Until March 2026 a Georgian company could hire a foreign national the same way it hired anyone else. Now the company has to qualify before the candidate does, on a turnover figure it may never have had to evidence for any other purpose, and the application is the employer's rather than the employee's. Get it wrong and the fine arrives at the company as well as the individual, in full, twice over. Here is what an employer has to show, who files what, and in which order.
What actually changed for employers
The Special Labour Permit, formally the right to labour activity, was created by a government resolution of 20 February 2026 and became mandatory on 1 March 2026. It is issued by the Employment Promotion State Agency under the Ministry of Labour, under the procedural rules on granting residence permits.
The change that matters to a company is not the existence of a new form. It is that the right to be in Georgia and the right to work for a Georgian employer are now decided by two different ministries. Your foreign hire's residence permit says nothing about whether they may work for you, and the fact that they hold one is not a defence.
The second change is that the test is partly about you. The labour permit is assessed on the employer's capacity to carry a foreign hire, which means your accounts are in the application. Most companies have never had to produce that evidence for an immigration purpose before, and the first time is always the slow one.
The full mechanics from the worker's side sit in the guide to the Special Labour Permit. This page is the company's half.
The turnover test
The number is GEL 50,000, roughly $19,000, of annual turnover per foreign employee, set by Decree No. 317 of 9 July 2026. Educational and medical institutions qualify at GEL 35,000.
| Employer type | Turnover required | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary company | GEL 50,000 per foreign employee | Decree No. 317 |
| Educational institution | GEL 35,000 per foreign employee | Decree No. 317 |
| Medical institution | GEL 35,000 per foreign employee | Decree No. 317 |
| Company under three months old | No turnover test, on conditions | Start-up relief, Decree No. 317 |
Three features of that figure decide most applications.
It is per foreign employee, not per company. A company sponsoring three foreign nationals is being measured against three times the figure, so the test tightens as your foreign headcount grows. Plan hiring waves against it rather than discovering the ceiling on the third application.
It has to reconcile with what the state already holds. Turnover you present has to agree with your filings at the Revenue Service. A company trading well but filing inconsistently is a harder sponsor than a smaller company with clean records, and a mismatch between the two is the single most common reason these applications fail. The rest of the recurring causes are set out in why labour permits get refused.
The reduced rate follows the institution, not the role. A school qualifies at GEL 35,000 for a maintenance hire as much as for a teacher. An ordinary company hiring a nurse does not get the reduced rate because the job is medical. The category attaches to the employer.
The amounts are fixed in lari by the decree. The dollar figures here are conversions at the prevailing rate and they drift; the lari figures are the law and they do not.
Who files what
This is where companies lose time, because responsibility is split in a way that does not match how hiring usually works.
| Step | Who is responsible | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Special Labour Permit | The employer, on an employment relationship | Employment Promotion State Agency |
| Turnover and tax evidence | The employer | Same application |
| Employment contract and role description | The employer, with the candidate | Same application |
| Passport, police certificate, photo, insurance | The candidate | Their own residence permit file |
| Residence permit, or D1 visa from abroad | The candidate | Public Service Hall, or a Georgian mission |
Two consequences follow. Your candidate cannot start the process for you, so a hire who says they are sorting their paperwork is not moving the part that depends on your accounts. And the items the candidate does control are the slow ones: an apostilled criminal record certificate from their home country routinely takes longer than both government decisions combined, which is the whole argument of the processing time guide.
Where the candidate is self-employed rather than employed, none of this is yours. They apply on their own turnover or income, which is the self-employed side of the work residence permit. Contracting with an Individual Entrepreneur moves the obligation onto them rather than removing it, because a Georgian company paying the invoices is exactly what puts an IE inside the requirement, so it should be a considered structure rather than a workaround.
The order of operations for a hire
- Confirm the company qualifies before you make the offer. Turnover per foreign employee, tested against your filings, including any foreign staff you already sponsor.
- File the labour permit application. Decision due within 30 calendar days on GEL 200, or ten working days on GEL 400.
- The candidate files their residence permit, or a D1 visa if they are applying from abroad, with the granted labour permit in the file.
- The candidate collects the residence card and starts work.
Step three has a deadline attached that catches employers specifically. Approval of the labour permit opens a short, finite window in which the residence permit application or the visa application has to be filed. The closing date is stated on the approval notice itself, so read it there rather than assuming, and keep it separate from the 30-day decision period that has just ended.
Two dates then govern the hire from the company's side. The candidate must file the residence permit at least 40 calendar days before their current lawful stay expires, and applications inside that window are refused review rather than assessed. If the person you are hiring is already in Georgia on visa-free entry, that date may be closer than either of you thinks.
