The kingdom that started living longer: six extra years in a decade

Life expectancy is one of the rare indicators that resists being gamed. You can argue about how unemployment is measured, what counts as a tourist visit, or where the baseline for non-oil exports should be drawn. You can't argue about how long people actually live. The Saudi figure has moved from 74 years in 2016 to 79.7 years by December 2025 — close to six years gained in less than a decade.

Where the gains came from

Three things drove most of the move. First, basic-services coverage. The percentage of populated areas with access to primary health services reached 97.5% by end-2025 — mathematically close to the ceiling and historically unprecedented for a country with the kingdom's geography. The expansion happened through Ministry of Health primary-care centers, mobile units in remote regions, and the contracted private-sector network.

Second, the unification of health insurance. The Council of Cooperative Health InsuranceCHI — Council of Cooperative Health InsuranceThe body that regulates and certifies private health-insurance providers in the kingdom. Established in 1999, it became the central architecture for the universal health coverage rollout that took basic coverage to 97.5% by 2025. The transition from fragmented employer-provider arrangements to a regulated unified scheme runs through CHI.→ Read more in the glossary consolidated what had been fragmented employer-by-employer schemes into a regulated single architecture. Mandatory coverage for private-sector employees, expansion to dependents, and government-funded coverage for Saudi citizens collectively closed the gap between “health system exists” and “patient can actually access it.” The Citizen Account Program, which delivers cash subsidies to lower-income households, includes coverage for out-of-pocket medical costs for those who fall outside other insurance schemes.

Third, specialist medicine. The kingdom's flagship academic medical centers — led by KFSH&RCKFSH&RC — King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research CentreThe kingdom's flagship academic medical center, founded in 1975. Internationally ranked as one of the world's top hospitals (consistently top 25 globally by Newsweek's specialty-medical ranking). Hosts the national programs in oncology, organ transplantation, cardiac surgery, and clinical research; runs the kingdom's largest stem-cell transplant program in MENA.→ Read more in the glossary, with King Abdulaziz Medical City and the University Medical Cities filling out the system — moved up the international rankings during the same window. Newsweek's specialty-medical rankings consistently place KFSH&RC inside the global top 25 in 2024 and 2025; programs in oncology, organ transplantation, and cardiac surgery now retain Saudi patients who would previously have traveled to London, Houston, or Geneva. The brain drain in reverse — Saudi specialists trained abroad returning to staff these institutions — is what made the rankings durable.

The digital backbone

The healthcare transformation rides on the same digital infrastructure that the digital-government article in this portal covers in detail. SehhatySehhatyThe Ministry of Health's national patient-facing app. Hosts vaccination records, lab results, prescription tracking, medical appointment booking, and telemedicine consultations. Centralized what had previously been a fragmented health-records system distributed across separate provider IT systems.→ Read more in the glossary is the patient-facing application: vaccination records, lab results, prescription tracking, medical appointment booking, telemedicine consultations. Behind Sehhaty sits the National Center for Health Information Exchange (Nphies), which connects providers, insurers, and pharmacies on a common standard.

The pandemic was a forcing function. In March 2020, Saudi Arabia had a usable but fragmented health-records system. By March 2022, it had a national digital backbone that delivered vaccine certificates, virus-test results, contact-tracing alerts, and appointment booking through a single application. The Sehhaty user-base passed 12 million during the peak pandemic period and has remained at scale since. The institutional muscle built during the pandemic is what made the post-pandemic rollout — telemedicine consultations, chronic-disease monitoring, mental-health screening — feasible at scale.

Weqaya and the public-health layer

One of the institutional outputs of the pandemic was the Saudi Public Health AuthorityWeqaya — Saudi Public Health AuthorityThe national public health authority, established in 2021 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consolidated disease surveillance, outbreak response, vaccination programs, and population-health monitoring that had previously been distributed across the Ministry of Health and several agencies. Modeled in part on the US CDC and Public Health England structures.→ Read more in the glossary, established in 2021. The model is broadly that of the US CDC or Public Health England: a dedicated national agency for disease surveillance, outbreak response, vaccination programs, and population-health monitoring. Before Weqaya, these functions were distributed across the Ministry of Health and adjacent agencies; the post-pandemic consolidation produced an institution with the mandate to handle the next event before it becomes a crisis. The annual flu campaigns, the measles-rubella push, and the chronic non-communicable-disease screening programs all now run through Weqaya.