Every autumn we get some version of the same email from a finance team abroad. The Minsk center needs a budget for next year, the board meets in December, could we check the numbers? Usually the numbers are close enough. The structure is what’s off. Social contributions get calculated on full salaries, the HTP deduction is forgotten or charged on profit, rent is entered in euros, and all twenty people are on payroll from 1 January.
2027 won’t bring big tax surprises. The draft changes to the Tax Code that went to Parliament this autumn mostly index fixed amounts to inflation, and the Ministry of Finance says most taxpayers won’t feel a difference. Still, a few things that drive an R&D budget move every year anyway. The national average salary changes every month, office rent can now only be written in rubles, and engineers’ pay keeps going up.
So this is how we put these budgets together with clients who run a Belarusian entity with Hi-Tech Park status, with a full example for a 20-person team at the end. Everything is in Belarusian rubles. That’s the currency you pay salaries, rent and taxes in, and it’s far easier to convert the final figure at one planning rate than to fight the exchange rate line by line.
Our template has five blocks: salaries, employer contributions, the HTP deduction, office and IT, and outside services. Salaries and contributions together usually come to 75 to 85 percent of the total. You’ll be closer to 75 in a year when you’re also fitting out a new office.
We build it month by month. Most parent companies send money to the Belarusian entity once a month, so sooner or later the CFO asks which month each payment falls in. A single annual total can’t answer that.
On top of that we add a contingency of 5 to 7 percent. Budgets here rarely go over because of one big event. They creep up through small things, like a senior hire who wants relocation support, or the landlord’s indexation clause kicking in sometime in spring.
Before any numbers go in, settle how the center makes money. Most R&D centers we work with are cost-plus: they bill the parent for development work at cost plus a markup the two sides agree on. That bill is the entity’s revenue, and the HTP deduction is calculated from it. If your Hi-Tech Park residency is still pending, make a second copy of the model on the general tax regime for the months before it comes through. It’s better for headquarters to see that figure in the budget than to meet it for the first time in the accounts.
This is where most of the money goes, and where most of the arguments with headquarters happen.
Employment contracts in Belarus fix pay in rubles, so every position in the model needs a gross monthly figure in BYN. Candidates may talk about offers in dollars. The contract won’t.
For a sense of scale, Belstat put the average salary in information and communication at about 6,426 rubles in September 2026. The national average that month was 3,099. People at international R&D centers, especially seniors and team leads, earn well above the sector figure, and foreign finance teams are often surprised by how wide the gap between a middle and a senior engineer is.
Income tax comes out of the employee’s pay, so if salaries are agreed gross it doesn’t touch your cost. It does affect negotiations, because candidates think in net terms. HTP employees pay a flat 13%. The old 9% rate is still suspended and won’t return before 1 January 2028, so plan the whole of 2027 at 13%. The higher 25% and 30% rates for very large incomes don’t apply to people employed by HTP residents.
A rough rule for converting offers: up to the contribution cap, people take home about 86% of gross after 13% income tax and their own 1% pension contribution. Above the cap it’s a bit more, since that 1% is only charged on the capped amount.
The mistake we see most often is a budget with the whole team starting in January. Nobody hires like that. Put a start month against every open position and the annual total usually drops by 10 to 20 percent.
Then decide when salaries will be reviewed and by how much, and write it into the model. If grades come from last year’s offers rather than a current salary survey, you’re likely to need a correction halfway through the year, and headquarters won’t enjoy that conversation.
Bonuses come last. A 13th salary isn’t required by law, but most centers pay some kind of performance bonus, so budget it as a share of gross pay. Bear in mind that bonuses push up average earnings, and in Belarus vacation pay is based on average earnings, not the base salary.
Health insurance, training and the occasional team event sit at the bottom of this block. It’s small money, but candidates do ask about it.
If there’s one part of the budget where HTP status pays for itself, it’s this one.
Belarusian employers pay 34% of salary to the Social Protection Fund (FSZN), 28% for pensions and 6% for social insurance. Employees add 1% for their pension, withheld from pay. For a regular company the base is the whole salary.
HTP residents don’t pay contributions on the part of a salary that’s above one national average monthly wage for the previous month. Staff who maintain or guard buildings are the exception. For engineers on two or three times the national average, that’s a lot of money. Take a senior engineer on 11,000 rubles a month, with the cap at 3,400:
| FSZN base, BYN per month | 11,000 | 3,400 |
| Employer FSZN at 34%, BYN per month | 3,740 | 1,156 |
| Employer FSZN, BYN per year | 44,880 | 13,872 |
That’s about 31,000 rubles a year on one person.
