On 23 September 1932, Royal Decree number 2716 changed the name of a country. The Kingdom of Hejaz and Najd and its Dependencies — a title that reads like a merger agreement, because that is roughly what it was — became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, effective from the first day of Libra in the solar Hijri year.
That is what National Day marks. Not a war won or a border drawn, but a paragraph that turned a set of unified territories into a single named state. This year it falls on Wednesday 23 September, and it is the ninety-sixth.
Two national days, and why
Saudi Arabia observes two founding dates and visitors regularly conflate them.
Founding Day, on 22 February, was established by royal decree in 2022 and commemorates 1727, when Imam Mohammed bin Saud became ruler of Diriyah and the first Saudi state began. It is about origin — the Al Saud, the mud-brick capital, the three-hundred-year story.
National Day, on 23 September, marks 1932 and King Abdulaziz. It is about unification and the modern state. It became an official national day in 1965 under King Faisal, and a public holiday only in 2004, by supreme order of King Fahd.
The two-day arrangement is recent and deliberate. For most of the twentieth century the country dated itself from 1932, which made it younger than most of its neighbours’ independence dates. Founding Day moved the origin story back two hundred and ninety-five years, to a place you can now buy a ticket to walk around.
Source: U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Tyler Moody, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
What actually happens
The visible half is aviation. The Saudi Hawks, the Royal Saudi Air Force’s aerobatic team, formed on 24 January 1999, fly British Hawk aircraft painted white and green and trail white, green and red smoke. They are genuinely good, and in National Day weeks they tour.
The scale is worth understanding before you plan around it. In 2023 the displays ran from 17 to 23 September across thirteen cities — Riyadh, Jeddah, Al-Khobar, Dammam, Jubail, Al-Ahsa, Hafar Al-Batin, Abha, Khamis Mushait, Tabuk, Taif, Al-Baha and Al-Jouf — with Typhoons, F-15s and Tornados alongside the Hawks, plus military parades and naval processions. That is not a fly-past. It is a week of them, in most of the places you might be.
Around that: fireworks, drone shows, a national identity and slogan released by the General Entertainment Authority, and heavy retail discounting. The 2025 edition ran under the slogan Pride in Our Nature; 2024’s was We Dream and Achieve. The 2026 identity had not been published when this was written — it has historically arrived in the last days of August or the first days of September, and there is a good deal of confidently wrong information circulating in the meantime.
One thing it is not
National Day does not overlap with Riyadh Season. The season has opened in October in recent years and runs into the spring; late September falls in the gap between the end of the summer programme and the start of the winter one.
This matters if you are timing a trip. A traveller who books late September expecting both will get one, and the quieter one at that.
Read also: Riyadh: the guide
Whether to travel around it
Three honest considerations.
It is a public holiday, and things close. Government offices shut, and the holiday period has in past years run to several days rather than one. Museums and attractions generally stay open and get busier; business does not. If your trip has a commercial purpose, this is the wrong week.
Domestic travel gets tight. The country moves internally on National Day. Flights between Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam, and hotel rooms in all three, are booked by Saudi travellers first. Book earlier than you would otherwise.
The weather has not turned yet. Late September in Riyadh and Jeddah is still hot. The season that makes Saudi Arabia genuinely pleasant starts in November. If you are choosing between a National Day trip and a December one purely on experience, December wins comfortably.
Source: Saudi Press Agency, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
If you go anyway
Go to Riyadh rather than Jeddah. National Day is a state occasion and the state is in Riyadh; the flags, the projections onto the towers, the traffic on Tahlia and the atmosphere in Boulevard City are all bigger there.
Make one stop that most visitors miss: Al Masmak, the mud-brick fort in old Riyadh where King Abdulaziz’s recapture of the city in 1902 began the campaign that ended in the 1932 decree. It reopened in July 2025 after renovation by the Museums Commission. Standing in it on National Day is the shortest route to understanding why the date exists.
Then drive out to Diriyah in the evening, which is where the other national day comes from. Doing both in one day is the most efficient history lesson available in the country, and on 23 September it is also the most crowded. Take the trade.
The thing underneath
It is easy to read the flags and the fly-pasts as ordinary national pageantry, and much of it is. But a country that in 2022 added a second founding date, and has since spent very large sums making the site of that founding visitable, is doing something more specific than celebrating itself.
It is making a case about age. Ninety-six years is a young state. Two hundred and ninety-nine is not. Both numbers describe the same country, and this September you can stand in the places that produced each of them, twenty minutes apart.
Featured Image Source: Yasser Bakhsh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
