One Year and a Notice Period
In March 2021 Saudi Arabia let private-sector migrant workers change employer without their employer's permission, which was the central thing the sponsorship system had always prevented. The reform did not cover domestic workers, and domestic work is a larger share of employment in Saudi Arabia than anywhere else on earth.
At the 2022 census Saudi Arabia had 32.2 million people in it, of whom 13.4 million were not Saudi — 41.6 per cent. That is not a migrant workforce in the sense that Europe uses the phrase. It is closer to half the country, and it builds the roads, staffs the hotels, drives the cars, nurses the patients and cleans the houses. A visitor on this route will be served almost exclusively by people who cannot become citizens of the place they are working in and mostly do not expect to.
The mechanism that governed all of them is called kafala, sponsorship. Its logic is simple: a foreign worker's legal residence, the iqama, is held not by the state but by a named employer. The employer applies for it, renews it and is answerable for it. Historically that also meant the employer decided whether the worker could change jobs and whether the worker could leave the country, because the exit permit ran through the same office. A worker who walked away from a bad job did not become unemployed. They became illegal, and the employer could file an absconding report that made it so.
What changed on 14 March 2021
The Labour Reform Initiative was announced by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development on 4 November 2020 and came into force on 14 March 2021. It did three things for private-sector workers covered by the labour law. It let them transfer to a new employer without the current one's consent once they had completed a year, subject to notice. It let them apply for an exit and re-entry visa themselves. And it let them apply for a final exit visa at the end of a contract without the employer signing it off. All three run through the government's own apps, Absher and Qiwa, which matters more than it sounds: the transaction moved from a man behind a desk to a screen with an audit trail.
The part that made it stick
The exit permit was not abolished. The worker still has to request one; the state now grants it rather than the sponsor. Human Rights Watch said at the time that this fell short of dismantling kafala, and on the strict question it is right. But the reform that has bitten hardest is a duller one that began eight years earlier. The Wage Protection System started on 1 June 2013 with firms of 3,000 employees or more and was stepped down through the size bands until, by December 2020, it covered every private establishment in the country. Salaries must be paid through a bank and matched against the registered contract. By 2024 it was running across some 900,000 establishments and about 8.5 million workers, with roughly 88 per cent participation.
A right the worker has to invoke is only as strong as their appetite for a fight with the person holding their residence permit. A bank transfer that has to reconcile against a filed contract asks nothing of the worker at all, which is why it is the piece that worked.
Who was left out
The 2021 reform applied to workers covered by the labour law, and domestic workers are not. Neither are farm workers. That exclusion is not a rounding error here. The ILO counted about 3.66 million domestic workers in Saudi Arabia at the end of 2020 — roughly 28 per cent of total employment, the highest share of any country in the world, and the fourth largest absolute number anywhere. Housemaids, drivers, cooks and gardeners were, and to a significant degree remain, on a separate legal track from the man laying cable on a NEOM contract.
Saudi Arabia issued a new Domestic Workers Law on 2 October 2023, in force a year later. Thirty-three articles: an explicit prohibition on confiscating a worker's passport, a cap on daily working hours, paid leave, and occupational safety and health obligations written down for the first time. There is no minimum wage in it. Recruitment and now wage payment run through Musaned, the ministry's platform, which was set up in 2016 and to which wage protection was extended for newly arriving domestic workers from 1 July 2024, with wider coverage phased in behind it. The direction is consistent. The enforcement problem is the one it has always been: the workplace is a private house, and labour inspectors do not enter private houses.
Where the argument is now
On 4 June 2025, at the International Labour Conference, workers' delegates filed a complaint against Saudi Arabia under Article 26 of the ILO constitution — the procedure that can end in a Commission of Inquiry, the strongest instrument the organisation has and one it has resorted to only a handful of times since 1919. In November 2025 the Governing Body found the complaint receivable in relation to the Forced Labour Convention, the Protection of Wages Convention and the Discrimination Convention. In March 2026 Saudi Arabia asked for it to be closed on the grounds that the reforms had answered it. The Governing Body did not close it and did not escalate it either; it deferred the question to November 2026, which is where it sits as this is written.
What a visitor is looking at
None of this is hidden and none of it is theatrical. It is visible in the ordinary way: the composition of the staff at every hotel between Jeddah and Tabuk, the accommodation blocks beside the construction sites on the coast road, the fact that the person who checks you in and the person who owns the building are from different continents and different legal categories. The reforms are real, they are partial by design, and the country publishes enough of its own data to check both halves of that sentence. Knowing which half you are looking at, on any given day of a trip like this one, costs nothing and is the least a traveller owes the place.