Hiring from abroad is a different sequence again: the D1 visa is applied for at a Georgian mission after the labour permit is granted, and its fee, processing time and validity are set by the mission rather than published centrally, so confirm all three with the specific post before you promise a start date.
A residence permit application filed without a valid labour permit underneath it is refused, not queued. The company loses the fee and the candidate loses the cycle, and if their lawful stay was running down, they lose the window entirely.
New companies: the start-up relief
A company with no trading history cannot demonstrate GEL 50,000 of turnover, and without relief no start-up in Georgia could hire a foreign national at all.
Decree No. 317 provides for that. A Georgian company can hire foreign staff without meeting the turnover test where it is less than three months old, is hiring no more than three foreign nationals, and is making a first application.
The catch is on the other side. Permits issued under the relief run six months only, and the renewal is assessed on the ordinary rules, so the company has six months to generate the turnover it was excused from showing. For a founder that is a planning constraint on the whole first year, and it is set out in full in the guide to the start-up relief and its six-month term.
If the company itself does not exist yet, that comes first and it is not an immigration question. Our sister firm at register-company.ge handles incorporation, tax registration and accounting, and the incorporation date is the one the three-month clock runs from, so it is worth sequencing deliberately rather than incidentally.
The fine lands on the company separately
This is the part that turns a compliance question into a board question.
Employing a foreign national without a valid labour permit carries GEL 2,000 on the individual and a separate GEL 2,000 on the employer. Not a single penalty divided between you. Two penalties, one each, and both double on a repeat, taking the combined exposure on a second finding to GEL 8,000 for one worker.
Multiply that by headcount and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable quickly. A company with four unauthorised foreign staff is looking at GEL 8,000 of its own exposure on a first finding, before anything happens to the employees themselves.
The individual consequences reach back to you. Unauthorised work undermines the legal basis of the worker's residence permit, which turns an administrative penalty into a question about their right to remain, and any prohibition on entry comes from a separate decision that states its own period. Losing a key hire to a status problem you created is the real cost, and how the penalties actually work is worth reading before you rely on an informal arrangement.
Georgia has also run an illegal-presence database since October 2025, alongside expanded biometrics and inspection powers. Describing the mechanism is as far as we will go, because nobody publishes enforcement volumes and we are not going to guess at them.
Staff you already employed
If a foreign national was already on your books before 1 March 2026, that employment sits inside a transition window that closes on 1 January 2027.
Companies read that as ten months of comfort and it is not. A decision takes up to 30 calendar days, so the real deadline is the start of December. Every affected employer in the country shares the same date, and the queue in the final quarter will not resemble the queue now. The sensible plan is to file for existing foreign staff well before the autumn, and the detail sits in the guide to the 1 January 2027 deadline.
The window does not stretch to cover residence permits, because the two rules do different jobs. It is time to regularise staff you already had, not a waiver of the prerequisite. Work and IT residence permits have required a granted labour permit underneath them since 1 March 2026, and a renewal on either route is assessed against that requirement rather than against the transition date. So where an employee's residence permit falls due for renewal during the window, sequence the labour permit ahead of it and work to their expiry date rather than to 1 January 2027.
What is not an exemption
Employers reach for these regularly, and none of them works.
- The employee holds a residence permit. That is presence, not permission to work. On work and IT routes the labour permit is the prerequisite for the residence permit.
- The salary is paid from abroad, or by a foreign parent company. Payroll routing is not the test, the employment relationship is. Somebody on your Georgian company's books needs the permit whichever account pays them. If the intention is that the foreign parent employs the person outright and your entity does not, that is a different structure with different consequences, and it has to be true on paper before you rely on it. The reasoning, with worked examples, is in who needs a work permit in Georgia.
- The engagement is short. No minimum period appears in the rules, so treat the requirement as applying from the first paid day.
- The person is a director or a shareholder. Neither status is on the exemption list, so where the company employs them the permit is due as it would be for any other hire.
What genuinely sits outside the requirement is narrow: holders of the $300,000 investment residence permit and permanent residents are exempt, and diplomatic and consular staff, accredited foreign journalists, refugees and asylum seekers are governed by separate rules. Verify an exemption claim in writing before you rely on it, because the fine is yours as well as theirs.
What we do for employers
We run the company side of the Special Labour Permit: assembling and reconciling turnover evidence against your Revenue Service filings, classifying the role so the description matches what the company actually does, and filing at the Employment Promotion State Agency. Where the same hire also needs a residence permit, we run the work residence permit into the window that approval opens, so the second application is not left to the candidate to discover.
Category requirements and fee schedules on the residence permit side are published by the Public Service Development Agency, and the underlying obligations sit in the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens and Stateless Persons.
