Employer of Record in Kazakhstan

What decides whether a project team can start work in Kazakhstan?

The permit position of the entity that will employ them, rather than anything about the client company. A work permit is issued by the local executive body to a named employer for a named worker and the client company does not appear on it.

Two conditions decide whether that permit can be issued at all and both attach to the employer rather than to the role. The permit is drawn against an annual quota set as a percentage of the labour force, which for 2026 is 0.3% for permits issued by local executive bodies to employers. And it is assessed against local content in personnel: Kazakhstan citizens must be at least 70% of the employer's first and second category employees and at least 90% of its third and fourth category employees.

Worker category is the organising fact of this market, because three separate things key off it. It decides which of the two ratios a worker counts into, how long the permit runs and how often it can be extended and what the permit costs. A deployed engineer is a third category worker, which is the category the permits and quota page works through in full.

The ratios are a standing position rather than a one-off test. A permit is issued or extended on those conditions, so an employer satisfies them again at every renewal, across its payroll numbers in those categories, not once at the point of first application.

The quota works at the level of the region rather than the employer. The migration authority distributes it across administrative-territorial units and the local executive body issues permits within the share allocated to its own unit, so a permit consumes part of a regional quota rather than drawing on an allowance held by the company applying for it.

What an employer already operating in that region brings to it is permits it already holds and ratios it already satisfies, so its next application is a continuation of something running rather than a first. Watching the regional position is part of running the business, not something a project has to discover for itself.

That is what makes the choice of employer the first decision rather than a later one. An employer already established in Kazakhstan applies as an employer that already holds permits and already meets the ratios and the posting, the application, the fee and the renewal cycle are absorbed into work it is already doing rather than stood up for one project. It holds the permit, employs the specialists on Kazakh contracts and carries the statutory employer positions that come with them.

Why do the numbers in this market move every January?

Because Kazakhstan sets its fees, floors, caps and thresholds in two index figures rather than in tenge and both are reset each year by the budget law.

Both figures come from the same provision of the budget law for 2026 to 2028 and apply from 1 January 2026.

The practical consequence is that the tenge cost of employing in Kazakhstan moves every January whether or not a single rule has changed. The permit fee rates were not changed for 2026 and the fee still went up, because the rate is read at the MRP in force on the date the fee is paid. A budget carried over from last year is wrong by the index movement alone and the cost breakdown prices each line at this year's figures.

What changed for employers in Kazakhstan in 2026?

A new Tax Code, a lower social tax rate that arrived with the loss of an offset and a quota revision in the spring.

The two social tax changes have to be read together. Before 2026 an employer computed social tax and then reduced it by the amount of its social contributions. From 2026 the two are computed and paid independently, so a figure that takes the fall from 11% to 6% without the loss of the offset misstates the employer's position.

The Tax Code of 18 July 2025 took effect on 1 January 2026 and carries most of the rest. Employment income moved onto a progressive scale, 10% up to 8,500 MRP a year and 15% above it, with the same scale applying to a non-resident. Value added tax is 16% and corporate income tax is 20%. The social tax object is defined there too, as the employee's income after the mandatory pension contribution, the employee health insurance contribution and the exempt income categories the Code lists are deducted.

Two further changes sit in their own instruments. Both health insurance caps are new paragraphs inserted with effect from 1 January 2026, capping the employer's base at 40 minimum wages a month and the employee's at 20. And the employer pension contribution is on a legislated ladder rather than a fixed rate: 3.5% in 2026, stepping up annually to 5% by 2028.

One thing did not change, though it is easy to assume otherwise. The permit fee schedule that applies from 1 January 2026 re-enacted the existing rates under the new Tax Code, repealing the 2018 decree that carried the same figures. The MRP multiples did not move. What moved is the legal basis and the tenge cost.

A year like 2026 lands on whoever runs the Kazakh payroll and files the permit applications. Tracking the rates, applying the new social tax object, paying the contribution lines each worker's status attracts and re-pricing the permit fee each January all sit there. An employer already established in Kazakhstan absorbs it as maintenance.

What sits on the employer once the permit is issued?

A recurring cycle rather than a completed filing and the cycle is why the employer question is settled before a mobilisation date rather than after it.

A specialist permit runs twelve months and is extended twelve months at a time, no more than three times, which puts a ceiling of forty-eight months on one employer permit. The fee falls again on every extension and each extension is assessed against the same local-content ratios as the original application. The extension itself has a window: it is applied for not earlier than sixty and not later than thirty calendar days before the permit expires, so the renewal decision is taken while the permit still has a month to run.

Two conditions attach to the employment itself rather than to the permit application. The employment contract is registered in the unified system for recording employment contracts and the foreign worker obtains an individual identification number. Both sit with the employing entity.

The rules also allow for a deployment that does not go to plan. Where the worker a permit was issued for did not arrive at the place of work, or where their employment contract was terminated, the permit may be re-issued to a different foreign worker with a new number.

All of that is ordinary operating load for an employer already established in Kazakhstan and none of it reaches a client company that is not the employer. What the client keeps is the direction of the work. The routes comparison sets out what each way of employing here carries afterwards, which is where the decision actually sits.