MENA Bridge · Market Research
Jordan Economy, Population & Capital Flows Tracker
The demand-side backdrop to Jordanian property: what the economy is producing, where capital is coming from, how many people there are and how households are forming, and who is working.
Real GDP growth · year on year
2.9%
Q1 2026 · constant prices
▲ 0.2 pp vs a year earlier
Real GDP per head · annual growth
1.1%
2025 · output growth less population growth
▲ 0.4 pp on 2024 · fell every year 2010–2020
Property complex · share of GDP
16.1%
Construction + real estate · Q1 2026
5.9% of the quarter’s growth
Direct investment · rolling four quarters
1,280
JD million · net inflow to Q1 2026
▲ 19.6% 2025 against 2024
ASE real-estate sector index
2,414
Month-end August 2026
▼ 70.3% since July 2006
Population · end of year
11.94M
End-2025 · estimate on a 2015 census base
▲ 1.7% annual growth
Remittances received · latest quarter
796
JD million · 2026Q1 · from Jordanians abroad
▲ 12.4% on the same quarter a year earlier
Net remittances · last full year
1,685
JD million · 2025 · received less sent out
▼ 20.6% against the 2015 peak of JD 2,123 million
Unemployment rate · total population
16.1%
Q1 2026 · Jordanians and non-Jordanians
Unchanged on Q4 2025 · Jordanians only 21.3% in 2025
Horizon
What the economy is producing
Three questions, in the order the charts answer them: how fast the economy grew, what it is made of, and which activities actually moved it. Everything in this section is at constant prices — real growth, with inflation taken out — and the activity-by-activity detail runs to Q1 2026.
Growth, quarter against the same quarter a year earlier
Constant prices strip out inflation; current prices do not. The gap between the two lines is roughly the GDP deflator.
What GDP is made of, Q1 2026
Share of GDP at constant prices. Activities below 2% of GDP are grouped; construction is gold, real-estate activities brick.
Reading the composition
What the shapes mean. Every slice is one economic activity’s share of GDP at constant prices in Q1 2026. The 7 activities below 2% are grouped into one slice worth 5.5% between them; nothing is dropped, and the slices sum to the whole economy. Net taxes on products is not an activity — it is the bridge from what activities produce to GDP at market prices, and it is shown in grey.
What the series is doing. Manufacturing industries is the largest activity at 16.6%. Real-estate activities are second at 13.1% — larger than wholesale and retail trade, larger than public administration, and more than four times construction’s 3.0%.
What that means. The property complex is a sixth of Jordan’s economy by size and a twentieth of its growth. Put this chart beside the ranked growth chart: the second-biggest slice belongs to the slowest-growing activity.
What to watch. Shares are quarterly and seasonal, and the real-estate slice is mostly imputed rent rather than development — see the note below the growth charts. Watch whether construction’s slice grows, which is the one that means building.
How fast each activity grew, Q1 2026
Each bar is that activity's OWN growth rate against the same quarter a year earlier — not its effect on the economy. All 20 measured activities, ranked. Construction is gold, real-estate activities brick.
How much of the economy's growth each activity delivered, Q1 2026
The same activities, now weighted by how big each one is. Each bar is the part of the quarter's 2.9% growth that came from that activity, in percentage points. The bars add up to the 2.9%.
Reading these two charts
What the two charts are. On the left, how fast each activity grew — its own growth rate, on its own terms, whatever its size. On the right, how much of the economy’s growth each activity actually delivered, which depends on how big it is as well as how fast it grew.
What a number on the right-hand chart means. The economy grew 2.9% in Q1 2026. Think of that 2.9% as a cake cut between the activities: each bar is one activity’s slice of it, measured in percentage points. Manufacturing industries is 16.6% of the economy and grew 5.3%, so it delivered 0.86 pp of the 2.9% points — 30% of all the growth in the country. A bar reading 0.01 delivered one hundredth of a point, about 0.3% of the quarter’s growth: that activity is either very small, or it barely grew, or both. Add every bar together and you are back at 2.9%. As a rule of thumb, an activity’s contribution is its share of GDP multiplied by its own growth rate.
