Bahrain Reaches 72 Percent of Its 25,000 Citizen Hiring Target, With Training at 71 Percent
Bahrain had met 72 percent of its 2026 goal of employing 25,000 citizens by the end of the third quarter, and 71 percent of its goal of training 15,000, according to third-quarter labour-market indicators approved by the Cabinet at its weekly meeting chaired on 12 October by His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister. On our calculation, the rounded published shares imply 18,000 Bahrainis placed in jobs and 10,650 trained over the first 3 quarters of the year.
The third quarter was the strongest of 2026
The employment reading climbed from 23 percent after the first quarter and 43 percent after the second to 72 percent after the third. The 29-point gain from July to September was the largest of the year’s 3 quarters, against 23 points in the first and 20 in the second, and implies 7,250 hires on our calculation from the rounded shares, compared with 5,000 in the second quarter.
Training followed the same pattern. Its reading rose 30.5 points in the third quarter, against 14.5 points in the second, taking the tally from 40.5 percent to 71 percent, or 4,575 more trainees on our calculation.
The third-quarter hiring gain matched last year’s. In 2025 the employment reading also gained 29 points between the end of the second and third quarters, from 49 percent to 78 percent, before a further 30 points in the final quarter carried the year to 108 percent.
Bahrain’s hiring target: share of 25,000 met by quarter end
| Quarter end | 2026 | Hires implied, 2026 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| First quarter | 23% | 5,750 | 24% |
| Second quarter | 43% | 10,750 | 49% |
| Third quarter | 72% | 18,000 | 78% |
Quarterly percentages as published in the Cabinet’s statements; 2025 full year, from the year-end tally: 108%, or 26,963 hires. Implied hires are our calculation from the rounded published shares.
What the fourth quarter needs to complete both goals
Closing the year on target needs 28 points of the hiring goal, or 7,000 hires, and 29 points of the training goal, or 4,350 trainees, in the fourth quarter, on our calculation from the published shares. On those shares, both are smaller than what the third quarter itself delivered.
On our arithmetic, and not as a forecast, a fourth quarter that repeated the third quarter’s gains would take employment to 101 percent of target and training to 101.5 percent; one that matched the final quarter of 2025, when the employment reading added 30 points and training 42, would take them to 102 percent and 113 percent.
With 3 quarters of the year gone, a straight-line path to 25,000 would have put the count at 18,750 by the end of September. The 18,000 implied by the latest reading sits 750 hires, or 3 points, short of that line on our calculation. Training is 600 trainees, or 4 points, behind its straight-line mark of 11,250.
Against a year earlier, both readings are lower. At the same point in 2025, 78 percent of the hiring target and 108 percent of the training target had been reached, so this year’s readings stand 6 points and 37 points below those marks.
Bahrain’s training target: share of 15,000 met by quarter end
| Quarter end | 2026 | Trainees implied, 2026 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| First quarter | 26% | 3,900 | 28% |
| Second quarter | 40.5% | 6,075 | 63% |
| Third quarter | 71% | 10,650 | 108% |
2025 full year, from the year-end tally: 150%, or 22,508 trainees. Implied trainees are our calculation from the rounded published shares.
What a completed year looked like in 2025
The Ministry of Labour’s tally for 2025 shows the mix behind a target that was beaten by 1,963 hires. New entrants to the labour market were the largest group at 9,149, or 114 percent of their own 8,000 sub-target, and 42.3 percent of all those hired had been out of work for 2 months or more, on our calculation.
Who filled Bahrain’s 26,963 private-sector hires in 2025
| Group | Bahrainis hired | Share of total |
|---|---|---|
| New entrants to the labour market | 9,149 | 33.9% |
| Out of work more than 6 months | 7,166 | 26.6% |
| Job changers, 1 month or less | 6,409 | 23.8% |
| Out of work 2 to 6 months | 4,239 | 15.7% |
Shares are our calculation; the 4 groups sum to 26,963.
Training in 2025 reached 22,508 Bahrainis, 7,508 above the 15,000 goal. Current employees made up 51.3 percent of trainees (11,536), jobseekers 42.8 percent (9,643) and other groups 5.9 percent (1,329), on our calculation.
For 2026 the new-entrant goal is 10,000, against 8,000 in 2025, an increase of 25 percent on our calculation. The quarterly statements put progress on it at 18 percent after the first quarter and 33 percent after the second, or 1,800 and 3,300 new entrants on our calculation; the October statement carried no third-quarter reading for it.
Citizens’ share of the insured workforce rises to 25.3 percent
Social Insurance Organization figures for the second quarter of 2026, the latest available, put Bahrainis at 25.3 percent of the 624,820 insured workers, up 0.46 points from the first quarter, and at 18.4 percent of the private sector, where all 466,680 non-Bahraini contributors work, on our calculation.
The higher share came from the expatriate side of the ledger. Non-Bahraini contributors fell by 12,027, or 2.5 percent, between the 2 quarters, while the Bahraini count eased by 182. Of insured Bahrainis, 66.6 percent work in the private sector, on our calculation.
Set against that base, the 18,000 hires implied for the first 3 quarters of 2026 equal 17.1 percent of the 105,362 Bahrainis insured in the private sector in the second quarter, on our calculation, although on the 2025 tally’s definition the hiring count is a gross flow that includes job changers. On the permit side, the Labour Market Regulatory Authority issued 129,149 new employment work permits in 2025, 11.4 percent fewer than in 2024, while active foreign work permits reached 654,672 at the end of the year, up 1.8 percent. Bahrainis hired in 2025 equalled 20.9 percent of those new permits, on our calculation.
Bahrainis’ share of insured workers rises in 2026
| Measure | Q1 2026 | Q2 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bahraini contributors | 158,322 | 158,140 | -182 |
| of which public sector | 52,542 | 52,778 | +236 |
| of which private sector | 105,780 | 105,362 | -418 |
| Non-Bahraini contributors | 478,707 | 466,680 | -12,027 |
| All contributors | 637,029 | 624,820 | -12,209 |
| Bahraini share, all sectors | 24.85% | 25.31% | +0.46 pts |
| Bahraini share, private sector | 18.10% | 18.42% | +0.32 pts |
Quarterly executive summary of the Social Insurance Organization; shares and changes are our calculation.
Why it matters: The quarterly indicators follow agreements reached with the Legislative Authority during talks on the 2025 to 2026 state budget and form part of the Labour Market Plan 2023 to 2026, which reaches the end of its period this year. With 72 percent of the hiring goal met after 3 quarters, the fourth quarter needs a smaller gain on the published shares than either the third quarter of 2026 or the final quarter of 2025 delivered, and citizens’ share of insured workers rose in the second quarter as the expatriate count eased. Bahrain beat both goals in 2025, by 8 percent on hiring and 50 percent on training.
Outlook: A fourth-quarter gain of 28 points on the published shares would complete the 2026 hiring goal; the 2025 full-year tally was released by the Ministry of Labour on 12 January 2026. The Information and eGovernment Authority’s Labour Force Survey selects a random sample of more than 4,000 households over the period from 1 October to 31 December 2026 to measure employment and economic participation rates.
Sources: Bahrain Cabinet, Bahrain News Agency, Ministry of Labour, Social Insurance Organization, Labour Market Regulatory Authority, Information and eGovernment Authority, The Edge.
