Methodology · being straight with visitors
What we cannot reach, and why
We write down what we do not have as we write down what we have, so that a missing figure is not read as zero or as unimportant. We have not contacted any agency yet; any formal request is a CEO decision.
9documented gaps
167broken indexes at GASTAT
The list
| Data | Agency | Why we do not show it |
|---|---|---|
| Property deals and rents down to district | Ministry of Justice and the Real Estate General Authority | The national data portal drops connections from our servers, and the real estate indicators platform is interactive dashboards with no announced export. We do not scrape dashboards before reading their terms. |
| Commercial registrations after 2023 | Ministry of Commerce | We hold the history via KAPSARC to 2023. The latest is on the national data portal, and the Ministry’s website returns a connection error to our server. |
| Building permits after 2019 | Ministry of Municipal Affairs | The last year in the open source is 2019. The latest is in the interactive “Balady” dashboards with no export; the right route is a formal data request (contacting an outside body is a CEO decision, and we have sent nothing). |
| Consumer prices by city after January 2025 (Rajab – Sha'ban 1446 AH) | GASTAT | GASTAT moved the base year to 2023 and now publishes by administrative region, not city. We do not estimate a city figure that was not published; each city takes its region’s figure and we say so. |
| Establishments by activity and region after 2018 | GASTAT | The latest are the 2018 survey and the 2010 census (archived raw with us), and there is nothing newer at the source. Establishments by activity for Saudi Arabia in the database end at Q4 2019 (Safar – Jumada al-Ula 1441 AH). |
| Census 2022 at district level | GASTAT | Not published for download; interactive view only. The finest published level: city and governorate. |
| 167 indexes in the statistical database | GASTAT | Of 560 indexes, the server answers “index not found” even from a browser on GASTAT’s own site (including quarterly wholesale and retail trade, the establishment census and tourism establishments). A fault at the source that our collector re-checks every week; some we fill from GASTAT’s published releases. |
| City × activity weekly before 21 September 2025 (29 Rabi' al-Awwal 1447 AH) | SAMA | The statistical report gives the last 52 weeks only, and the daily one the last 31 days; what left the window before we started pulling cannot be recovered. We pull daily so that nothing is lost from now on. |
| A single establishment’s sales, cash payments and online purchases | — | Not in any source anyone has published: SAMA figures are aggregated by city and activity and cover cards at point-of-sale terminals only. |
What we do
- We re-check broken indexes every week automatically; any that become readable join the pull queue on their own.
- What can be filled from GASTAT’s published releases we pull from them instead of the database.
- What needs a formal request to an agency is raised for decision; we do not send it ourselves.