What that means. Real-estate activities are 13.1% of the output and 3.8% of the growth. The second-largest activity in the country ranks ninth of 20 for what it added this quarter, because it grew 0.8% against the economy’s 2.9%. Size and momentum are not the same thing, and for this sector they point in opposite directions.
What to watch. The right-hand chart is where a turn in the property market would show up first — not as a bigger slice on the pie, which moves slowly, but as construction climbing this ranking. It sits at 0.06 pp today.
What “real estate activities” means here, and what it does not. In the national accounts this line is dominated by the imputed rent of owner-occupied dwellings plus actual rents — it measures the service flow from the housing stock that already exists. It is not development activity, not transactions and not construction. Development is the separate construction line, 3.0% of GDP in Q1 2026; transactions are counted by the Department of Lands & Survey. Reading 13.1% as “development is an eighth of the economy” would be wrong.
The property complex as a share of GDP
Construction and real-estate activities, constant prices.
Why this chart is short
This chart covers 3 quarters because the Department of Statistics changed its GDP presentation at the Q3 2025 release, moving from about eleven aggregated sectors to twenty activities. In the earlier presentation real estate was not reported separately — it sat inside a combined “Finance, Insurance & Real Estate Services” line. Splicing the two would put a different measurement either side of the break, so the chart starts where the current definition starts. It lengthens by one quarter every release.
These are quarterly shares, so they move with the season. Construction is summer work; real-estate value added is mostly imputed rent and barely moves quarter to quarter. When construction and agriculture fall back in the winter quarters, real estate’s share rises without anything happening in the property market. Compare like quarter with like quarter.
What was first published, and what stands today
Dashed: the figure in the release that first carried the quarter. Solid: the current estimate. Bars: the revision.
Reading this chart
What the shapes mean. The dashed line is what the Department of Statistics published for each quarter when that quarter was new. The solid line is what it says today. The bars are the difference.
What the series is doing. 11 of the 17 quarters here have been restated since first publication. 9 were revised up and 2 down, the largest being +0.4 pp in Q1 2023.
What that means. Jordan’s recent growth was consistently better than first reported. An investment case built on a press release from the quarter itself was working from numbers the Department has since moved.
What to watch. Revisions arrive in batches when the Department rebases, not steadily. A quarter that has not yet been through one of those rounds should be treated as provisional however precise it looks.
Where capital is coming from
Net direct investment into Jordan fell from JD 1,487 million in 2014 to JD 430 million in 2021, then recovered 3.1-fold to JD 1,327 million in 2025.
Direct investment into Jordan
Bars are the quarter; the line is the rolling four quarters, which is what removes the seasonality.
How the stock market has priced listed property companies, July 2006 to August 2026
Four Amman Stock Exchange sector indices, month-end, each rebased to 100 at the start. These are the share prices of a small number of listed companies — not property prices, not land values and not building activity.
How the direct-investment figure is built. The Central Bank reports direct investment inside the financial account of the balance of payments, stated as net lending or net borrowing — so an inflow of capital into Jordan appears in the source as a negative number. The chart reverses that sign, so a taller bar means more money arriving. It is the net figure: foreign investment into Jordan less Jordanian investment abroad, and it is measured on transactions in the quarter, not on the stock of foreign-owned assets.
Reading this chart
What this chart is not. It is the first thing to say, because the lines fall a long way. These are share prices of a handful of companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange. They are not property prices, not land values, not rents and not construction activity. A real-estate share price can halve in a year when the buildings the company owns have not moved at all. Jordanian land and apartment prices did not fall by two thirds over this period; the listed companies’ market capitalisation did.
What the shapes mean. Each line is a sector index of the Amman Stock Exchange, rebased so that every series starts at 100 in July 2006. The scale is logarithmic, so equal vertical distances are equal percentage moves.
What the series are doing. Over 20 years the market as a whole is +24.6% and banks +35.2%, while real estate is −70.3% and engineering & construction −64.5%. Read that against the market rather than against zero: real estate is −76.2% relative to the general index and engineering & construction −71.5%. Note also how little the whole market did — +24.6% over two decades — so the starting point in July 2006 was a high one for everything, not just for property.
