Riyadh’s 50th place in the Oxford Economics Global Cities Index is the first time the capital has entered the top 50, and the third step in a straight line: 118th in 2024, 97th in 2025, 50th in the 2026 edition published this month. Composite indices move slowly by design, so a 47-place rise in a single year records something that already happened in the underlying data. The city added people and jobs faster than any peer, and the index arithmetic caught up.
The components locate the strength. Riyadh ranks fourth globally on human capital and 18th on economics. The index credits the city with the most jobs created of any city worldwide over the past five years and an average economic expansion of about 11 percent a year, the eighth fastest in the survey. The population has grown from 6.7 million in 2021 to 8.6 million at the end of 2025, roughly 3 million jobs have been added, just under 60 percent of residents are foreign-born, and more than 700 international firms base regional headquarters in the city. Dubai, at 42nd, is the only other city in the region inside the top 50.
The distance between fourth on human capital and 50th overall is where the remaining work lives. A composite rank averages its pillars, and a city that stands fourth on one pillar while placing 50th overall is being held by the others, the measures of quality of life and environment on which younger cities score against decades of accumulated amenity in the incumbents. Those measures move on delivery timelines, parks, transit, air, housing, not on hiring ones, which is why rank gains from here should come more slowly than the 47 places just recorded.
The forward numbers describe what kind of growth comes next. Oxford Economics projects Riyadh will add more than 750,000 business-services jobs by 2050, and that the four Gulf hubs together, Riyadh, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, will add 1.8 million such jobs against just over one million for New York, London, Paris and Berlin combined. That is a forecast about offices rather than construction sites, a services economy layered onto the decade of building that preceded it. The 700 regional headquarters are the leading edge of the shift, and consultants read the ranking the same way; Arthur D. Little’s Thomas Kuruvilla called it evidence that “national ambition is translating into tangible outcomes.”
For residents, the index is a formal record of what the city already feels like: 3 million added jobs in five years is the fact beneath most other Riyadh stories this year, from office vacancy and rents to school places and traffic. Growth of 11 percent a year is a demand shock to housing and infrastructure as much as a return on them, and the city’s current programs, the housing ventures, the metro, the rent measures, are the supply side answering it.
By 2050 the index projects Riyadh as the world’s 30th-largest city economy. The nearer test is the 2027 edition: whether 50th is a way station or a plateau will show in whether the jobs engine keeps outrunning the amenity build.