Marketing Teams After the 60% Saudization Rule: In-house, Partner or Hybrid

Since 19 April 2026, a Saudi company that employs three or more people in marketing roles has had to make at least 60% of them Saudi nationals. Most coverage of the rule stops at the quota. The harder question for a CEO or marketing director is what the marketing function should look like once it applies: which roles you staff in-house, what you buy from outside, and how to do that without drifting into arrangements the ministry has said it will not accept.

This guide sets out what the rule requires, how to run the numbers on your own team, and three compliant structures, all built on Saudi staff leading the function. It is not legal advice. Treat it as a planning tool and confirm your own position with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development (HRSD) or your HR and legal advisers.

What the rule requires

HRSD’s announcement says the 60% localisation rate covers private-sector establishments with three or more workers in the targeted marketing professions. A Saudi employee counts towards the rate only if paid at least SAR 5,500 a month (HRSD). The decision (Ministerial Decision No. 101319) was announced on 19 January 2026 with a three-month grace period (HRSD, 19 January 2026; KPMG, 29 January 2026), and enforcement began when that period ended on 19 April 2026 (HRSD marketing procedural guide; Arab News, 19 April 2026). A parallel decision applies the same 60% rate to sales professions. The ministry’s announcements give the SAR 5,500 wage condition for the marketing decision only.

Source: the profession list in HRSD’s announcement of 3 May 2026. The ministry has published a separate procedural guide for each decision, covering the professions, implementation, the calculation method and penalties. These rules can change, so check the current text on HRSD’s site before you act.

This is the second round for marketing. The rule HRSD enforced from 8 May 2022 set a 30% rate for establishments with five or more marketing workers, with the same SAR 5,500 wage condition (HRSD, May 2022). The 2026 decision doubles the rate and lowers the threshold from five workers to three. The roles also change. HRSD’s 2022 announcement listed six: marketing manager, marketing specialist, advertising and PR manager, marketing sales expert, advertising designer and commercial advertising photographer. The 2026 list names graphic designers, advertising specialists, advertising agents and PR specialists for the first time, separates the advertising and PR manager roles, and lists photographer without the commercial-advertising qualifier. Many mid-sized companies that were outside the 2022 rule are now inside it.

Run the numbers on your own team

HRSD’s procedural guide for the marketing decision sets out the method (HRSD procedural guide, marketing professions). Under the guide:

• Additional Saudis needed = (total workers in the covered professions × 60%) − Saudis already counted, rounded. A fraction of 0.49 or less rounds down, and 0.5 or more rounds up. The guide’s own example: 16 workers × 60% = 9.6, minus 3 Saudis = 6.6, so 7 more Saudis are needed.
• The count is made per legal entity registered in HRSD’s records. All branches of the same economic activity under that entity are counted together.
• The rule follows the work actually done as well as the job title.
• Your Nitaqat band does not change the calculation.
• Where another localisation decision, including a regional one, sets a different rate for the same profession, the higher rate applies.

Applied to typical marketing teams, the method gives the following minimum number of counted Saudis. These are worked examples, not rulings on any particular company.

A Saudi team member whose wage registered with GOSI is below SAR 5,500 a month does not count towards the marketing rate. So a team of five with three Saudis, one of them below the threshold, is not compliant. Do the salary check person by person, not as an average.

What the rule does not allow

Two points in the published guidance matter most for anyone redesigning a team.

First, the marketing guide’s penalty clause covers both missing the rate and assigning the tasks of the covered professions to a non-Saudi worker “directly or indirectly” under any other job title. Retitling a designer as an “operations assistant” is the arrangement the ministry has already ruled out. The guide applies penalties under HRSD’s schedule of Labour Law violations and penalties, citing Ministerial Decisions No. 75913 (19/5/1445 AH) and No. 44558 (3/4/1446 AH) as amended, and it does not quote amounts itself. Qoyod, a Saudi accounting software provider, reports that a newer schedule issued by Ministerial Decision No. 112377 (February 2026) fines failure to meet localisation ratios at SAR 2,000, 4,000 or 6,000 per non-Saudi worker above the ratio, for establishments of up to 20, 21 to 49 and 50 or more workers (Qoyod, September 2026). We could not open the official schedule to confirm these figures, so check the current schedule on HRSD’s site.

Second, none of the official pages we reviewed explain how outsourced service contracts are treated. Neither do the advisory summaries we read. We found no HRSD statement either way on whether work supplied by an outside firm counts towards your headcount. That silence does not mean outsourcing is permitted. Do not read it as a green light.

The safe principle: an outside partner can supply defined deliverables that your Saudi-led team commissions, reviews and approves. It should not be used to place people who do covered jobs inside your company, under your daily direction, outside your headcount. If an arrangement starts to look like the second, ask HRSD or your legal adviser before you sign.

Our reading, not an HRSD ruling: a marketing studio registered in Saudi Arabia is itself a private establishment, so the decision would apply to its own staff in the covered professions once it has three or more of them. If that is right, moving work to a local studio shifts where the rule applies rather than removing it, which is another reason to choose partners on what they deliver, not as a way to move headcount off your books. This is not legal advice; confirm with HRSD or your adviser.