What that means. Investors have steadily de-rated Jordan’s listed property companies against a market that itself went almost nowhere. That is a statement about how equity investors price these particular companies — their earnings, their governance, their free float — and it sits oddly beside a sector that is an eighth of GDP. It is a sentiment signal, not a valuation of the country’s building stock.
What to watch. A change in direction matters far more here than any level, and both property lines have turned up since 2025. For what property is actually worth and what is actually being built, use the transactions and construction-pipeline trackers — this chart cannot answer either question.
Three things a reader might expect here, and why they are not. Foreign investment by sector and source country — the Central Bank publishes the headline flow quarterly, which is the chart above, but not the splits; those appear only in annual Ministry of Investment reporting. Visitor arrivals — the Department of Statistics series is a survey last fielded in 2016–17; the live monthly series belongs to the Ministry of Tourism and will appear on the tourism tracker. Population growth by governorate — the Department applies one national growth rate to every governorate, so charting it would publish an assumption as a finding. Population levels by governorate are real and are used above.
What Jordanians abroad send home
Jordanians abroad sent home JD 2,889 million in 2025, 2.5 times what they sent in 2000 and 6.6% of GDP. But transfers out of Jordan by foreign workers grew 9.7-fold over the same period, so the net contribution to the balance of payments peaked at JD 2,123 million in 2015 and is 21% lower today.
Money in and money out, by quarter
Bars: received from Jordanians abroad, and sent out by non-Jordanians working in Jordan. Line: the net.
Half a century of inflows
Annual receipts in US dollars. The 1990-91 collapse is the return of Jordanians from the Gulf.
Reading these two charts
What the shapes mean. On the left, each pair of bars is one quarter: money received from Jordanians working abroad, and money sent out of Jordan by non-Jordanians working here. The line is the difference between them — what the country actually keeps. On the right, the annual inflow measured in US dollars over half a century.
What the series are doing. The inflow has risen almost every year and reached JD 2,889 million in 2025, $4,075 million in dollars. The outflow has risen far faster, from JD 124 million in 2000 to JD 1,204 million. Net remittances peaked in 2015 and have fallen 21% since. The long view shows why that matters: the inflow collapsed to a third of its level when Jordanians were expelled from the Gulf in 1990–91, and it took until 1996 to recover.
What that means. Remittances are roughly 2.3 times the size of net direct investment, and they are the single largest external source of household purchasing power in Jordan — which is what pays for apartments bought by Jordanians living abroad. But the net figure, not the headline, is what supports the dinar and the deposit base.
What to watch. The inflow is concentrated in the Gulf and the United States, so it carries the labour markets of five or six countries, not a diversified risk. Watch the outflow line as closely as the inflow: it has been the faster-moving of the two for seven years.
Where the money is sent from, H1 2026
Declared source of inflows. A snapshot published in commentary, not a continuing series.
Reading this chart
What the shapes mean. The declared source of remittance inflows in H1 2026, as the Central Bank reported them.
What the series is doing. United Arab Emirates alone accounts for 21% of everything received. The Gulf states together and the United States account for the great majority; no other single country is material.
What that means. Jordan’s largest external income stream depends on the construction and services labour markets of a handful of Gulf economies and on professional employment in the United States. A Gulf capital-spending cycle reaches Jordanian households before it reaches Jordanian GDP.
What to watch. This split is published in the Central Bank’s commentary rather than as a continuing table, so it is a snapshot, not a series. It records where money was sent from, which is not always where the sender lives.
Two things about these figures. The quarterly series is the Central Bank’s workers’ remittances line, spliced across its move from the fifth to the sixth edition of the balance of payments; the sixteen quarters the two editions share are identical to the decimal, so nothing is adjusted at the join. The outflow series steps up sharply between 2018 and 2019 — that is a change in how the Central Bank measures transfers by non-residents, not a sudden change in behaviour, so read the level either side of it rather than the step. Monthly figures the Central Bank releases ahead of the quarterly accounts are preliminary: $2,500 million for H1 2026, against $2,187 million a year earlier.
