Our Process to Apply for Saudi Arabia Visa

In March 2020, the Saudi Arabian government offered both commercial visit visas and working visit visas. The commercial visit visa permitted soft activities to be undertaken and the working visit permitted work involving any manual tasks. In March 2020, the Saudi Arabian government removed the working visit visa, and changed the commercial visit visa to a “Business Visit Visa”. This visa type only specifically allows for directors, managers, soft based activities to undertake business meetings and work. Work of a manual nature is no longer permitted, and the working visit eliminated. Please visit our Saudi business visa guide page for more information.

The main step in the Saudi visa application process is to have your inviting sponsor company in Saudi Arabia contact the Saudi Chamber of Commerce who then use their company registration number to obtain a letter of invitation. The invitation will contain the name of the applicant, their job title, name of the UK company. If your employer is based abroad and not a UK registered company, then the letter must first be legalised by the Saudi embassy in that country and then sent to us with the rest of the application for processing via the KSA embassy in London. This will also contain an invitation number on it as well and be stated in Arabic (our team can do a translation of this, please email this to us first). Once we have this invite we can proceed accordingly to assist with the preparation of other documentation.

This is the main type of visa issued for visitors looking to travel for visiting family members. This again requires a letter of invitation from the ministry of foreign affairs in Riyadh or Jeddah. It is the responsibility of the person you are visiting to obtain this invitation and email it to you accordingly. Please visit our invitation page for more information on what this looks like and how to obtain one as well.

The main difference between the Saudi Arabia Family Visit Visa and the Saudi online visa otherwise known as the Saudi Arabian tourist visa for UK, EU and other authorised nationals from approved countries is the duration and number of entries. This visa type permits a longer duration and stay compared with the online evisa. Also this visa is common for nationals that reside in the United Kingdom but not applicable to nationals from non authorised countries in Africa, Asia and the Indian subcontinent, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The Saudi Embassy in Delhi, the Saudi embassy in Islamabad or Saudi embassy in Dhaka would need to be contacted accordingly.

We offer an online form to allow quick completion of the visa form for all nationals. The process to complete the Saudi online visa form takes less than 20 minutes and the visa is generally issued in less than 48 hours where you simply complete the information into our database and upload a picture of your passport and digital photo. With our company registration, we will then go ahead and obtain the online visit visa to saudi for you. There are 49 approved countries, with the main countries shown in the footer of this webpage, or you can visit our list of approved countries page.

For applicants that are not apart of the 49 authorised countries permitted to apply for an online visa and also cannot get a family member to obtain an invitation from the MOFA, but are a residence of the UK (with the relevant permit to allow residence in the United Kingdom) then we can apply for a Saudi Arabia tourist visa from the Saudi embassy in London on your behalf. The requirements are a little more complicated than that of a family visit visa, however with the right documentation, we can obtain this for you. Please visit our relevant page to get started.

For those who have been offered a job in Saudi Arabia, the process of applying for an employment work visa requires significantly more documentation and each applicant should expect approximately 4 – 6 weeks to complete all the necessary steps. This is assuming that there are no delays in any of the steps, and all requirements are in hand. The most important points to consider for Saudi Arabia work visas are:

You must have a full employment contract from the company in Saudi Arabia, along with a visa block number which gives the allocation and official registration from the relevant ministries in Saudi to grant you permission to be granted employment in Saudi Arabia. This is typically for the MLSD (Saudi Ministry of Labor and Social Development). The visa block number will contain information about the company you are going to work for (including their company registration and sponsorship ID), and most importantly the job title which you are to undertake and to be reflected on the respect of the paperwork.

Once you have this, the next step is for any educational certificates to be legalised by the embassy, however prior to this, they will need to be authenticated by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau in Chiswick first. This process involves the SACB communicating with either your degree, institution or professional body to verify the legitimacy of the document.

This is the most time dependent step in the entire process of applying for a Saudi Arabia work visa. The fastest turnaround time we have seen has been 2 weeks. You can do this online via their website, or alternatively if we are your acting Saudi Visa Agent, then we can also undertake this process for you as well.

Along with this you will also need to undertake a Saudi visa medical examination at an approved provider, which we can set up with us in London, or independently elsewhere. Most of the approved clinics are in London, but can also be located elsewhere around the country.

Saudi Arabia is not apart of the Hague Convention of countries, thus for documents to be used for Saudi Arabia visa applications (eg to confirm relationships in way of marriage certificates or birth certificates), document authenticity (such as educational certificates for work visas), or for documents to be legalised for use in Saudi Arabia (for example patents, contracts, identity documents, company accounts, decree absolute, HMRC documents, export documents etc) the Saudi embassy will need to ratify it. Please see our Saudi legalisation page which describes the full process.

Prior to this, each document will need to have an FCO Apostille. If the document is an education certificate for a degree, from a professional body then this will need to be legalised by the Saudi Arabian cultural bureau first. Please note that we offer a full Saudi document legalisation service where we will Apostille the document at the FCI and legalise from the KSA embassy. This would take approximately 2 working days.

For SABC verifications, this would need to be undertaken online and the timeframe would be based on the communication of the SABC and the parties they are contacting.