The global construction industry is facing pressure to reduce environmental impact by improving energy efficiency amid rising energy demands and growing concerns about climate change. Consequently, sustainable building practices, like the Passive House (PH) design, prioritize minimizing building energy demand. In Saudi Arabia, where cooling loads dominate electricity use, implementing PH could significantly lower energy demand. However, research on PH challenges in the Saudi climate is limited, which highlights the importance of investigating the barriers and potential solutions for PH adoption in this context. This study investigates barriers to PH adoption and proposes context-specific solutions for Saudi Arabia. A mixed-methods approach, including a literature review and structured questionnaires among construction professionals, was used. Thematic analysis and importance–performance analysis (IPA) helped prioritize barriers and identify strategies. By combining evidence from the literature and practitioner surveys, this study uniquely prioritizes PH adoption barriers and proposes tailored solutions for Saudi Arabia’s hot climate. The results showed that the most critical barriers include a lack of supportive building codes, the absence of government incentives, low awareness, contractor resistance, and limited material availability. At the same time, key strategies were identified, such as revising building regulations, offering tax incentives, and adapting PH design with improved shading and HVAC systems. Overall, these findings indicate that removing the identified barriers and implementing the suggested strategies can reduce energy demand and demonstrate the feasibility of PH in Saudi Arabia’s hot climate, thereby supporting the Kingdom’s broader sustainability goals.

Energy consumption in hot–arid and warm climates is driven by cooling demand during long, intense summers. In these contexts, the residential sector accounts for much of national electricity use, and cooling can exceed 70% of annual household consumption. Saudi Arabia exemplifies this pattern, with the residential sector consuming over half of the national electricity and cooling dominating demand in hot–arid cities like Riyadh. Against this background, this study explores the adaptation of the Passive House approach—originally developed in cold and temperate regions—for a cooling-dominated, hot–arid context. A detached villa in Riyadh was selected as a case study, and its energy performance was modeled in DesignBuilder using a baseline calibrated against 12 months of electricity bills. Passive House measures were then tested. The results showed that insulating walls and roofs provided the largest reductions in electricity use, at 21% and 15%, respectively, while high-performance glazing with external shading achieved an additional 3.4%. Improvements in airtightness and ventilation with heat recovery yielded only minor savings in a cooling-dominated climate. When all measures were implemented together, the villa’s annual electricity consumption was reduced by 48% compared with the baseline, and cooling demand was reduced by 72.3%. These findings demonstrate that Passive House measures can be effectively adapted to hot–arid conditions, with envelope insulation and solar-gain control delivering the most significant benefits. The Riyadh case underscores the potential of Passive House principles to reduce residential electricity use in cooling-dominated housing and to support energy-efficient design in hot–arid and warm-climate regions.