How many people, and how households form
Jordan’s population reached 11,937,000 at the end of 2025, growing 1.73% on the year. The last census was held in 2015; every figure since is an estimate carried forward from it.
Population and annual growth
Bars are the population at each year end; the line is growth on the previous year.
Where housing is being licensed, against where people live
Each point is a governorate. Both scales logarithmic.
Reading this chart
What the axes mean. Across, how many people live in a governorate. Up, how much residential floor area was licensed there during 2025. Both scales are logarithmic, so a governorate ten times larger sits one step to the right.
What the points are doing. They do not lie on a straight line. Amman licensed 0.92 m² of residential floor area per resident; Zarqa licensed 0.30 m² — a 3.0-fold spread across the same country.
What that means. Licensed supply is not distributed in proportion to people. A governorate sitting well below the cloud is licensing less housing than its population would imply.
What to watch. A single year of licensing is volatile in the small governorates, where one large project moves the total. Read the position, not the precise value, and re-read it when the next full year lands.
Marriages registered each year
A household-formation signal, not a household count. The line is the crude rate per 1,000 residents.
Marriages per 1,000 residents, by governorate, 2024
Ordinary and repeat marriage contracts. Bars at or above the national rate are sage.
Reading this chart
What the shapes mean. Marriage contracts registered in each governorate during 2024, divided by that governorate’s population.
What the series is doing. Madaba registers 8.29 marriages per 1,000 residents and Karak 4.42 — a 1.9-fold spread against a national 5.41.
What that means. New households are forming far faster in some governorates than others. Household formation is what turns population into housing demand, and it is not evenly spread.
What to watch. The geography covers ordinary and repeat contracts only; acknowledgement and reconciliation contracts are recorded nationally with no governorate. The base is therefore 62,970, not the 63,449 national total.
Who is working
Jordan’s unemployment rate among its own citizens peaked at 24.1% in 2021 and has eased to 21.3%, still 3.0 pp above where it stood in 2017.
Unemployment among Jordanians, annual
Derived from the published counts of employed and unemployed Jordanians aged 15 and over.
Unemployment by governorate, Q1 2026
Total population. Bars at or above the national rate are brick.
Jordan publishes two unemployment rates and they are not comparable. The quarterly release covers the total population, Jordanians and non-Jordanians together, and reads 16.1% for Q1 2026. The annual tables cover Jordanians only and read 21.3% for 2025. The 5.2 pp gap is not an error: non-Jordanians were about two fifths of everyone employed in Jordan and are far less likely to be recorded as unemployed, because a residency permit is tied to a job. The Department itself moved its headline from the first basis to the second during 2025, which is why the quarterly series here is short.
Jordanian unemployment by governorate and sex, 2025
The quarterly release does not publish a sex split by governorate; the annual tables do.
Reading this chart
What the shapes mean. Two bars per governorate, men and women, on the Jordanians-only basis and ranked by the combined rate.
What the series is doing. The gap between the two bars is wider than the gap between the best and worst governorate.
What that means. Sex explains more of Jordanian unemployment than geography does. A location decision made on the headline rate alone is reading the smaller of the two effects.
What to watch. These are annual figures with roughly a year’s lag, and the counts in the smallest governorates are thin. Watch the direction over several years, not one step.
Where Jordan sits in its cycle
Jordan has been through four distinct cycles in fifty years. Output sat furthest above its own trend in 1981 and furthest below it in 1991; the deepest single contraction was -10.7% in 1989. Since 2010 the economy has grown at an average of 2.2% a year, and the cycle has flattened into a narrow band.
Real growth, 1976 to 2025
Bars: growth on the previous year. Line: the ten-year moving average, which is the trend rate.
How far output sits from its own trend
Above the line the economy is running hot; below it, with slack. Sage above, brick below.
Reading the long cycle
What the shapes mean. On the left, how fast real output grew each year. On the right, the output gap: how far output sat above or below its own long-run trend, in per cent. Above the line is an economy running hot; below it, one running with slack.
