The Right to Work: What the Special Labour Permit Asks For, in Order

If you are self-employed here, the special labour permit is a form you fill in yourself, for 200 GEL, and the part that takes time is not the form. It is the description of what you actually do for money — written so that a case officer who has never met you can tell what it is. Budget an evening for that paragraph and a morning for everything else.

If you are employed by a Georgian company, you do not apply at all. Your employer does, and they cannot start until they have advertised your job to the local labour market for ten working days. That difference is the whole of the procedure, so establish which of the two you are before you read any further.

Everything below was checked on 4 September 2026 against OC Media’s explainer on the new labour laws and the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi’s notice to its citizens. The Employment Promotion Agency’s own portal at labourmigration.moh.gov.ge is where the current requirements live; where the two disagree, the portal is right and this page is old.

Who needs the special labour permit at all

From 1 March 2026, a foreign national without permanent residence needs the right to work if they are employed by a local employer, work remotely for a local employer, or are self-employed in Georgia.

The exemptions are narrow and specific rather than general — the categories named in the reporting 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. There is no line on that list that says “works remotely for a company abroad”, and that absence is doing a great deal of work in a lot of people’s assumptions right now. The remote-worker question is genuinely unresolved and it is the next post for a reason.

The self-employed route, in order

1. Have something to describe#

   The agency asks the self-employed for their personal data, their education and professional experience, and information on the nature and scope of their current or planned activity in Georgia. For an activity that already exists, the supporting document is a turnover statement from the Revenue Service. For one that does not yet exist, it is a business plan.

   The practical consequence: if you are registering an Individual Entrepreneur and applying for the right to work in the same week, you will not have a turnover statement yet, and you are in the business-plan case. That is not a problem, but it is a different evening’s work, and it is the step people do not see coming.

2. Write the description of the work, plainly#

   This is the part that matters. Not a résumé, not a pitch — what you do, for whom, in what volume. “Back-end development for two software companies registered in Germany and Estonia, invoiced monthly, roughly 4,000 EUR a month” is a description. “Consulting” is not.

   I rewrote mine twice, and both rewrites were in the direction of specificity. There is no advantage to vagueness here and there is an obvious disadvantage.

3. Assemble the education and experience evidence#

   Diplomas, certificates, employment references — whatever supports the professional experience you are claiming. If any of it is a foreign document, it goes through the apostille and translation chain first, and that chain is the reliable source of delay in every Georgian process it touches. Two weeks is a realistic assumption; the person quoting you a timeline usually thinks it is one.

4. Apply through the Labour Migration Electronic System#

   labourmigration.moh.gov.ge, which opened alongside the law on 1 March 2026. The self-employed submit their own information and documents rather than going through anyone.

5. Pay, and pick a speed#

   200 GEL for standard processing and 30 calendar days, or 400 GEL for expedited and 10 business days. Pay the 400 only if a real date depends on it — a residence permit application window, a contract start, a lawful stay running out. Otherwise the 200 is the same permit.

6. Diarise the expiry the day it is granted#

   The authorisation runs on its own clock, separate from your residence permit’s. Nothing connects them and nothing will remind you. This is the single cheapest thing on this page and the one most often skipped.

The employee route, and why it is slower

If a Georgian company is employing you, the application is theirs. Before they can make it, the vacancy has to be posted on the state employment portal worknet.moh.gov.ge for at least ten working days, and the agency has ten business days in which to propose local candidates for it.

That is a labour market test, and it changes the timeline in a way worth saying out loud to a prospective employer: from a standing start, the advertising period and the processing period run consecutively, not in parallel. A company that has never hired a foreigner before will not have priced this into their start date.

The documents on that side are the employer’s — a copy of the passport, personal data, the employment contract, and an application confirming the intention to work. I have not been through this route and am not going to describe it as though I had; the employer's permit and your part in it is a separate post built on sources rather than on my own queue.

What it costs to get wrong

The published penalties, from OC Media:

Set the first row against the 200 GEL fee and the arithmetic is not close. There is no version of this where waiting for the permit is the expensive choice, and the fine on the self-employed lands on the worker directly rather than on an employer who might absorb it.

The second row is the one people do not expect, because it is not about starting work — it is about a contract changing after the permit exists. If you are on the employee route and your terms change, someone has to tell the agency.

The dates that are still ahead

1 January 2027. Foreigners working on an employment contract as of 1 March 2026 have until then to hold both the work authorisation and, where required, a residence permit. That is under four months from this post’s date, it applies to people who are already here and already working, and it is the deadline least likely to be noticed by the people it binds.

If that is you, the standard route takes 30 calendar days plus whatever your documents take. Counting backwards from 1 January, the comfortable month to start is October. The expedited fee exists for people who do not.

What this does not do for you

The right to work is not a right to stay. It authorises the work; it says nothing about your lawful presence in the country. If your presence rests on the visa-free year, that year is still counting down underneath the permit, and the residence permit application window opens forty calendar days before it ends. The grounds, and which one you actually qualify for covers what the permit rests on.

It is also not a tax status. Holding it does not register you as an Individual Entrepreneur, does not grant small business status, and does not change what rate your income is taxed at. Those are the Revenue Service’s, and the registration is tomorrow's post.

Three agencies, three applications, three expiry dates, and no shared file between them. The administrative burden here is genuinely light by the standards of the region — each individual step is short and mostly in English — but nothing joins the steps up for you, and the joins are where the money is lost.

The part worth knowing before you start

Do the document chain first. Anything foreign that needs apostilling and translating should be in motion before you open the portal, not after. It is the only part of this whose timing you do not control.

Write the activity description like a stranger will read it, because one will. The case officer is not hostile and is not looking for a reason to refuse; they are looking for a clear statement of what you do. Give them one.

Do not let the expedited fee become the default. Twice the price for twenty fewer days is worth it exactly when a date depends on it. Most of the time no date does, and the 200 GEL version is the same document.

Keep the confirmation somewhere you will find it in a year. You will need to know the grant date and the term when the renewal comes round, and by then the email will be four thousand messages down.