Wael’s view
In 2025, Saudi courts received 1.6 million requests to collect on more than 165 billion riyals ($44 billion) in unpaid financial obligations. Justice Minister Walid Al-Samaani said the figure was evidence of a modern, responsive judicial process, but read differently, it is the mark of a society creaking under pressure it was never designed to bear.
Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 corrected a historical exclusion against women in the workforce, using incentives and quotas to address the imbalance. It worked: Female private-sector employment grew at more than twice the pace of male employment in recent years. Women’s unemployment has fallen from over 30% to under 13%.
The problem is that it was not paired with a rebalancing of the obligations still attached to men. The state added women to the workforce without removing men from their role as sole providers. The result is a labor market that is more competitive for young men than before, governed by a social contract that still holds them fully accountable for the financial outcomes.
The kingdom’s banking data tell the story of young men borrowing to survive in an economy they were promised would reward them, and locked in a legal system that still assigns them total financial responsibility for households their wives are now equally capable of funding.
Saudi consumer loans grew ninefold since 2000, to 477 billion riyals — a pace that outstrips both population growth and GDP expansion. The IMF puts Saudi private debt at 81.4% of GDP. More revealing than the total is the composition.
Credit card debt has more than tripled since 2014, to 34.5 billion riyals. Renovation loans — the instrument Saudi men traditionally use to prepare a home for marriage — have collapsed 70% since 2015. Vehicle loans are down 39% since 2014. In their place, education loans have grown twentyfold, to 8 billion riyals, pointing to how a generation of men is borrowing to compete for jobs that increasingly go to women.
This generation of Saudi men, unlike their fathers, can’t afford to start households. They are borrowing to survive, locked in a legal system that assigns them total financial responsibility for households their wives are now equally capable of funding. Until that architecture changes, the debt will only grow. And marriage, for many Saudi men, will remain a trap.
A Saudi wedding regularly costs 100,000 riyals; lavish ones run into the millions. The mahr — the obligatory dowry the groom must pay under Islamic law — comes on top of that, as does the apartment, furniture, and expectation of ongoing household support. These are legally enforceable obligations.
Under Islamic family law as applied in Saudi courts, the husband bears full financial responsibility for the household. A wife’s income is legally her own property; she owes nothing toward rent, groceries, or school fees. The result: a household where the wife earns 15,000 riyals a month and the husband earns 8,000 riyals still places total liability on the man. His income is a shared obligation. Hers is a private asset. The courts are applying a law written for a world in which women did not work. That world no longer exists.
Three paths are available in response to this situation. The first is to rebalance the labor market and invest in sectors where young men can find stable employment. That is politically easy, but insufficient on its own. The second is to update the legal framework: Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, and Turkey have all modified their laws to reflect dual-income households. The third path is to do nothing — and watch enforcement requests rise, marriage rates fall, and a fertility rate already down from 4 children per woman to 2.5 continue its decline.
Saudi Arabia has made significant advances in resolving financial disputes. The government can trace money across accounts, resolve commercial cases in two court sessions, and issue digital enforcement bonds in real time. What it has not done is answer the harder question: Now that women work, who pays the bills? Until it does, the 1.6 million enforcement requests filed in 2025 — the overwhelming majority against men — will not be an aberration. They will be a floor.
Wael Mahdi is an independent commentator specializing in OPEC and Saudi Arabia’s economy, and co-author of OPEC in a Shale Oil World: Where to Next?
Notable
- Saudi Arabia has made significant progress on women’s rights and labor force participation, but gender inequality and a wage gap persist, writes Sussan Saikali for the Washington-based think tank the Arab Gulf States Institute.