Government land location records and accrual accounting in Saudi Arabia

A government entity can know that it controls a piece of land and still be unable to say, from its own records, where the land is. That does not necessarily mean any one record has failed. The deed or allocation that establishes control, the approved plan and the registered map that place the land on the ground, and the valuation report that values it are created by different bodies, for different purposes, and kept in different places.

Accrual accounting requires these records to be reconciled, so that the carrying amount can be attributed to a parcel of definite location and area. A parcel on the statement of financial position has an area and a location behind its value, whether or not anyone has checked them. This piece sets out where each record sits in Saudi Arabia, how land described by plan, plot and stated lengths can end up in the wrong place, and what the accounting standards make of a recorded location that is corrected, or shown to be wrong, after the parcel's carrying amount has been recognised.

Four records, four holders

Land used by a government entity can reach it as an allocation of state property rather than as a title in its own name.

What the standard requires · State Properties General Authority, Controls for the Allocation and Recovery of State Properties, board decision Q/1/22/2024, Articles 1 and 9; Organisation of the State Properties General Authority, Council of Ministers decision 266 of 14/5/1442H, Articles 1 and 4

The State Properties General Authority's allocation controls define allocation as placing state property at an entity's disposal for use or benefit. State property is land and buildings owned by the state and established by a deed; the Authority obtains deeds in the name of state properties and keeps the originals. Before an allocation, the Authority ensures the property has been valued by a qualified valuer under the standards of the Saudi Authority for Accredited Valuers and the public sector accounting standards, with land and building valued separately.

The approved subdivision plan, which gives a parcel its plan and plot number, is held by the municipality, and a paper or electronic copy can be requested through the Balady platform. Since 2022 a registered title with a coordinate map is held by the Real Estate General Authority, but only for land in zones it has declared. The value sits in the valuer's report.

So four records bear on one parcel: the deed or allocation that establishes control, the approved plan, the registered map and the valuation report. Each has its own holder and does its own job. None of them, alone, brings together the control, position, area and value of the entity's land, which is what the accounts ask for.

One asset in several records, each governed by its own rule

What the register settles, and where it does not yet reach

What the standard requires · Real Estate Registration Law, Royal Decree M/91 of 19/9/1443H, Articles 1, 4, 7, 8 and 39, and decree item 2; Council of Ministers decision 537, item 12

The registration law's title deed states the property's location, boundaries, description and use, and its map is an engineering survey drawing on a national coordinate system. The register has absolute evidential force and can be challenged only for clerical error or forgery. Zones are declared by the Real Estate General Authority, and the earlier documentation regimes stay in force for property outside them. First registration requires complete geospatial data, and a valid deed except for state-owned property. Government bodies holding property in a declared zone must register it, in coordination with the State Properties General Authority.

Title registration has been law since 1423H (2002), when the earlier registration law was issued; the 1443H law replaced it. On 8 June 2026 the Minister of Municipalities and Housing announced the register's first 1 million records, with more than 3 million parcels declared for registration, and named expansion to all cities and regions as the next phase.

The register is built to fix the line. England's is not: there, the boundary shown on the register is a general boundary, and by statute "a general boundary does not determine the exact line". The Saudi register records boundaries and corner coordinates, prepared to a stated accuracy. What remains open is the land it does not yet hold.

A plan number is not a position

The list contains no coordinates. Converting a paper deed to an electronic one changes the medium, and the parcel is still placed by its plan, its plot and its stated lengths. Where those are missing, the remedy is a municipal letter, which leads back to the plan. A parcel described this way was not fixed in coordinates when its deed was written, and three different things can then place it somewhere it is not.

The survey reference. Coordinates identify a position only when their geodetic datum is known. Ain el Abd 1970 is an older regional geodetic datum, and the same latitude and longitude read in Ain el Abd 1970 and plotted in WGS 84 land in different places. Applying the published transformation for onshore Saudi Arabia, EPSG 1111, which states its own accuracy as 18 m, the difference is 76 m at Riyadh, 69 m at Dammam, 85 m at Abha, 97 m at Hail and 116 m at Tabuk, each displaced towards the north-west. The offsets lie between about 70 and 120 m, before any other error is counted.

The reference feature that moved or disappeared. Where a description places a parcel by distance or direction from a building or another feature, the parcel's recorded position depends on the recorded position of that feature. If the feature has been demolished, rebuilt or relocated, the description, read from the feature as it now stands, points to a place the parcel never was. No change of datum corrects it. The positional error is as large as the feature's movement; as the surroundings continue to change, reconstructing the original reference becomes harder. The US Bureau of Land Management's specifications for land descriptions require a referenced monument to be described "with sufficient particularity as to be capable of definite identification and susceptible to only one interpretation". A building meets that only for as long as it stands where it stood.

The marks that were never set.

Georeferencing a paper map, fitting it to its position on the ground, adds error of its own. Fetai and co-authors compared boundaries digitised from analogue cadastral maps with survey records in one North Macedonian and one Slovenian district. The positional RMSE was 48 cm in the North Macedonian district and 56 cm in the Slovenian one, and it carried into parcel areas as an RMSE of 26 m² and 23 m² respectively. The error came from scanning, georeferencing and vectorising the paper maps. The register's own target for imagery-based mapping in urban zones is an absolute horizontal accuracy of 25 cm.