The cap moves every month with Belstat’s data, so nobody knows the 2027 values yet. September 2026 came in at 3,099 rubles. We plan 2027 at 3,400 to allow for wage growth during the year, then adjust once a quarter. If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong on the high side, because a higher cap means higher contributions.
Employees can also ask, in writing, to have contributions paid on their full salary. Some senior people do, since their future pension depends on what goes in. Flag them in the model.
Accident insurance is paid to Belgosstrakh. The base rate for commercial employers is 0.6% of payroll, and the insurer can give a discount or add a surcharge depending on your history. The HTP cap doesn’t apply here, so use the full gross payroll, bonuses included.
None of this is difficult, but it has to be right every single month: the correct cap, the list of who opted out, reports to two funds on time. That’s the main reason foreign-owned centers of this size usually outsource payroll instead of hiring someone for it.
Residency isn’t free. Every quarter an HTP resident pays 1% of the revenue it earned in the previous quarter from its HTP activities, token sales included, to the HTP Secretariat. The government has had the power to change that rate since 2022. So far it hasn’t used it.
The deduction is charged on revenue, not profit, and that catches people out. With a cost-plus model and a 10% markup, 1% of revenue comes to about 1.1% of your costs. The deduction is itself one of those costs, so it ends up inside the invoice it’s calculated from. One formula in the spreadsheet sorts out the loop, and the difference is a few hundred rubles.
Timing matters more for cash than for the annual total. The deduction for October to December 2026 is paid in early 2027, and the one for the last quarter of 2027 lands in 2028. In the annual budget, 1% of 2027 revenue is fine. In the monthly cash forecast, push it back by a quarter.
So what does the 1% buy? Zero profit tax on core activity. No VAT on domestic sales of works and services, plus exemptions on a long list of services bought from abroad. No customs duty on equipment imported for your own activity. Dividends to a foreign parent are taxed at 5% according to the HTP’s own list of benefits, unless a treaty gives a lower rate. Then there’s the FSZN cap. In the example further down, the deduction is well under a tenth of the contribution savings alone.
Next to payroll the office looks small. It’s still where most of the one-off spending sits, and a badly read lease can cost you for years. We keep recurring costs and launch costs on separate lines, since headquarters tends to sign them off separately anyway.
Engineering teams in Minsk usually need 8 to 11 square meters per person once meeting rooms, a kitchen and corridors are counted. Call it 200 square meters for twenty people. Asking rents in class B+ buildings are roughly 41 to 60 rubles per square meter a month including VAT, and class A costs more. Most of the room for negotiation is in rent-free months and fit-out money rather than the rate itself, which we went into in our piece on opening an R&D office in Minsk.
A few things belong in the rent line. Since January 2025 leases have to state rent in rubles, so landlords now add indexation clauses, and it’s sensible to assume at least one increase during 2027. Many HTP residents can’t reclaim VAT on rent, so use the VAT-inclusive figure unless your accountant tells you otherwise. And check what the rate actually covers. Utilities, cleaning and security are sometimes included and sometimes billed on top. Internet with a backup line and the usual supplies come on top of that.
If you’re opening or expanding in 2027, add furniture, network equipment, access control, a UPS and a deposit of one or two months’ rent. Laptops and monitors are often the biggest single item. HTP residents can import equipment for their own activity without customs duty or import VAT, so buying through the Belarusian entity usually works out better than shipping hardware from head office.
Software and cloud subscriptions go in the local budget too, even if the parent pays for them and recharges. They’re part of the cost base, and so part of revenue.
At twenty people, a full in-house back office rarely makes sense. Most centers we work with keep an office manager on staff and buy in the rest.
Accounting and payroll are the core of it: bookkeeping, tax returns, FSZN and Belgosstrakh reports, salary calculations and annual statements. That’s normally a fixed monthly fee that grows with headcount.
HR administration is the part foreign companies tend to underestimate. Belarusian labor law runs on paper. Every hire comes with a contract, personnel orders, timesheets, a vacation schedule and, for some employees, military registration records. Gaps usually come to light during an inspection, which is the worst possible moment to find them.
