If you are here for a year, working for yourself, and your clients are abroad, the whole decision costs about 260 GEL and two mornings: roughly 60 GEL to register as an Individual Entrepreneur, nothing to apply for small business status, and 200 GEL for the right to work if you conclude you need it. The 1% is the cheap part. The expensive part is deciding whether you need the permit at all, and that question does not have a settled answer yet.
Three separate things get collapsed into one on almost every page about this, including by people paid to know better. They are not one thing. A Georgia work permit is an authorisation to work. A residence permit is an authorisation to be here past your lawful stay. Small business status is a tax rate. You can hold any one without the others, they are granted by three different agencies, and they expire on three different dates.
The stamp is not a status, and neither is the tax rate. That is the whole post. What follows is the arithmetic.
All figures below were checked on 4 September 2026. Government fees are quoted in lari, because lari is the only currency any of these counters wants.
What the March 2026 work permit rule actually says
From 1 March 2026, a foreign national without permanent residence who is employed by a local employer, works remotely for a local employer, or is self-employed in Georgia needs a right to work granted by the State Employment Promotion Agency. That is the shape of it. The U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi published a notice for its citizens when the rules took effect, and OC Media’s explainer is the fullest English account of the mechanics.
The published figures, from OC Media:
- 200 GEL for standard processing, 30 calendar days.
- 400 GEL for expedited processing, 10 business days.
- 2,000 GEL fine for working without the authorisation, rising to 4,000 GEL for a repeat and 12,000 GEL after that.
- 1,000 / 2,000 / 6,000 GEL on the same escalation for failing to report a change in an employment contract.
Applications go through the Labour Migration Electronic System at
labourmigration.moh.gov.ge, which opened with the law on 1 March 2026.
Two dates matter more than the fee. Anyone already self-employed here on 1 March 2026 had until 1 May 2026 to comply — that one has passed. Anyone working on an employment contract as of that date has until 1 January 2027, which has not, and which is the deadline sitting quietly in the middle of this site’s readership right now.
The three routes, priced
There are only three ways to be paid for work while living in Tbilisi. Everything else is a variation on one of them.
1. Individual Entrepreneur, small business status, clients abroad
The common case, and the cheapest. You register as an Individual Entrepreneur at a Public Service Hall, apply separately to the Revenue Service for small business status, invoice your clients, and file once a month.
Registration is filed at the Public Service Hall and needs a legal address, with the owner’s written consent if the address is not yours. 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 is the figure I would budget; it is eighteen months old at the time of writing and the counter will tell you the current one before you pay it.
Small business status is a second, separate application, made to the Revenue Service after the registration exists. It is not granted with the registration and it does not backdate itself to cover the invoices you sent while waiting. This is the single most common expensive mistake on this route, and it is expensive precisely because it is silent — nothing rejects you, you simply find later that some of your turnover sat outside the status.
PwC’s Worldwide Tax Summaries for Georgia, last reviewed 2 September 2026, states the regime plainly: turnover below 500,000 GEL at 1%, and 3% on turnover above it. Below 30,000 GEL a year with no employees there is a separate micro business status that is exempt from tax on business income altogether — worth knowing about before you default to the 1%, because a genuinely small first year may not need the small business regime at all.
The registration itself, step by step is the next post, because the order of the two applications is where the money goes.
2. Employed by a Georgian company
Your employer applies, not you. Before they can, they have to post the vacancy on the state
employment portal worknet.moh.gov.ge for at least ten working days, and the agency has ten
business days to propose local candidates. That is a labour market test, and it means the
permit is not a form your employer fills in on a Friday afternoon.
This route is not mine — I have never been employed by a Georgian company — so everything in that paragraph is sourced from OC Media’s explainer and dated, not remembered. The employer's side of it is its own post later in the plan.
3. Remote for a foreign employer
The one everybody reading this actually wants an answer to, and the one where the law is not explicit. OC Media quotes a lawyer reading the requirement as aimed at people “directly occupying positions in the Georgian labour market”, which would put a salaried employee of a company in Berlin outside it. That is a reading, offered by a named lawyer to a named publication. It is not a ruling, and nobody has published one.
The ambiguity gets its own post, because it deserves more than a bullet and because the honest answer is longer than “probably fine”.
What the 1% costs to keep
The rate is 1%. The regime is not free, and the running costs are where people who chose it for the headline number get surprised.
A declaration every month, including empty ones. While the registration is live you file, whether or not you invoiced anything. The deadline I have filed against since I registered is the 15th of the month following the reporting month, and it is the deadline every accounting practice in this city publishes. Confirm the current one on rs.ge rather than on my say-so — the declaration is a post of its own.
A VAT threshold that is not the same number as the status ceiling. PwC gives mandatory VAT registration once taxable turnover exceeds 100,000 GEL in any continuous 12-month period, at a standard rate of 18%. Read those two sentences together: you can be a long way below the 500,000 GEL small business ceiling and still be a VAT payer. The 1% headline does not mention this, and the two thresholds are measured over different periods — one is a calendar year, one is a rolling twelve months.
A ceiling that has consequences past it. Turnover above 500,000 GEL is taxed at 3%. What happens the month you cross it and the activities and mistakes that cost you the status are both later in this plan, because both are longer than a line.
A one-client problem. Barshovi’s Forbes Georgia guide flags it directly: an Individual Entrepreneur serving only one client risks the tax authority treating the fees as wages, taxable at 20%. If your Georgian registration exists to invoice one company you would otherwise be an employee of, that is a question for an accountant before it is a question for a form.
And a source question underneath all of it. Whether your income is Georgian-source is the thing that decides what any of this means, and it is not decided by where your client sits. Whether your income arises here is the question under every other tax decision, and I am not going to answer it for your situation in a subsection, because nobody honest can.
