Restoration of degraded rangelands through rainwater harvesting (RWH) is an important intervention in arid and semi-arid regions to sustain rangeland productivity and ecosystem services. We conducted a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to assess the economic viability of implementing contour ridges as an in situ rainwater harvesting technique to restore degraded rangelands in Jordan. Jordan has vast pastoral areas and faces significant water scarcity, which is expected to intensify under climate change. We assessed the benefits of three essential ecosystem services: forage production, water availability, and prevention of soil erosion, and compared them with the costs of implementing and maintaining contour ridges and the initial forage loss incurred during the establishment of the forage shrubs. Our research design combined model-based biophysical simulation and economic valuation. For the biophysical simulation, we used the Global Range (G-Range) model to estimate the increase in forage production and the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to estimate improvements in water availability and soil erosion prevention. The CBA was conducted across five distinct rangeland classes, differentiated by average annual rainfall, land slope, and soil organic carbon (SOC), which allowed us to cover 75% of Jordanian rangelands. Economic valuation was performed by monetizing benefits and costs to 2022 U.S. dollars over a 15-year project lifespan and by calculating the net present value (NPV) using an 8% discount rate, with sensitivity analyses at 5% and 12%. We considered two scenarios: the first incorporated the benefit of increased water availability from shallow groundwater aquifers, while the second excluded this benefit to reflect the current policy restrictions on groundwater extraction. The results of the CBA revealed positive NPVs in the first scenario and negative NPVs in the second scenario across all rangeland classes. These findings highlight the importance of the benefit of increased water availability when evaluating large-scale restoration projects. (c) 2026 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of The Society for Range Management. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )