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Expat residents in Saudi Arabia: a patient base that needs its own language

Non-Saudis are about 44% of the population and most of the privately insured. Here is what the numbers say and how to serve them in their language.

5 October 2026 · 4 min read

Non-Saudis made up about 44% of Saudi Arabia's population in mid-2024 and, according to the Council of Health Insurance, about 9.5 million of the 14 million people with private health insurance in the third quarter of 2025. For many private clinics they are a large share of insured patients. Clinics serve them well when ads stay in Arabic and pages, replies and insurance steps are also available in English and the other languages the team speaks.

What the numbers say

  • Population. The General Authority for Statistics put the mid-2024 population at 35.3 million, of whom about 15.7 million (44.4%) were non-Saudi. Non-Saudis accounted for 75.6% of the year's increase. These are summary figures from the Population Estimates 2024 document; open the full tables before quoting them.
  • Insurance. The Council of Health Insurance spokesperson said, as reported by Al Watan on 26 October 2025, that there were 14 million private health insurance beneficiaries in the third quarter of 2025: 10 million primary members and 4 million dependants. About 9.5 million were non-Saudi and about 4.5 million Saudi.
  • Doctor gender. In an online survey of 3,949 people in Saudi Arabia published in 2024, women preferred a female doctor for general examinations (67.9%) and men preferred a male doctor (63.3%), with the preference strongest for intimate examinations. It was a convenience sample, so read the figures as a direction.

What the research leaves open

We found no study of language preferences among expatriate patients in Saudi Arabia. The language mix that suits your clinic comes from your own records: the language of each first message, the language patients ask for at the desk, and the questions they repeat.

Arabic in the ad, more languages after the click

According to a published summary of the Ministry of Health's health advertising controls (Al Watan, 29 January 2025), health ads must be in Arabic. Other languages can be added alongside the Arabic. Our article on medical advertising rules covers the wider controls. In practice:

  • Write each ad in Arabic, and add an English line where the audience calls for it.
  • Send English speakers to an English landing page with the same service, price and doctor details.
  • Reply in the language the patient wrote in, using approved templates for each language the team supports. Reply speed matters in every language, as our piece on the first minutes after an enquiry explains.

What to publish in each language

  1. Which doctors speak which languages, on each doctor's page.
  2. Whether a female doctor is available in each specialty, and on which days.
  3. Insurance approval steps: the insurers you accept, what the patient brings, how long approval usually takes at your clinic, and how co-payment works.
  4. Directions, parking and opening hours.

Keep the Arabic site as the base, add each language as a complete version, and have a fluent staff member review each translated page before it goes live.

One page per language, linked properly

Google documents how to tell it about localized versions of a page, using hreflang annotations, so each searcher sees the right language version. Keep one URL per language for each page, link the versions to each other, and leave machine-translated duplicates out of the site. Multi-specialty complexes can see how this fits a larger site on our medical complex page.

How to check

  1. For one month, record the language of every first message and call. Work out the share for each language.
  2. Compare those shares with the languages your pages and reply templates cover. As a working threshold, any language above about 10% of enquiries without its own pages is a gap.
  3. Track the booking rate for each language: bookings divided by enquiries. A clearly lower rate in one language points to a gap in replies or pages.
  4. Count female-doctor questions in the same month. If they are frequent, publish the availability more clearly.

Repeat the count each quarter and keep the results in one dated table.

In practice

Start with the insurance page and reply templates in English, then add doctors' languages and female doctor availability. If you would like help building the language versions, the Naqar team can work through them with you as part of Websites & Web Platforms.

Common questions

Can a health ad in Saudi Arabia be in English only?

According to the published summary of the Ministry of Health's controls, health ads must be in Arabic. English can be added alongside it.

Which languages should we add after English?

The ones your patients use and your team speaks fluently. One month of enquiry records will show you.

Should we publish whether female doctors are available?

Where it is accurate, yes. In one 2024 Saudi online survey, most women preferred a female doctor for general examinations, so a clear answer on the page saves them a question.

Sources

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