Employer of record enquiries into the Kingdom are rising, assignee numbers are increasing, and employers are having to adapt their mobility programmes to the reality of operating in a conflict zone.
What are they doing, and are there takeaways with broader application?
Why assignee numbers have increased
The main driver behind the surge is Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s national transformation initiative. Determined to deliver it on time, the Kingdom has relaxed its procurement regulations to stay on schedule.
Previously, only Saudi companies could bid on government tenders. But since November last year, foreign companies have been able to obtain a formal exemption that allows them to bid on projects critical to Vision 2030’s success.
When the conflict broke out, the government pointedly pushed ahead with the programme, completing an office park and even beginning work on a third runway at King Salman airport. Their message was clear: nothing has changed. Reassured that their contracts were secure, foreign vendors continued deploying their people, albeit under dramatically altered circumstances.
What assignments in Saudi Arabia look like now
Since March, Relocation packages have been reconfigured around managing the heightened risk, with assignment location determining the level of exposure. Mobility teams have broadly classified the country into three zones.
The industrial cities of Jubail and Yanbu, on the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea coasts respectively, are treated as relatively stable: fully integrated industrial hubs with established security, good logistics access, and in some cases capacity for families.
Riyadh and Jeddah fall within the medium-risk zone. Both are heavily defended by air defense infrastructure and offer compound-based living arrangements.
The Eastern Province, closest to the Arabian Gulf, is classed as a high-risk zone, as is the south-western border region, due to the ongoing conflict at the Yemen border.
Within this system, the assignees themselves have been split into three tiers — a categorisation that matters most in the high-risk zones, where the degree of exposure determines who is deployed and how:
- Tier 1 — Essential personnel. Roles that require a full-time presence in country, compound accommodation, individuals only – no families.
- Tier 2 — Project-critical specialists. Technical experts deployed on a rotational basis. The emerging standard is 28 days in-country, 14 days out, to minimise insurance costs. Compound accommodation. Security escort between site and residence.
- Tier 3 — Support functions. Finance, HR, IT infrastructure, marketing, and legal teams who can operate remotely and enter Saudi Arabia only for short, specific engagements.
The impact on compensation and passport profiles
The compensation shift that accompanies this new structure is significant. Total packages for senior roles in Riyadh have reportedly nearly doubled since the onset of the conflict, with housing costs rising sharply as compound inventory has tightened.
Hardship allowances, which typically sat at around 10% of base salary for pre-conflict assignments, are now set at 50% or above for roles in high-risk areas. Security premiums, evacuation insurance, and war risk bonuses have become standard additions to packages that would not have included them a year ago.
To offset these costs, companies are increasingly sourcing project-level talent from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and India – profiles that combine the relevant skills with cultural familiarity and, critically, lower base compensation costs.
For project-critical roles, the passport profile of candidates has become a deployment planning tool in its own right. Nationalities with expedited visa processing for Saudi Arabia can be mobilised faster to meet project timelines.
The three takeaways for global mobility professionals
Saudi Arabia is an extreme – but not isolated – case. In the broader Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Asia, longstanding tensions continue to sustain the uncertainty dogging the global economy.
In these conditions, global mobility professionals must ensure their policies are resilient enough to withstand prolonged disruption. The Saudi experience offers several transferable principles:
- Grade your assignees. Knowing in advance which roles are business-critical, which are project-deployable, and which can operate remotely is an essential element of policy design.
- Audit your compensation framework for conflict scenarios. Hardship allowances set in a stable market context may bear no relationship to what is required to retain and deploy talent to a now high-risk location.
- Build nationality-aware mobility planning. In complex deployment environments, passports are a logistical variable. Visa processing timelines, bilateral agreements, and port-of-entry arrangements can determine whether the assignment starts on time or not.
What Saudi Arabia teaches about readiness
Talent movement today is shaped by geopolitical tension, economic security concerns and an increasingly protectionist migration landscape. That reality has pushed mobility from a service function into a strategic risk-management capability, one built on foresight, scenario planning and the ability to respond in real time.
This is why mobility programmes need their own Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans: frameworks that let a company repatriate or relocate staff quickly once a crisis hits.
Done well ahead of time, this work saves money. Identifying and resolving mobility risks before the business has committed to a course of action is cheaper than fixing the same problems once it is already underway.
There is also duty of care to consider. Embedding it into your risk strategy does more than limit legal exposure, it builds trust, strengthens organisational resilience, and becomes a genuine differentiator in attracting and retaining talent.
If your policy hasn’t been stress-tested against a scenario where geopolitical instability takes centre stage, now is the time
AGS Relocation has teams on the ground across Europe, Asia and Africa, and in our more than 50 years of operation we have faced – and withstood – conflict in each. Drawing on that real-world experience, we guide clients on how to integrate risk management into their own mobility programmes.
Wherever your assignees are operating, resilience starts with knowing where the risk actually lies. Talk to us about getting your mobility programme ready for whatever comes next.