Three compliant structures

Every structure below puts Saudi employees in charge of the function. They own the plan, the brand, the budget and the approvals. The structures differ in how much specialist production sits in-house.

1. Full in-house team

You hire every covered role yourself and meet the 60% rate across all of them. This suits large companies with continuous, high-volume output: daily social content, several product lines, an always-on paid media programme. The cost is fixed, and you carry the hiring, training and retention risk. This includes keeping Saudi staff above SAR 5,500 as salaries move.

2. Saudi-led core plus an outside studio

A small in-house core leads the function. Typically that is a Saudi marketing manager and one or two Saudi specialists, for example in digital and communications. An outside studio delivers specialist production against briefs: identity work, campaign creative, video, exhibition materials, company profiles. The core writes the briefs, sets priorities, approves every piece and owns the relationship with sales and management. This suits mid-sized B2B companies whose production needs come in waves, such as launches, exhibitions and tenders, rather than as a steady daily load.

3. Hybrid with in-house content and external specialists

Here the in-house team is larger. It handles the always-on work itself, such as social content, community replies and basic design, and buys only the specialist or peak-load work from outside: brand strategy, film, large campaigns, websites. This suits companies with steady daily output and a few big moments a year.

The second model fails most often when the core is too junior to direct the partner. If your in-house lead cannot judge a brand concept or push back on a campaign idea, the partner ends up running your marketing. A strong Saudi lead who knows the market, the buyers and the sales team is what makes an outside studio useful; if that lead is still being hired, a time-limited strategy consultant engagement can hold the plan until they arrive. For a broader comparison of in-house, agency and outsourced-department models across the Gulf, see our guide to in-house teams, agencies and outsourced marketing departments.

Building the Saudi-led core

Hiring to the quota is the minimum. A core that can actually lead the function needs a few things deliberately designed in:

• Decision rights, written down. Who approves the annual plan, the budget, brand changes and individual campaigns. The in-house lead should hold final content approval for everything published in the company’s name.
• Ownership of accounts and assets. Ad accounts, social pages, the website, analytics and brand files sit in the company’s name, with your team holding admin access. Partners work inside them on delegated access.
• A plan the team can execute and measure. Clear objectives, channels and KPIs give a new team something to manage against. Without that, it ends up reacting to requests. This is the work of our marketing strategy and research service.
• A development path. HRSD’s marketing guide lists support for sourcing candidates, training Saudi employees, hiring and retention, plus priority access to the ministry’s support programmes; KPMG places the incentives with the Human Resources Development Fund (Hadaf) (HRSD marketing guide; KPMG). Check what is currently available through HRSD and Hadaf before you budget for training on your own.
• Pay that holds above the threshold. Set salary bands for covered roles with SAR 5,500 as a floor, not a target. Losing a counted employee can push you out of compliance overnight.

Contracting an outside studio properly

If you choose the second or third structure, write the partner agreement around outputs rather than people. Our guide to marketing agency fees in Saudi Arabia explains what drives the monthly number once the scope is set.

1. Scope by deliverable. List what the studio produces, for example a campaign key visual and its adaptations, a corporate film or an exhibition pack. Avoid wording like “a designer for 20 days a month at your office”.
2. Brief and approval in your team’s hands. Every job starts from a brief your in-house team writes, and nothing goes out until they approve it.
3. Files and rights at handover. Final and source files, plus usage rights, come back to the company so your team can adapt and reuse them.
4. Knowledge transfer. Ask the partner to document templates, brand rules and production processes so the in-house team grows more capable over time, not more dependent.
5. A compliance review before signing. If anyone from the partner would work on your premises, under your managers’ daily direction, or in a covered profession for an extended period, have your HR or legal adviser review the arrangement against the current HRSD guidance first.

This is close to how RX works with clients: clients approve content before it goes out, ad accounts stay in the client’s name, and final and source files and rights are handed over. Our Azeidk case study shows the model on a larger scale: a complete marketing control centre for a contracting and MEP company, covering brand, content, campaigns, events and sales communication.

A 30-day action list

1. List everyone doing marketing work in each legal entity, with their title, what they actually do and their monthly wage.
2. Map each person to the ten covered professions, using what they do rather than what they are called.
3. Calculate your required Saudi headcount with the rounding method above. Check each Saudi employee’s wage against SAR 5,500.
4. Download the current marketing procedural guide and penalty schedule from HRSD and confirm the calculation and any updates since this article.
5. Choose a target structure: full in-house, Saudi-led core plus studio, or hybrid. Write down the decision rights.
6. Recruit or promote the Saudi lead before you redesign anything else, and check which HRSD and Hadaf support programmes apply.
7. Rewrite any outside contracts around deliverables, approvals and handover. Get any arrangement involving on-site or embedded people reviewed first.

Do steps 1 to 3 first, with HR, in a single afternoon: the headcount calculation decides whether you need to hire, promote or restructure, and everything else follows from it. Put the result, with the date you checked HRSD’s current guide, in the paper that asks management to approve the structure.