This is one of the few genuinely do-it-yourself procedures in this country, and it is two applications rather than one. You register the Individual Entrepreneur at a Public Service Hall, and then you apply separately to the Revenue Service for small business status. About 60 GEL, one business day, and a morning. Nobody needs to be paid several hundred lari to do this for you.
The trap is the gap between the two. Registration does not carry the 1% rate with it, the status is not granted automatically, and it does not reach backwards to cover invoices you sent while you were waiting. Almost every expensive version of this story is the same story: someone registered, started billing, and applied for the status a few weeks later.
Checked on 4 September 2026. Fees at Georgian counters move; the number the counter tells you is the number.
What each of the two things is
The registration puts you in the Entrepreneurs Register as a sole trader. By itself it grants no tax advantage at all. It is the legal existence of the activity.
Small business status is a tax regime granted by the Revenue Service on top of that registration. PwC’s Worldwide Tax Summaries for Georgia, last reviewed 2 September 2026, gives it as 1% of turnover below 500,000 GEL a year, and 3% on turnover above that.
There is a third thing worth knowing before you default to the second. PwC also describes a micro business status: annual turnover under 30,000 GEL, no employees, exempt from tax on business income. If your first year here is genuinely small, that is a different application and a better answer, and no agency will volunteer it because there is nothing to sell around it.
Before you go: the address
A legal address is mandatory for the registration, and if the address is not yours you need the owner’s written consent for it to be used.
This is the one item you cannot fix on the morning. Ask your landlord when you sign the lease, not in the week you need it — it is an unfamiliar request, it needs a signature, and a landlord who is abroad for a fortnight is a fortnight of delay. If you are still in a short-term rental, sort the lease before you sort the registration; the sequence only runs one way.
Registering the Individual Entrepreneur, in order
Assemble the folder#
Passport, the address, and the owner’s written consent if the address is not your own. Bring two copies of everything — the counter keeps one, and this is true at every counter in this city.
Go to a Public Service Hall#
The registration of Individual Entrepreneurs is filed there, and the staff at the foreigner- facing windows work in English. Take the earliest appointment of the day: if something is missing you still have the afternoon to fix it and come back, which is the difference between a morning and a week.
Pay the state fee and choose a speed#
Writing in Forbes Georgia in January 2025, the tax adviser Gela Barshovi gave the state fee as about 60 GEL standard and about 85 GEL expedited, with registration completing within one business day. That figure is eighteen months old as this publishes and is the one to budget rather than the one to quote; the counter will state the current fee before you pay it.
Collect the registration extract#
Same day or next business day. Keep the digital copy somewhere you can find it — the bank will ask for it, the Employment Promotion Agency may ask for it, and a landlord doing a lease renewal sometimes does too.
The status, which is the other application
Do this the same week, and ideally the same day.
Small business status is applied for at the Revenue Service — in person, or through your personal account on rs.ge once the registration exists. It carries no fee. It is a short application and the decision is not usually a long wait.
What it is not is automatic. It is a separate decision by a separate body, and the practical consequence is the only sentence on this page worth memorising: do not invoice until the status exists. Money that moves in the gap is not covered by a rate you had not yet been granted, and unpicking that afterwards is exactly the kind of work you were hoping not to pay an accountant for.
If you register on a Tuesday and apply for the status on the Tuesday, the gap is short and uneventful. If you register, start work, and get around to the status in October, the gap is your problem in a way that is tedious rather than dramatic — and it is entirely avoidable.
What you have signed up for, monthly
The 1% is not a rate you collect passively. Three obligations come with it.
A declaration every month, including the empty ones. While the registration is live you file, whether or not you invoiced. The deadline I have filed against since I registered is the 15th of the month following the reporting month, and it is the deadline the accounting practices here publish. Confirm the current one on rs.ge — the declaration is its own post and it is genuinely a fifteen-minute job once you have done it twice.
A VAT threshold that is not the status ceiling. PwC gives mandatory VAT registration once taxable turnover exceeds 100,000 GEL in any continuous 12-month period, at 18%. That is a fifth of the small business ceiling, measured over a rolling year rather than a calendar one, and it catches people who are watching only the 500,000 GEL number.
A ceiling with a consequence. Above 500,000 GEL the rate is 3%. What happens the month you cross it, and the activities and mistakes that cost you the status, are both later — the second matters more than the first for most readers, because losing the status is easier than exceeding the ceiling.
The question to settle before you register, not after
Barshovi’s Forbes Georgia guide flags the risk directly: an Individual Entrepreneur who serves only one client risks the tax authority treating the fees as wages, taxable at 20% rather than at 1%.
If you are registering in order to invoice a single company that you would otherwise be an employee of, that is the shape of the question, and it is one for an accountant before it is one for a form. It is not a technicality and it is not rare — it is one of the most common structures among the readers of this site.
The other question to settle first is whether your income is Georgian-source at all, because that is what decides what these rates are being applied to. The source question is the post, and the honest summary of it is that the answer is not obvious and does not turn on where your client sits.
What an agency charges, and what it buys
A relocation or accounting firm will do both applications for you as a package. What that buys is a queue, an interpreter you do not need at a window where they speak English, and somebody to blame if it goes wrong. For this specific procedure, with a clean address and a passport, it is not worth it.
The genuinely useful thing to buy is not the registration. It is an hour of an accountant’s time on the two questions above — one client, and the source of your income — before you commit to a structure. What an accountant costs here, and what you are actually buying is tomorrow’s post, and the short version is that the monthly bookkeeping is the cheap part and the advice is the part with value in it.
The part the fee does not tell you
Register and apply the same morning if you can. The two counters are not far apart and the gap between them is the only real risk in the procedure.
Do not register before you have work. The registration creates a monthly filing obligation immediately, empty or not, and closing it later is its own small procedure. Closing an IE is the post nobody reads until they need it.
The registration does not authorise you to work. Since 1 March 2026 that is a separate permission from a third agency. The right to work, in order, and the three of them priced together.
Keep the extract and the status certificate in the same place. You will be asked for both, separately, by people who will not accept one as evidence of the other.