A parcel in the wrong place can be valued for the wrong use

A parcel plotted on the wrong side of a planning boundary can be assigned the permitted use of that location and valued on that basis. The error is then not only one of area. It can move the parcel to a different level of value, in either direction, and nothing in the figure shows it.

The State's own rules provide for the gap

The registration regulations make the same provision for area. Where the area on the ground differs from the deed, the deed area is registered if the difference is within a tolerance, which in urban zones is 2% of the area and no more than 100 m². A registered area is the deed's figure, checked against the ground to a stated limit.

What the accounts need from a location

For allocated land, control rests on the allocation rather than the deed, and the Ministry of Finance's manual works through that case for a building allocated by the State Properties General Authority. Location has its accounting effect at measurement, because area and position are inputs into the land's current value and the classification under which it is valued.

What the transitional relief is for, and why a valuation is not a register

When a corrected location is an error

The answer depends on where the entity stands in its adoption of accrual accounting.

Our reading, not a standard · Projects Advisors, from Saudi PSAS 33 paragraphs 21 and 24, PSAS 3 paragraphs 7 and 47, and the Real Estate Registration Law, Article 4

Where a location is settled before the parcel's first measurement, the correct location is incorporated in that measurement and its effect enters the opening balance, without restating anything, which makes that the cheapest point to settle it. Once the parcel carries an amount under the standards, the question is what information existed when that amount was struck. Where the parcel sat in a declared zone with a registered map, the map was available, and carrying a different area beside it is a candidate prior-period error, which may require retrospective restatement, rather than a revision of an estimate. Where no better information existed, a later correction is a change in estimate, made going forward.

Saying which evidence a location rests on

The registration regulations describe the routes by which a location enters the register: a ground survey; boundaries fixed from orthorectified imagery where a wall, fence or other built boundary is visible; and existing survey data approved by a competent body and consistent with the deeds. An entity's own records add the cases the register does not reach: a plan copy fitted to features or imagery, and a description alone.

Each parcel's location can be recorded with the evidence it rests on. That is a statement of origin, not a score. ISO's published summary of ISO 19157-1, the standard for describing the quality of geographic data, says it does not attempt to define minimum acceptable levels of quality, because setting those levels belongs in a product specification.

The template does not itself require the valuer to verify area or boundaries. Where the area or boundary data came from the client or a third party, the report must identify its source and any limitations, and set out how it was verified. That is where an unverified location becomes visible.

The line the contracts do not carry

Neither asks for deliverables referenced to the national coordinate frame, so drawings can be editable, owned by the entity and still positioned against whatever control points the entity supplied.

The articles name nobody to keep a dissolved consultant's or contractor's project records after deletion. The entity's accepted copy is then the only copy. A contract can require drawings to be georeferenced to the national frame and checked at acceptance against known control points. That requirement is absent from the standard forms.

Four tests that separate a delivered file from an accepted record

What to ask of a parcel on the books

Which instrument gives this entity control of the parcel: a deed in its name, an allocation, or something else, and who holds the original?
Is the parcel in a declared registration zone, and if so, has it been registered with a map?
Which evidence does the location in the asset register rest on: registered map, approved survey, plan fitted to imagery, or description alone?
If the description refers to a building or feature, does that feature still stand where it stood when the description was written?
In which datum are any coordinates on the plan recorded, and is it stated on the drawing?
Does the permitted use the valuation assumed match the approved plan at the parcel's actual position?
Was the parcel measured for the accounts before or after its location was settled, and if after, what information was available at the time?
Does the valuation report say where the area came from, and how, if at all, it was verified?

Sources. Bureau of Experts at the Council of Ministers, Real Estate Registration Law, Royal Decree M/91 of 19/9/1443H, with Council of Ministers decision 537, in Arabic. Real Estate General Authority, Implementing Regulations of the Real Estate Registration Law, Articles 13, 16, 42, 43 and 44 and Tables 1 and 2, in Arabic. Ministry of Municipalities and Housing, announcement of 8 June 2026. Ministry of Justice, guide to the deed-update service, in Arabic. Balady, copies of approved plans, in Arabic.

Bureau of Experts at the Council of Ministers, Organisation of the State Properties General Authority, in Arabic. Umm Al-Qura, Controls for the Allocation and Recovery of State Properties, in Arabic. State Properties General Authority, Rules and Procedures of the State Properties Register, first edition, July 2025, in Arabic.

IOGP, EPSG Geodetic Parameter Dataset, transformation 1111, Ain el Abd to WGS 84 (2); the offsets are calculated by Projects Advisors. US Bureau of Land Management, Specifications for Descriptions of Land, revised 2017, pages 19 and 20. Fetai, Tekavec, Kosmatin Fras and Lisec, Inconsistencies in Cadastral Boundary Data: Digitisation and Maintenance, Land 11(12), 2022. Land Registration Act 2002, section 60. ISO, ISO 19157-1:2023, published summary.

Ministry of Finance, Saudi Public Sector Accounting Standards 1, 3, 33 and 45, 2024 editions, published in Arabic and English. Ministry of Finance, comprehensive manual for the census and valuation of assets of government entities, second edition, pages 40, 41 and 67, in Arabic. Saudi Authority for Accredited Valuers, digital library, approved minimum-requirements report template, in Arabic.

Ministry of Finance, standard contract for general construction and standard contract for engineering design services, second version, in Arabic. Bureau of Experts at the Council of Ministers, Companies Law, Royal Decree M/132 of 1/12/1443H, in Arabic.

The land is on the books. Its location is held somewhere else