Nobody knows, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something or repeating someone who is. What is known is narrower and more useful than the headline: if you are registered as an Individual Entrepreneur here, you are self-employed in Georgia and the requirement almost certainly reaches you, whoever your clients are. If you are a salaried employee of a foreign company with no Georgian presence, and you have registered nothing here, that is the genuinely open case.
Those two situations get written about as one, and they are not one. Sorting yourself into the right one is most of the value on this page.
Checked on 4 September 2026. If this has been resolved since — by a regulation, a ministry statement or a named newspaper reporting one — this post is out of date and should say so. Nothing here is legal advice, and the whole point of it is that the law has not yet been made to say what people want it to say.
What Georgia’s work permit rule names, and what it does not
From 1 March 2026, a foreign national without permanent residence needs a right to work from the State Employment Promotion Agency if they are employed by a local employer, work remotely for a local employer, or are self-employed in Georgia.
Read that list slowly. Two of the three limbs are explicitly about a local employer. The third is about self-employment in Georgia. What is nowhere in it — as an inclusion or as an exemption — is employment by a company that has no presence here.
The published exemption list does not close the gap either. The categories reported are refugees and people under temporary or additional protection, asylum seekers, diplomats, accredited journalists, people covered by an international agreement, and holders of investment residence permits. It is a list of statuses, not of work arrangements. There is no line on it for the remote employee, which means the remote employee is neither named in nor exempted from the requirement.
OC Media’s explainer quotes a lawyer reading the law as aimed at people “directly occupying positions in the Georgian labour market” — which would place the Berlin company’s salaried employee outside it. That is a reasoned reading by a named lawyer in a named publication, and it is the best thing available. It is not a ruling. No ministry has published one, and until one exists a reading is what everybody has, including the agencies charging to tell you theirs.
The case that is not actually ambiguous
If you registered an Individual Entrepreneur in Georgia, you are self-employed in Georgia. The third limb names that directly. The location of your clients is not what the limb turns on — your registration is here, your economic activity is registered here, and the Revenue Service knows about both.
I say this bluntly because the reasoning that gets people to the opposite conclusion is appealing and wrong-shaped: my clients are all abroad, so my work is not in the Georgian labour market, so the permit is not for me. The first two clauses may well be true. The conclusion does not follow from a limb that says “self-employed in Georgia” rather than “self-employed for Georgian clients”. A registration is the clearest possible statement that you are conducting an activity here.
There is a second reason to be relaxed about it, which is that this is the cheap case. The permit is 200 GEL and thirty days. Set that against a 2,000 GEL first-offence fine and the decision does not need certainty to be obvious. The application, in order.
The case that is
The unregistered salaried employee. You work for a company in another country, you are paid into an account in that country or into a Georgian one, you have registered nothing in Georgia, and you are here on the visa-free year.
Arguments that you are outside the requirement: the two employment limbs both say local employer, and yours is not; the self-employment limb does not describe you because you are employed, not self-employed; and a named lawyer’s published reading is that the law targets positions in the Georgian labour market.
Arguments that you might not be: the law’s stated purpose is to regulate foreign labour activity performed in the country, and yours is performed in the country; the exemption list is written as statuses rather than as arrangements, so there is no door marked “remote employee” to walk through; and the tax side of Georgian law takes a notably different view of where work performed here happens, which is the next section.
I hold the first set of arguments myself, provisionally, and I am not confident in them. That is an honest position and the site’s position: it is unresolved, the plausible reading is favourable, and a plausible reading is not a defence you can spend.
Why the tax answer does not settle the labour answer
People reach for the tax rules to resolve this, and it goes badly, because the tax rules point the other way.
Article 104 of the Tax Code deals with the source of income, and the principle it applies is not intuitive. Writing in Forbes Georgia in November 2021, the tax adviser Gela Barshovi set it out with an example: a Georgian resident individual providing a translation service to a French company, paid from France into Georgia, has Georgian-source income. The place the money is received is not what decides it.
So on the tax side, work performed by a resident while physically in Georgia is treated as arising here, regardless of where the client is. Someone hoping the labour law will read “remote work for a foreign employer is not work in Georgia” is hoping for the opposite of how the tax code reads the same facts. These are different laws with different purposes and one does not bind the other — but if you are guessing which way an unresolved question will be resolved, that is not an encouraging neighbour.
The source question is a post of its own, and it is the one to read before you conclude anything about your own rate.
What it touches, if you get it wrong
This question is not sealed off in the working-and-taxed corner. Three things downstream of it move:
Your residence permit’s ground. Most readers here apply on a work basis, and a work basis assumes a lawful work status. If you conclude you need no permit and that conclusion is wrong, the problem is not only a fine — it is the foundation of the application you make forty days before your lawful stay ends. The grounds, and which one you qualify for.
What the bank asks. Georgian banks ask foreigners direct questions about what you do and how you are paid, and an answer that describes ongoing paid work with no Georgian registration and no work authorisation is a harder conversation than one that does not. What each bank actually asks is later in the plan.
Your position at 183 days. Being here long enough to be tax resident changes what questions you are answering and to whom. When Georgia decides you are tax resident.
What to do this month
Not “wait for clarity”. Clarity has had six months to arrive and has not.
- Establish which case you are in. Registered here, or not. That single fact decides whether you have an open question at all.
- If you are registered, apply. 200 GEL and thirty days closes a question that would otherwise sit under every other decision you make here. This is the recommendation and it is not a close call.
- If you are not registered and are salaried abroad, decide what your exposure actually is — how long you intend to stay, whether you will need a residence permit on a work ground, and whether the 200 GEL is meaningful against the answer to either. For a six-month stay ending in a departure, the analysis is different from a stay that becomes a permit application.
- If a real decision turns on it, pay for one hour of a Georgian lawyer’s time, and ask for the reading in writing. This is the case where the fee is cheap: when to pay a lawyer, and when you're paying for a queue. Ask specifically whether the agency has issued any guidance on employees of foreign companies — the answer to that is a fact, not an opinion.
- Watch for the resolution. It will come from the Employment Promotion Agency, from a regulation on matsne.gov.ge, or from a named newspaper reporting either. It will not come from an agency blog post, and it will certainly not come from a forum.
The honest summary
There is a real chance that remote employees of foreign companies are outside this requirement, and a real chance they are not. Nobody publishing on the subject — including this page — is in a position to close that. What can be closed is the adjacent question, and for most people reading this the adjacent question is the one that applies: if you have registered an activity in Georgia, the requirement reaches you, the fee is 200 GEL, and the alternative is a fine ten times that.
Anyone telling you confidently that remote workers are exempt is quoting a lawyer’s reading without the word “reading”. Anyone telling you confidently that they are caught is usually selling the application. The accurate sentence is that the law does not say, and that this post will be rewritten the week it does.