Government authorisation for labour activity in Georgia. Required to employ foreign staff, to trade as an IE with Georgian clients, or to apply for a work or IT residence permit.
See what it costs, from $450
Key takeaways
- Since 1 March 2026 the employer, not the employee, applies for the Special Labour Permit on an employment relationship.
- The company must show GEL 50,000 of annual turnover per foreign employee, or GEL 35,000 if it is an educational or medical institution.
- The figure is per foreign employee, so the test tightens with every additional foreign hire.
- Turnover evidence has to reconcile with your Revenue Service filings. A mismatch is the most common cause of refusal.
- Government fee is GEL 200 for 30 calendar days or GEL 400 for ten working days.
- The labour permit comes first, then the residence permit or D1 visa inside the window the approval notice states.
- A company under three months old can hire up to three foreign nationals without the turnover test, but those permits run six months.
- The fine is GEL 2,000 on the worker and a separate GEL 2,000 on the company, doubled on a repeat.
- Foreign staff already on the books before March 2026 must be regularised by 1 January 2027, which means filing before the autumn.
Frequently asked questions
What turnover does a Georgian employer need to hire a foreign worker?
GEL 50,000, around $19,000, of annual turnover per foreign employee, set by Decree No. 317 of 9 July 2026. Educational and medical institutions qualify at GEL 35,000. Because the figure is per foreign employee, a company sponsoring three foreign nationals is measured against three times the amount.
Who applies for the Special Labour Permit in Georgia, the employer or the employee?
The employer, where there is an employment relationship, because the application rests on the company's turnover and tax filings. Self-employed foreign nationals who need one, meaning an Individual Entrepreneur with Georgian clients or somebody applying for a work or IT residence permit, apply for themselves on their own income. The employee still files their own residence permit afterwards, with the granted labour permit in the file.
How much does a Special Labour Permit cost an employer in Georgia?
GEL 200, around $75, for a decision within 30 calendar days, or GEL 400, around $155, for a decision on the tenth working day. The fee is the small part. Assembling turnover evidence that reconciles with the Revenue Service is where the work and the risk sit.
What is the fine for hiring a foreign worker without a permit in Georgia?
GEL 2,000 on the company and a separate GEL 2,000 on the worker, both doubled on a repeat finding. They are two penalties rather than one shared amount, so a second finding for a single worker reaches GEL 8,000 combined. The worker's residence permit is also exposed, because unauthorised work undermines its basis.
Can a new Georgian company hire foreign employees?
Yes, under the start-up relief in Decree No. 317, if the company is less than three months old, is hiring no more than three foreign nationals and is making a first application. The turnover test is waived, but permits issued under it run six months only and the renewal is assessed on the ordinary rules.
Does my foreign employee's residence permit mean they can work for us?
No. A residence permit establishes lawful presence, not authorisation to work for your company. On the work and IT routes the labour permit is a prerequisite for the residence permit, so a valid permit implies one existed, but you should verify it rather than infer it. Holding a permit is not a defence to the fine.
Do we need a labour permit for a foreign employee paid by our overseas parent company?
If your Georgian entity employs them, yes. The requirement follows the employment relationship rather than the account the salary is paid from, so an overseas payroll changes nothing about who files or what has to be shown. Where the parent employs the person outright and the Georgian company does not, there is no Georgian employment to authorise, but that has to be the actual arrangement rather than a description of it, so confirm the structure in writing before anyone starts.
How long does it take to hire a foreign national in Georgia?
Budget the labour permit at up to 30 calendar days, or ten working days on the expedited fee, then the residence permit at 10 to 30 days on top. The candidate's apostilled criminal record certificate from their home country usually takes longer than both, so start that first and treat six to eight weeks as the realistic minimum.
What is the deadline for existing foreign staff in Georgia?
1 January 2027, for foreign nationals already employed by a Georgian company before 1 March 2026. Because a decision takes up to 30 calendar days and every affected employer shares the deadline, the practical filing point is before autumn 2026 rather than December.
Which foreign employees are exempt from the Georgian labour permit?
Investment residence permit holders and permanent residents are exempt. Diplomatic and consular staff, accredited foreign journalists, refugees and asylum seekers sit outside the regime under their own rules. Directors, shareholders, short engagements and an overseas payroll are not exemptions where your Georgian entity is the employer, and there is no de minimis period before the requirement is engaged.
Can we hire a foreign national who is outside Georgia?
Yes. The labour permit is applied for first, and the candidate then applies for a D1 visa at a Georgian mission and converts to a residence permit after arrival. The visa fee, processing time and validity are set by the mission rather than published centrally, so confirm all three before committing to a start date.
