3OCT

Saudi golden visa loses its work right

3 min read

13:31UTC

From June 2026, holders of Saudi Arabia's Premium Residency must obtain a separate Qiwa work permit before taking any job, reversing the assumption that the golden visa alone conferred the right to work.

← Back to Spain's Congress sinks its rental decrees Jump to analysis ↓

SocietyDeveloping

Key takeaway

Saudi Arabia's golden visa no longer implies the right to work, unlike Europe's income-based nomad visas.

From June 2026, holders of Saudi Arabia's Premium Residency Programme (PRP), The Kingdom's golden-visa equivalent, must obtain a separate work permit before taking any job.⁠¹ The permit is issued through Qiwa, the digital labour platform run by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development (MHRSD), at a base fee of SAR 100 (Saudi riyals) plus employer-size subscription fees.

No grace period is stated, and permits cannot be amended once issued, so an employer that files the wrong category has no correction route. Saudi Arabia runs no dedicated digital-nomad visa, and tourist eVisa holders stay formally barred from working, so there is no remote-work path around the permit.

The Gulf sorts mobile workers by employer sponsorship rather than by lifestyle status. Decoupling residence from the right to work keeps Saudi labour-market control, including the Saudisation quotas that run through Qiwa, intact even as The Kingdom sells long-term residence. Europe's nomad visas do the reverse: they grant residence on income and assume the right to work.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Saudi Arabia sells a long-term residence permit for wealthy foreigners called the Premium Residency Programme, sometimes compared to a golden visa. Many holders assumed it let them live and work in the country freely. From June 2026, that is no longer enough on its own. Anyone with Premium Residency who wants a job now also needs a separate work permit, issued through Qiwa, a Saudi government online system that manages employment paperwork, before they can legally start work. There is no announced transition period for existing holders, and once a permit is issued it cannot be corrected or changed, so an employer who applies for the wrong category has no fix available. Saudi Arabia has no visa for remote workers who want to work for a foreign employer while living there, and ordinary tourist visas do not allow any paid work at all.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Saudi Arabia's Premium Residency Programme replaced kafala-style employer sponsorship for residency status specifically when it launched in 2019, but it never touched the separate legal track governing the right to work, which has run through employer-sponsored labour contracts since long before Qiwa existed.

Residency and employment were always two different legal permissions under Saudi law; Premium Residency marketing collapsed that distinction for buyers without changing the underlying statute.

What changed in June 2026 is enforcement capacity, not the law itself. Qiwa's digital contract system can now cross-reference a residency permit against an employment record automatically, something the ministry could not do at scale when Premium Residency first launched, which is why a rule that technically always applied is only now being checked.

What could happen next?

Risk
A Premium Residency holder who started a job before June 2026 without a Qiwa permit has no stated grace period to regularise the arrangement, leaving both employee and employer technically exposed until guidance is published.
Meaning
Saudi Arabia is signalling that Premium Residency is a wealth-and-presence product, not a work-authorisation product, at the same time Gulf neighbours weigh their own golden-visa employment rules.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: The UAE's golden visa, launched in 2019 and marketed the same way as Saudi's Premium Residency, faces an identical gate. Holders who want to be employed, rather than sponsor their own company, still need a separate labour card from the UAE's Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation through its own digital platform. Long-term Gulf residence and the right to work are two separate administrative tracks in both kingdoms, whatever the golden-visa marketing implies.

Counter-parallel: The EU's Single Permit Directive runs the opposite way. It requires member states to issue one combined document covering both residence and work for any legally resident third-country national, precisely so a labour ministry cannot gate employment separately once residence is granted. Saudi Arabia and the UAE sort mobile workers by sponsorship; EU law treats the right to work as bundled into residence status itself.

Immediate: the Qiwa permit itself is cheap, a 100-riyal base fee plus an employer-size subscription, trivial against the wealth threshold Premium Residency itself requires. The real cost sits with employers, who face Saudi labour-law fines for employing anyone without a valid work permit, a liability that did not previously apply to Premium Residency holders because the ministry never checked.

Structural: because permits cannot be amended once issued, an employer that misclassifies a holder's job category has no correction route and must reapply from scratch, adding processing delay and cost precisely when Saudi Arabia is trying to make Premium Residency attractive to the same high-net-worth applicants the programme depends on.

Consensus view: The Gulf Research Center reads the Qiwa work-permit requirement as policy coherence rather than a reversal. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 Saudisation quotas already route all employment compliance monitoring through Qiwa, so folding Premium Residency holders into that system was always a matter of when, not if.

Counter-view: Alex Nowrasteh, who studies migration policy at the Cato Institute, argues the framing understates how the programme was sold. The Premium Residency Programme's 2019 founding regulations never explicitly granted blanket work rights; enforcement against wealthy holders simply never happened in practice. June's change is years of dormant law catching up with new digital enforcement capacity, not new policy.

Key tension: Whether this is deliberate labour-market tightening timed to Vision 2030, or years-old law finally enforceable once Qiwa could check every contract against a residency status, a distinction golden-visa marketing never made clear.

Sources:KPMG Global Mobility Services (Flash Alert 2026-155)

Mentions:Saudi Arabia →Premium Residency Programme →Qiwa →Cato Institute →Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development →

First Reported In

Update #9 · Europe's 90-day clock goes biometric

KPMG Global Mobility Services (Flash Alert 2026-155)· 2 Jul 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

This Event

Saudi golden visa loses its work right

A long-term residency sold to wealthy foreigners no longer carries the right to work, the mirror image of Europe's nomad visas that grant residence on income alone.

Led to

Saudi premium residents gain 31 services

The June Qiwa work-permit requirement preceded the 22 September service additions.

Occurred 22 Sept 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy

Nandy told MPs around 3 September that England's register of short lets will be fully operational by March 2027. Wales opened compulsory registration for every paid stay on 1 October, with a deadline of 31 March 2027.

Venice budget assessor Michele Zuin

Zuin told Il Gazzettino on 21 September that a charge of about €30 on peak days from 2027 would be the most concrete solution. He added that the city must set new rules together with government and Parliament.

Saudi Premium Residency Center

The Center added 31 services on 22 September, according to the newspaper Okaz. Primary holders now register employment contracts through the Qiwa platform, and no Saudi Press Agency release confirms the package.

Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis

Mitsotakis announced at the Thessaloniki International Fair on 5 September that new short-let registrations in central Athens and Thessaloniki stay suspended to 31 December 2027. No ministerial decision has been found, and golden-visa applications fell 39% from January to July.

Cape Town housing group Ndifuna Ukwazi

Ndifuna Ukwazi backs the city's draft by-law, which rates lets available over 183 nights a year as commercial from 1 July 2027. Finance mayco member Siseko Mbandezi said it ensures fairness in the commercial accommodation sector.

Klungkung Regency and KPK

Klungkung took 2.7bn rupiah on Nusa Penida from 1 to 9 September against 1.1bn in the first ten days of August. The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) sent files on eight suspects in a residence-permit extortion case to prosecutors on 30 September, alleging 145.5bn rupiah was taken.