What each of the three actually costs, side by side
| What it authorises | Published fee | Who grants it | Runs out | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right to work | Working here at all | 200 GEL / 400 GEL expedited | State Employment Promotion Agency | Its own term |
| Residence permit | Staying past your lawful stay | 300 / 450 / 600 GEL by speed | Public Service Development Agency | Its own term |
| IE registration | Nothing, by itself | about 60 GEL | Public Service Hall | Does not expire; you close it |
| Small business status | The 1% rate | No fee | Revenue Service | Until cancelled or lost |
The column that matters is the last one. Two of these expire, on separate clocks, granted by separate agencies that do not remind each other or you. Put both dates in a calendar the day each is granted.
The deadlines already on the calendar
- 1 May 2026 — passed. The compliance date for foreigners already self-employed here on 1 March 2026.
- 1 January 2027 — coming. The date by which foreigners working on an employment contract as of 1 March 2026 must be compliant.
- Forty days before your lawful stay ends — the application window for a work-ground residence permit, which is a PSDA rule and unrelated to either of the above. The routes to staying legally has the detail.
The 1 January 2027 date is the one to watch. It is four months away as this publishes, it applies to a population that mostly does not read immigration news, and the first-offence fine attached to getting it wrong is ten times the standard application fee.
When the agency is worth it, and when it is not
For route 1 — self-employed, no employees, clients abroad, no family application — this is genuinely do-it-yourself. The forms are in English or have English support, the counters at the Public Service Hall speak English, and the two applications are short. An agency’s package for the same work buys you a queue, a translation, and someone to blame. Sometimes that is worth several hundred lari. For this specific route, usually it is not.
Pay for advice, rather than for administration, in three cases:
- Your income might be Georgian-source and you have not tested it. That is an accountant question with a real answer, and getting it wrong is not a fine, it is a rate.
- You have one client who looks like an employer. Same reason.
- A family member, a refusal, or an appeal is involved. That is a lawyer, and the fee is cheap against the alternative. When to pay a lawyer, and when you're paying for a queue.
What no agency can sell you, and what most of them cannot publish, is the finding that you do not need them, or that your particular income does not qualify for the rate you moved here for. That is not a criticism of anyone’s honesty. It is what happens when the person answering the question is paid per case.
The order to do things in
- Decide what you are, in the law’s terms, before you register anything. Employed by a Georgian company, self-employed here, or working for a foreign employer with no Georgian presence. The three routes are genuinely different and the middle one is the only one this post can price with confidence.
- Register the Individual Entrepreneur if route 1 is you. A legal address, the owner’s written consent if it is not your own, about 60 GEL, one business day.
- Apply for small business status separately, the same week. It is not automatic and it does not backdate.
- Apply for the right to work if you conclude you need it — 200 GEL, 30 calendar days, or 400 GEL and 10 business days if a deadline is close.
- File the first declaration by the 15th of the month after your first month of turnover, even if the turnover was nothing.
- Count backwards forty days from the end of your lawful stay for the residence permit, which is a different application to a different agency and is not helped by any of the above being in order.
Steps 2 and 3 are the ones I did myself, in that order, in a single morning. Step 4 I did later, under the transition window, and the part that took the time was not the form.
What the fee does not tell you
Every page about this quotes the 200 GEL. Here is what quoting it leaves out.
The three clocks do not sync. Your right to work, your residence permit and your small business status are granted on different days by different bodies for different terms, and for a lot of people here the work authorisation will expire before the residence permit does. Nothing will remind you. The calendar entry is the whole defence.
The registration is the easy part; the address is not. A legal address with the owner’s written consent is a requirement, and it is a favour you are asking of a landlord who may not understand why. Ask when you sign the lease, not in the month you need it.
Bring two copies. The counter keeps one. This is true at every counter in this city and it is cheaper than the second trip.
Ask, at the window, what the next step is and by when. Not whether it is approved — what happens next, and by when. The answer is specific, freely given, and more current than anything published, including this page.
Do not start invoicing on the strength of a plan. The gap between registering and having the status is real, it is usually short, and money that moves inside it is the part you will be explaining later.
The rest of the working and taxed decisions
- The Right to Work: What the Special Labour Permit Asks For, in Order — The special labour permit in Georgia as a sequence: who applies, what the self-employed assemble, the published fees, and the step people do out of order.
- Remote for a Foreign Employer: The Exemption, the Ambiguity, and What to Do This Month — Whether Georgia's work permit rules catch remote workers with foreign employers is unresolved. What is unclear, which cases are not, and how to decide.
- Individual Entrepreneur With Small Business Status: The Registration, Step by Step — Registering as an individual entrepreneur in Georgia and getting the 1% rate are two separate applications. The order matters, and the second does not backdate.
- Georgian-Source or Foreign-Source: The Question That Decides Whether 1% Is Real — Whether income is Georgian-source is not decided by where your client sits. What the Tax Code's source rule turns on, and why the 0% assumption misleads.
- The Monthly Declaration on RS.ge: What You File, When, and What Happens If You Don't — The monthly declaration on RS.ge for small business status: the deadline, the nil return nobody expects, what counts as turnover, and how to check the penalty.
- What an Accountant Costs in Tbilisi, and What You Are Actually Buying — What an accountant costs in Tbilisi: published monthly rates run about 180 to 350 GEL for a one-person IE, before VAT. Why advice by the hour is the better buy.
Everything above carries the date I checked it. Where a figure came from a law firm, an accounting practice or a newspaper rather than from the Revenue Service, the Employment Promotion Agency or matsne.gov.ge, the sentence says so. This area of Georgian law changed twice in eighteen months and has a compliance deadline in January. Treat any undated page on the subject — including this one, a year from now — as a lead rather than an answer.