Iraq
Employ in Iraq without an entity.
A contract under Iraq's Labour Law, pay in dinars, and social security and income tax handled every month. One contact and one invoice.
The facts of employing in Iraq.
Paid in dinars, every month.
A 48-hour week.
Eight hours a day, with Friday the weekly rest day by default.
Social security from both sides.
12% from the employer and 5% from the employee, and the state's 8% from the employer for a foreign worker.
Work permits for a year.
Granted where no qualified Iraqi is available.
What employing in Iraq involves, in plain words.
Each is handled for everyone you employ through Global Kinect EOR.
- Contracts
A written contract is made in Arabic, in three copies. A foreign employee's is also in English or their own language.
- A fixed term covers a defined job, for up to a year. Renewed more than once, it becomes open-ended.
- Trial period: up to 3 months, once with each employer.
- Social security
Pensions, work injury, and health and maternity for everyone, and unemployment for Iraqi nationals, under the Social Security Law of 2023, on pay up to IQD 1,750,000 a month.
- 12% from the employer and 5% from the employee.
- For a foreign worker, the employer also pays the 8% the state pays for an Iraqi national.
- Employers whose profits come from oil and hydrocarbons pay a higher rate.
- Income tax
Withheld by the employer each month, after personal allowances, and paid within 15 days of the next month.
- 3% on the first IQD 250,000 of taxable income a year, then 5% to IQD 500,000, 10% to IQD 1,000,000, and 15% above.
- Leave
21 days of paid annual leave after a year, rising with service.
- Sick leave: 30 days a year on full pay, building up to 180.
- Maternity leave: 14 weeks on full pay, at least 6 of them after the birth.
- Ending employment
30 days' written notice, or pay in place of it.
- End-of-service pay: 2 weeks' wage for each year of service, except where the contract ends for a prison sentence, a breach of the employee's duties, a false identity or forged documents, or a serious error a final court ruling finds.
- An unlawful dismissal leads to reinstatement with back pay or, where that is not possible, twice the end-of-service pay.
Hiring in Iraq, step by step.
You choose the person
And agree the role and the salary in dinars.
The contract is put in place
Under Iraq's Labour Law, with a work permit where one is needed.
They are paid monthly
In dinars, with social security and income tax handled.
You get one invoice
With every other country you hire in.
Questions about employing in Iraq
What does it take to employ a foreign national in Iraq?
In federal Iraq, a foreign employee needs a work permit from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs before starting work. The permit lasts a year and is renewed each year. It is granted only where no qualified Iraqi is available for the job. Foreign workers may make up at most half of a project's staff.
Does the Kurdistan Region follow the same rules?
Is there a minimum wage?
Employing in Iraq, worked through in full.
The guide goes further than this page.
- Hiring in Iraq: the work permit, Iraqi workers first and the contract, step by step
How you hire in Iraq without an entity of your own: the work permit step by step, moving someone already in Iraq, the rule that Iraqi workers come first, the contract, the employee test, leave, and what has changed.
7 min read