What the series are doing. Four episodes stand out. The oil-funded boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, peaking 5.6% above trend in 1981. The dinar crisis and the Gulf War, which took output 6.3% below trend by 1991 and produced a -10.7% contraction in 1989. The long 2000–2008 expansion, averaging over 7% a year. And the post-2010 plateau, where the gap has stayed inside plus or minus one per cent every year except 2020.
What that means. Jordan no longer has much of a business cycle — it has a growth-rate problem. The interesting question for a property investor is not where in the cycle the country sits, because the swings are now smaller than the statistical revisions; it is whether the trend rate itself moves.
What to watch. A trend estimated from history is uncertain at its own end, so the last two or three years of the gap will be revised as more data arrives. Read the shape of the decade, not the final point.
Headline growth against growth per person
The gap between the two lines is population growth on the Department of Statistics estimates, including the refugee inflows of 2013-2016. Starts in 1995, the first year those estimates cover.
The quarterly cycle since 2008
The same gap on the rolling four-quarter series, which is what a current reading has to be taken from.
How the output gap is calculated, and what it is not. Real GDP is put on a logarithmic scale and a smooth trend is fitted through it — a Hodrick–Prescott filter on the annual series, and a Hamilton regression filter on the rolling four-quarter series, which avoids the end-point bias the smoother suffers from. The gap is the percentage distance between actual output and that trend. The trend is a statistical construct, not a measure of capacity: it says where output sits relative to its own recent history, not relative to what the economy could produce. It cannot tell you whether the trend itself is too low.
The property cycle against the macro cycle
Year-on-year growth, constant prices. Construction is gold, real-estate activities brick.
Reading this chart
What the shapes mean. Three growth rates, each quarter against the same quarter a year earlier: the whole economy, construction, and real-estate activities.
What the series are doing. They do not move together. Construction swings between roughly −5% and +12% while GDP stays inside 1–5%, and it spent 2023 and 2024 contracting while the economy grew. Real-estate activities are the smoothest line on the page, because most of that value added is imputed rent from buildings that already exist.
What that means. The property cycle in Jordan is not the macro cycle, and timing an entry off GDP would have you early or late by a year. Construction is the cyclical part of property; the real-estate line is close to a constant and tells you almost nothing about the market.
What to watch. Construction turned positive again in 2025 after eight quarters of contraction — the building-licence series on the construction tracker is the leading edge of that same turn.
Where the indicators point
Seven things this platform already tracks, each measured the same way: the most recent twelve months against the twelve before. All seven are higher than a year ago.
The seven series this platform tracks, against a year earlier
One rule for every bar: the latest twelve months against the twelve before, so none of it depends on the season. Each row shows the period it reaches.
Reading this chart
What the bars mean. One bar for each series, and one rule for all of them: the latest twelve months against the twelve before it — four quarters against four where the series is quarterly. Comparing a whole year with a whole year is what removes the seasonality, so nothing here depends on which month you look at. Sage is up on a year ago, brick is down. Each row carries the period it actually reaches, because the publishers run on different lags.
What the series are doing. All seven are higher than a year earlier. Listed property equities is the strongest at 29.1% and Industrial production the weakest at 0.3%; the middle of the pack is about 3.3%. One indicator cannot be a bar here: the real policy rate is a rate rather than a quantity, so its change is measured in percentage points. It stands at 2.96% and is 1.52 percentage points below a year ago — a loosening.
What that means. Every part of the economy this platform measures sits above where it was a year ago, and money has become cheaper — yet the economy as a whole still grew only 2.9%. Breadth is not strength: a set of series can all be up on a weak year and still leave the country growing at its long-run trend rate.
What to watch, and what not to read into it. Above a year ago is not the same as above normal. Licensed floor area is 3.3% on the year and still sits below its own long-run average — both are true, and they answer different questions. This panel describes where things stand; it is not a forecast, and MENA Bridge does not publish one. For a projection the IMF, the World Bank and the Central Bank each publish theirs. What would change the picture is a bar crossing zero, so the direction matters more than the length.