How to run a job per region with --vars in dbt Cloud

Some projects run the same models for several regions, each on its own schedule: Europe early in the morning, the Americas a few hours later. In dbt Cloud you create one job per region and give each a different value, either with --vars in the command or with a job-level environment variable. The part to get right is where each region’s results are written.

Copy and paste

Option 1: –vars in each job’s command

dbt build --select tag:regional --vars '{region: eu}'

-- models/marts/regional_sales.sql
{{ config(schema='sales_' ~ var('region')) }}

select order_date, sum(amount) as revenue
from {{ ref('stg_orders') }}
where region = '{{ var("region") | upper }}'
group by order_date

Create a second job with --vars '{region: us}', a third with apac, and give each its own schedule.

Option 2: a job-level environment variable

In the environment settings, add DBT_REGION with a default value. In each job, open Advanced settings > Environment variables and override it: eu in one job, us in the other. The model reads it with env_var():

{{ config(schema='sales_' ~ env_var('DBT_REGION', 'eu')) }}

select order_date, sum(amount) as revenue
from {{ ref('stg_orders') }}
where region = '{{ env_var("DBT_REGION", "eu") | upper }}'
group by order_date

Keep the regions apart

If the EU job and the US job both build regional_sales in the same table, each run replaces the other region’s data. The schema config above sends each region to its own schema, sales_eu and sales_us, which go through generate_schema_name like any custom schema; see how to change the target schema.

Two other ways work as well:

• One table, one region at a time: an incremental model with unique_key='region' and incremental_strategy='delete+insert' replaces only the rows of the region being built.
• One table name per region: {{ config(alias='regional_sales_' ~ var('region')) }}.

–vars or environment variables

Environment variables in dbt Cloud must start with DBT_. A job-level value overrides the environment value, which overrides the project default, which overrides the default in env_var().

One job, several regions

When the regions do not need different schedules, a single job can list one command per region:

dbt build --select tag:regional --vars '{region: eu}'
dbt build --select tag:regional --vars '{region: us}'

The commands run one after the other, and a failure in the first stops the second. To start a region on demand, pass the command through the API instead; see how to trigger a dbt Cloud job from the API.

The dbt code was tested with dbt Core 1.12; the job settings come from the dbt platform documentation (October 2026).