Mohammed bin Salman's Record, Measured Against the Numbers He Set Himself

Tourism has moved on the same scale. Saudi Arabia recorded 122 million domestic and international visitors in 2025, with tourism spending of about 300 billion riyals, in a country that did not issue leisure visas until 2019. The stock of what is actually open, rather than announced, is tracked in our guide to the megaprojects.

What changed for Saudis rather than for balance sheets?

The labour market, and mostly for women.

Female labour force participation was around 17 per cent when Vision 2030 was launched. It passed the programme's 30 per cent target in 2022, eight years early, reached 35.0 per cent in 2025, and stood at 33.9 per cent in the first quarter of 2026. The target has since been raised to 40 per cent by the end of the decade.

Two things should be said about those figures together. The first is that roughly 1.3 million additional Saudi women have entered the workforce since 2016, which is a change in how a society functions rather than a statistic about it. The second is that the first quarter of 2026 came in below the 2025 figure. A rate that triples and then wobbles is behaving like a real labour market. Reporting only the peak would be the kind of presentation that makes readers distrust every other number in the paragraph.

On the wider programme, the 2025 Vision 2030 annual report recorded 93 per cent of key performance indicators as fully or partially met. Partially met is doing some work in that sentence, and it is still a rate of delivery that most national strategies do not reach.

And the megaprojects?

This is where the assessment gets more interesting, not less.

The Line, the linear city announced in 2021 at 170 kilometres long and nine million residents, is not being built at that scale. The Public Investment Fund paused construction in September 2025 pending a strategic review. Around 2.4 kilometres of foundation work had been completed. The revised near-term scope is a segment of similar length for a population in the low hundreds of thousands, and the fund has reportedly taken a write-down running to several billion dollars. NEOM is being repositioned towards industrial infrastructure, data centres and energy rather than a residential city.

The straightforward reading of that is failure, and it is not the right reading. A state that stops a project when the numbers stop working, absorbs the loss and redirects the capital is behaving as a competent owner. The alternative, which is common in the region and elsewhere, is to keep building because stopping is embarrassing. Judged as capital allocation rather than as public relations, cutting The Line and moving the money towards industrial capacity, computing and power is the more disciplined decision, and it is consistent with the shift towards human scale that we covered in our piece on Riyadh.

What does the record suggest about the method?

That the durable parts of this transformation are the unglamorous ones.

The renderings travelled further than anything else, and they are the part that has been scaled back. What has held is duller and harder: a capital market authority with ministerial rank, local content rules that route procurement through domestic firms, a labour market that opened to half the population, a visa regime that did not previously exist, and a sovereign fund that measures itself partly by what it spends at home.

Ten years is long enough to judge direction and too short to judge outcome. The direction is clear, the diversification is real by the metric the programme chose in advance, and the country is arriving at the second half of the plan with the majority of its output no longer coming from oil. The third phase, and what it has to prove, is set out in our look ahead. On the evidence so far, the ambition was the easy part and the execution has been the surprising one.