The Ministry of Finance published its preliminary statement for the 2027 budget on Wednesday, and the document’s architecture says more than any single line in it. Spending is planned at SR1.392 trillion against revenues of SR1.202 trillion, a deficit of about 3.6 percent of GDP. Attached to the plan is a projection that real output will grow 12.8 percent in 2027, after an estimated contraction of 3.6 percent this year. The deficit is a choice. The growth figure is an assumption, and most of the budget’s arithmetic rests on it.
The 2026 estimates describe the year the plan is built on. The ministry expects oil activities to decline about 21.8 percent this year while non-oil activities grow 3.2 percent, with inflation near 2.1 percent and unemployment among Saudis at 6.5 percent in the second quarter. The contraction is concentrated entirely on the oil side of the ledger while the domestic economy keeps expanding, and the statement leans on that composition: non-oil activities reached 57.3 percent of real GDP in the first half, a record share, which means the economy the budget mostly funds is the part still growing.
The 12.8 percent projection for next year is best read as arithmetic about oil normalization. When a fifth of oil activity leaves the base in one year, restoring it produces a large growth number the next, without any acceleration in the underlying economy. The spread between forecasters measures how much restoration each expects: the IMF’s July estimate for 2027 was around 5.5 percent. The gap between the two numbers is not a disagreement about the non-oil economy; it is a view on how quickly oil output and exports return to normal running. The ministry, which writes that government initiatives to secure stable oil supplies and supply chains are supporting growth on both sides of the economy, has put the fuller recovery in writing.
What the statement does not do is bend spending to the downturn. The medium-term tables show revenues of about SR1.351 trillion against spending of SR1.544 trillion in 2029, which is to say deficits across the whole window. Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan described a government that “continues to monitor economic and geopolitical developments and assess their potential repercussions on the global economy, supply chains, and energy markets.” The operational translation is plainer: the capital programs attached to Vision 2030 are not being rationed to a difficult oil year, and the state will borrow the difference rather than interrupt them.
The borrowing itself is getting a wider base. The statement commits to raising funds in domestic and international markets through bonds, sukuk and loans at fair cost, says the debt portfolio will grow in a measured manner, and promises the full 2027 borrowing plan by year-end. The newer element is the planned expansion of alternative financing: project finance, infrastructure finance and export credit agencies. Each moves a slice of the capital budget off the sovereign’s general account and onto specific assets with their own revenues, which is how states with long construction pipelines keep headline debt readable.
The revenue side carries the decade’s quieter work. Non-oil revenues have grown from SR166 billion in 2015 to SR505 billion in 2025, and the statement adds the privatization ledger to the account: 83 signed public-private partnership contracts worth about SR28.3 billion, more than SR56.2 billion in private capital investment, and ten privatization and PPP projects launched since the start of this year, from the Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Qassim to the Jubail container terminal. The target is SR240 billion in private capital through the program by 2030. These are the receipts that make a 3.6 percent deficit a posture the ministry can hold rather than a constraint it must escape.
The statement landed in a week when the state was describing itself at length; the Crown Prince told the Shoura Council on Wednesday that 93 percent of Vision 2030’s benchmarks have been achieved and that the private sector now accounts for 51 percent of the economy. The full budget in December will set the final numbers. The sequence to watch runs through the quarterly GDP prints, which will grade the oil recovery the 12.8 percent implies, and through the year-end borrowing plan, which will show how much of the gap the Kingdom intends to fund at home. The projection is on the record now, and the prints will mark it quarter by quarter.