity to 74.5 for another. No single number serves both.
The rate moves with your size. Every employee you add — Saudi or expatriate — changes X, which changes the threshold you must clear. In most activities the bar rises as you grow. In construction contracting and in cleaning contracting the M constant is negative, so the bar falls as you grow. Even the direction of travel is not uniform.
The rate moves with the calendar. Annex 1 publishes three separate columns for T: 2026, 2027 and 2028.
The column nobody reads
That last point deserves a pause, because it is the only one that works against you while you do nothing at all.
Take three entities, sixty employees each, differing only in registered activity:
| Activity | 2026 | 2027 | 2028 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Construction and building contracting | 12.66% | 14.66% | 16.66% |
| IT solutions | 35.73% | 37.73% | 39.73% |
| Business services | 38.00% | 41.00% | 44.00% |
| Agriculture and livestock production | 5.16% | 5.16% | 5.16% |
That is the Low Green rate — the minimum that lets you issue the certificate at all — for exactly the same headcount.
Read the first and last rows together: a sixty-person agricultural entity needs 5.16%, and a sixty-person business services entity needs 38.00%. Seven and a half times the obligation, and the only difference is a line in the commercial register.
Now read the rows across. The agricultural entity's threshold is flat across all three years. The other three rise annually. A business services firm sitting at 39% issues its certificate comfortably in 2026, sits on the edge of the threshold in 2027 at 41%, and loses the certificate in 2028 at 44% — without a single employee leaving and without breaching anything.
That is the real trap in this certificate: it is measured against a moving ruler. Anyone planning a 2027 tender on a 2026 number is planning on the wrong number. We have seen the same mechanism drop establishments into the red band for no visible reason, and explained it in Nitaqat Motawar: why your band turned red and how to get out.
The number is not your Saudi headcount
Before you compute your rate, note that the numerator is not the count of Saudi employees on your payroll. Nitaqat weights heads before it counts them, and the heaviest filter is wage.
A ministerial decision of the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development raised the minimum monthly wage at which a Saudi counts in Nitaqat to SAR 4,000. Below that the employee does not disappear — they arrive in the numerator as a fraction:
| Monthly contributory wage | Counts as |
|---|---|
| SAR 4,000 and above | one worker |
| Above SAR 3,000 and below SAR 4,000 | half a worker |
| Below SAR 3,000 | nothing |
The wage in question is the GOSI contributory wage, not gross pay and not basic salary — usually three different figures. Where they diverge is covered in the GOSI contribution rate and salary deduction.
The practical consequence is harsh: a Saudi paid under three thousand adds a head to the denominator and nothing to the numerator, which means they lower your Saudization rate. Hiring five Saudis on low wages can move you further from the certificate rather than closer to it. That mistake is made in good faith every hiring season.
At the other extreme, if the registered wage is higher than the wage actually paid, you are not improving your rate — you are in phantom Saudization territory, where the penalty is a floor rather than a ceiling. That is the subject of phantom Saudization: SAR 20,000 is the minimum.
The certificate can issue while you are barred from hiring
Here is a contradiction worth stating plainly, because it changes what the certificate means.
The procedural guide publishes the table of ministry services available by band. In the Low Green band — precisely the threshold that lets you issue the Saudization certificate — your establishment is:
- Suspended from submitting new visa requests.
- Suspended from submitting requests to change expatriate workers' professions.
- Still able to renew work permits for existing workers.
The higher bands — Medium Green, High Green and Platinum — keep visa requests, profession changes, and the ability to receive transferred workers from any band.
So an establishment in Low Green holds an official document proving its Saudization compliance, submits it with a government tender, and is simultaneously barred from recruiting anyone new. The certificate is perfectly valid, but it does not mean "you are in good shape"; it means "you have reached the lowest threshold". The gap between those two readings is the gap between a hiring plan that works and one that hits a wall at the first visa.
In the red band the table closes everything: no new visas, no profession changes, no transfers in, no work permits for new expatriate workers, and no renewal of work permits for the workers you already have. That last item turns the problem from a growth constraint into a survival one. The rules governing transfers into and out of your establishment are covered in employee transfer through Qiwa: the real conditions and fees.
One last detail: the entity, not the establishment
The guide defines the entity as the unit the ministry deals with for the purposes of computing Saudization, recruitment and transfer of service, representing all branches under the same economic activity owned by one establishment.
The Saudization rate is computed at that level: the sum of the averages of Saudi employees across the entity's establishments, divided by the sum of the Saudi and expatriate averages together.
In practice this means an excellent branch does not rescue a weak entity, and one branch heavy with expatriate labour drags the whole entity down. Anyone computing their rate at the level of the branch they manage gets a number unrelated to the one Qiwa reads. Note also that the definition of expatriate labour excludes nationals of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, so they do not enter the denominator as expatriates.
What to do this week
If the issue button is missing, this is the right order to check in:
- Check your Wage Protection compliance first. It is a condition independent of your rate and may be the only thing blocking you. Start with the WPS file validator.
- Read your registered activity, not the activity you actually practise. The formula reads what is registered.
- Compute the rate at entity level, across all branches, not at your branch.
- Weight the heads before counting them: every Saudi whose contributory wage is under SAR 4,000 enters as a fraction, or not at all.
- Compute your 2027 threshold alongside your 2026 one, and treat the difference as a deadline.
The first four steps give you a number. The fifth gives you a timeline. The Nitaqat calculator applies the formula to your activity, size and year and returns the gap in employees — it applies the wage filter too, because the computation without it is systematically optimistic. If you want to build this logic into your own HR system, the full engine with code is in building a Nitaqat engine in TypeScript.
A closing note on validity: the certificate expires a short period after issuance — unofficial sources report ninety days — and more importantly it is a snapshot of the moment it was issued. A tender submitted two months later may be evaluated on a certificate that no longer reflects your band. Reissue before submitting, not a month before the deadline.
If your band sits on the threshold, or the numbers your HR system shows do not match what Qiwa shows, the gap is usually in data definitions rather than in hiring. Get in touch with your registered activity, headcount and wage distribution, and we will send back a written reading of where you sit against the threshold this year and next, and exactly where your computation diverges from the ministry's.
Sources
- The Procedural Guide to the Nitaqat Motawar Programme, Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development — definitions, the formula, Annex 1, and the services-by-band table.
- Ministerial Decision 182495 adopting the restructuring of the Nitaqat programme.
- Qiwa — the establishment certificates page, and the Saudization certificate conditions published on its official account.