Article 16 of the Saudi Social Security Law

This article specifies when payment of the social security pension begins. The pension is paid to the beneficiary starting from the month following the issue of the decision accepting his application.

Two things follow from the text:

• What counts is the date the acceptance decision is issued, not the date the application was submitted.
• Payment begins from the month following that decision, not from the month of its issue.

The pension under Article 1 is a monthly amount paid as social assistance to the beneficiary, and the beneficiary is any independent person or family to whom the Law applies.

So if the acceptance decision is issued on any day of the month, payment begins from the following month. The article does not say that the pension is paid retroactively for the period before the acceptance decision was issued, and it does not itself address the time taken to examine the application.

The amount paid rests on the basic minimum set by the Council of Ministers under Article 15. Continued payment is not absolute, as Article 17 lists cases in which payment of the pension stops, such as failure of an entitlement condition, proof that the data provided are incorrect, the beneficiary's waiver of the pension, or his death.