Who has to register their heavy equipment?
The Heavy Equipment Regulatory Center (HERC) is a government body created by Council of Ministers Resolution 488 in 2021 within the Saudi Standards, Metrology and Quality Organization (SASO). Its mandate is a national database of heavy equipment and its operators, oversight of pre-operation inspection, accreditation of inspection and training bodies, and licensing of equipment and operators.
Registration is the gateway to everything after it: no accredited inspection and no operating licence without a registered machine. The call covers equipment owners in contracting, mining, transport, logistics, water, agriculture and energy — any establishment running excavators, cranes, loaders or similar. The service is open to establishments and individuals through the center's web portal and mobile application.
The service in numbers
According to the service page published in SASO's e-services at the time of writing: the fee is SAR 250 per machine, processing takes five working days, and payment is accepted via mada, Visa, Mastercard and SADAD. These values are set by the center and may be updated — always rely on what the portal shows when you submit.
Registration conditions
Before you start, make sure four conditions are met — applications without them are rejected:
- A national ID for individuals, or a valid commercial registration for establishments
- A legal authorization or electronic power of attorney for whoever applies on behalf of an establishment
- A declaration that the data is accurate and the service terms are accepted
- The machine must be free of any legal claims or disputes
Documents required per machine
Each machine is a separate application. These are the documents the portal asks for — some mandatory, some attached where available:
- A completed registration request form
- Shipping certificate, conformity certificate or inspection certificate, where available
- The equipment specification card with serial numbers, plus four photos from the four sides
- Customs declaration and customs card, if the machine was imported
- Proof of ownership and purchase papers
- The machine's technical identification card, where available
Submitting on the portal
The procedure itself is short once the documents are ready:
- Sign in to the HERC portal and choose the heavy equipment registration service
- Fill in the form with the machine's data and upload the documents
- Pay the fee and submit; the center processes the application within the service period
What comes after registration?
Registration is the start of the obligation, not the end. The center oversees inspection of equipment to confirm its safety and readiness before operation through accredited inspection bodies, sets operator qualification and licensing rules through accredited training bodies, and issues the licences needed for the machine and its operation. The center's arrangements state that its supervisory committee defines which equipment falls within scope, with executive details completed in regulations.
In practice: keep each machine's registration and inspection certificates as documents with expiry dates, and tie each operator's qualification to the machines they are cleared to run. A company that discovers an expired inspection during a site audit pays far more than the service fee.
Imported machines: one step before registration
SASO requires an imported heavy machine to hold a valid conformity certificate from a conformity assessment body it accepts, issued through the Saber platform, before entry into the Kingdom — and bans importing a machine whose chassis number or data has been tampered with. So the conformity certificate and customs declaration are the first things asked for when registering an imported machine; file them in the machine's record on the day it arrives, not the day you need them.
Before you open the portal: prepare your asset register
The longest part of registration is not the form but gathering the data: a serial number for every machine, its four photos, its specification card, purchase papers and customs declaration. An establishment running forty machines with these papers scattered across drawers and folders will spend weeks going back to each machine two or three times.
An establishment that registered its equipment in an asset management system beforehand exports this in minutes: the asset file in TAC Flow holds the serial number, model, year of manufacture, photos and documents with their expiry dates, so preparing an application becomes copying from a ready file rather than searching an archive. Once the registration and inspection certificates are issued they are stored in the same file with their expiry dates, the system alerts before either expires — by the number of days you choose — and the machine's daily inspection sits in its record right beside them.
The right order of work, then: register your assets internally first with non-repeating numbers and dated documents, then register them with the center from that record. Whoever starts with the portal before the register pays twice.