Riyadh Metro Line 7 First Phase Targets 2026 Construction Start

Key facts

The Royal Commission for Riyadh City is aiming to move Riyadh Metro Line 7 into construction during 2026, according to Saudi financial news outlet Argaam. The planned first phase covers about 65 kilometers between Diriyah Gate in the city's north and the Qiddiya entertainment development in the southwest, passing King Abdullah International Gardens, King Salman Park and Misk City, according to trade publication MEED. Of that distance, 47 kilometers would run underground and 19 kilometers above ground, across 19 stations, 14 of them underground and five elevated, per specifications reported by Construction Review Online.

Bidding on the design and build contract, estimated at $900 million, has run for well over a year. The Royal Commission for Riyadh City issued the original request for proposals in September 2024 and pushed the submission deadline back more than once before four international construction groups, including consortia anchored by France's Alstom and Japan's Hitachi Rail, filed commercial bids by January 31, 2026, according to tunnelbuilder.com. Bidders submitted best and final offers on June 21, and MEED reported on June 24 that the Royal Commission for Riyadh City expected to name a winning contractor imminently, though no formal award had been confirmed as of that report.

What it means for Riyadh

None of Line 7's planned stations sit near Lucky Tea's current stores in Al Hamra, Ar Rabi or along Abdallah Ibn Soleiman Al Hamadani Street. The route runs through the giga-project belt on the city's northern and southwestern edges, not the established residential and commercial districts those stores serve, so this is a citywide infrastructure story rather than a neighborhood one. The more relevant signal for Riyadh residents generally is pace: the city's six-line, 176-kilometer metro network only opened in stages starting December 2024, and by October 2025 it had already carried more than 120 million passengers with a 99.8 percent on-time performance rate, according to Argaam. Moving straight from finishing that rollout to tendering a seventh line shows the Royal Commission for Riyadh City treating the network as unfinished business rather than a completed project.

For a household anywhere in the city, a line connecting Diriyah Gate to Qiddiya is also a preview of how Riyadh plans to keep tying its outlying heritage and entertainment districts back to the neighborhoods people actually live in, the same logic that has already put existing stations within walking distance of parks, malls and cafe streets across the current network.

Background

Riyadh Metro's six original lines opened in phases beginning December 2024, part of a rollout the Royal Commission for Riyadh City has cited a 99.8 percent on-time performance rate for through the network's first year, according to Argaam. Line 7 would be the network's first genuinely new line since that launch, rather than an extension of an existing one, which is part of why its tender has drawn so much attention from regional construction press.

The tender itself has moved slowly relative to the 2026 construction target now attached to it. After the original request for proposals went out in September 2024, the Royal Commission for Riyadh City extended the bid deadline from an initial March 2025 date to June 2025, and again later that year, before finally accepting commercial bids on January 31, 2026, according to Argaam's coverage of the deadline changes. The scale involved helps explain the delay: a mostly underground line built to serve giga-projects that are themselves still under construction, including Qiddiya's entertainment district and the Diriyah Gate heritage development, both flagship components of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 tourism push.

Takeaway

Riyadh Metro Line 7 will not carry passengers in 2026. What is targeted for this year is the start of construction, following a design and build tender that has run for more than a year and, as of the most recent reporting, was still awaiting a formal contract award. The 65-kilometer line linking Diriyah Gate to Qiddiya is nonetheless a marker of how quickly Riyadh is moving from finishing one metro network to building the next, a pace that matters for the wider city even in districts the new line will never reach.