National Water Company

About the Utility

National Water Company serves Saudi Arabia’s national municipal water and sanitation network. The Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture (MEWA) publishes the kingdom’s municipal tables for water networks, customer accounts, sewer networks and wastewater treatment with the company named as their data source, and those tables underpin this Snapshot. The company’s footprint therefore runs from distribution pipes and its own groundwater and surface-water treatment plants to the sewers and plants that handle municipal wastewater. Its customer base keeps growing: active water subscriber accounts have risen every year since 2019, reaching 2,336.66 thousand in 2024. Service is not yet universal, since part of the population remains outside both the water and the sewer networks.

Water System

Urban supply leans on bulk desalinated water. Of the 3,708,921,457 m³ of water distributed for urban purposes in 2024, measured net, 2,767,383,013 m³ was desalinated water from the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC). The company also operates groundwater and surface-water treatment plants, whose production MEWA tabulates separately. MEWA classes all residential and commercial supply as drinking water for urban purposes, so demand is essentially a municipal drinking-water load. Coverage remains the clearest operating gap: water supply reached 80.76% of the population that year, on the census basis MEWA adopted from 2022.

Wastewater System

Sanitation still trails water supply in reach. The sewer network, which MEWA now counts only where it is built and operating, extended to 50,104.14 km at the end of 2024, and sewerage covered 65.60% of the population that year. Treatment volumes have grown alongside the network: municipal treated wastewater rose in every year of MEWA’s series since 2017, and 162 plants were treating municipal wastewater by the latest year. The larger task is extending collection networks and household sewer connections to the communities that the sewerage system does not yet reach.

Investment & Priorities

MEWA’s statistics show the company’s investment through the assets it delivers each year rather than through budgets. In 2024 it added 1,131 km of water pipe, 432.68 km of sewer and 74,153 household water connections, while municipal wastewater treatment capacity has grown since 2020. Reuse is the main resilience lever on record: per the General Irrigation Organization and the company, 26.33% of treated wastewater was reused that year. These are delivered outcomes, not targets or plans.

Key Challenges

1. Extending sewerage coverage, which reached 65.60% of the population in 2024, behind water supply at 80.76%.
2. Managing an urban supply system that relies on desalinated bulk water from the Saline Water Conversion Corporation.
3. Connecting a growing customer base while maintaining and extending a 130,054 km water network.
4. Raising treated-wastewater reuse as treatment volumes and plant capacity continue to grow.