Legal work clusters in the launch year. There’s the intercompany services agreement with the parent, employment templates, the office lease and changes to the charter. After that it drops to the occasional question.
Recruitment agencies charge per hire, either a fixed fee or a percentage of salary. Multiply by the number of open positions and leave a little room for replacements.
Then come the smaller items. Bank fees, the paperwork banks ask for with every incoming payment from the parent, and whatever reporting the group needs, whether that’s monthly management accounts, IFRS adjustments or an audit.
If the first few engineers are hired through an Employer of Record while the entity is being set up, the EOR fee covers part of this block for those months. Show the move to direct employment as a separate step in the model, so nobody is surprised when the cost lines change.
Here’s how it looks for an HTP resident with its full team from January and a new office in 2027. The team is a head of R&D, six senior and seven middle engineers, two juniors, two QA engineers, a DevOps engineer and an office manager, with average gross pay of about 8,475 rubles a month. These are illustrative numbers, not quotes.
| Gross salaries | 20 people, 169,500 BYN per month | 2,034,000 |
| Bonuses | 8% of gross salaries | 162,720 |
| Health insurance, training, team events | About 2,250 BYN per person | 45,000 |
| Employer FSZN (34%) | HTP cap of 3,400 BYN per person per month | 277,440 |
| Belgosstrakh (0.6%) | Full gross payroll, no cap | 13,180 |
| Office rent | 200 m² at 48 BYN per m², VAT included | 115,200 |
| Operating costs, internet, supplies | Utilities, cleaning, security, backup line | 34,200 |
| Software and cloud | 2,000 BYN per person | 40,000 |
| Furniture, network, access control, UPS | One-off, launch year | 100,000 |
| Laptops and monitors | 20 sets at 7,000 BYN | 140,000 |
| Accounting, payroll, HR administration | Outsourced, fixed monthly fee | 60,000 |
| Recruitment | 6 hires at 9,000 BYN | 54,000 |
| Legal, banking, group reporting | Launch-year scope | 36,000 |
| Business travel | Trips to headquarters | 40,000 |
| Contingency | 5% of the lines above | 157,590 |
| HTP deduction | 1% of revenue at a 10% markup | 36,810 |
| Total costs | 3,346,140 | |
| Revenue invoiced to the parent | Total costs plus 10% | 3,680,750 |
Two figures from this table tend to stick with headquarters. On the general regime, employer FSZN for the same team would be about 746,900 rubles rather than 277,440, so roughly 469,000 more a year, against an HTP deduction of about 36,800. And once the 240,000 rubles of launch equipment drops out, the center runs at around 259,000 rubles a month before any salary review.
Your real 2027 figure will probably come in lower, because actual teams are hired over months, not on a single day.
13%. The 9% rate is suspended until 1 January 2028. The higher 25% and 30% rates for very large incomes don’t apply to salaries paid by HTP residents.
The national average salary that Belstat reports for the previous month. January’s contributions are capped at December’s average, February’s at January’s, and so on. Nobody has 2027 data yet, so we budget at 3,400 rubles, a bit above where the average sits now, and swap in the real figures each quarter as Belstat publishes them.
It’s charged on revenue from HTP activities and from disposing of tokens, received in the previous quarter. If your center only invoices its parent, that’s effectively everything.
You can present it that way. Salaries, rent and taxes are still paid in rubles, though, so build the model in BYN and convert at one planning rate. Currency movements then show up as one variance instead of hiding in every line.
Not much. It mostly indexes fixed amounts, moves the annual declaration deadline for individuals to 30 April and changes how tax at the 25% and 30% rates is offset. HTP payroll rules stay as they are. It’s still a good idea to check the final law once it’s adopted.
Around 5% for a center that’s already up and running. In a launch year, with the office, hiring and HTP admission all happening at once, we’d go for 7 to 10%.
Strip it back and a Belarusian R&D budget rests on a handful of assumptions: who starts when, what they’re paid in rubles, the FSZN cap, the markup and the size of the office. Once those are right, the rest is arithmetic. Most of the HTP cost advantage comes from the contribution cap and zero profit tax, and the 1% deduction stays a small, predictable line.
The budgets that hold up through the year are the ones built by month, with honest guesses about how fast you’ll really hire, when salaries go up and what the landlord’s indexation clause actually says.
If you’d like someone to go through your 2027 numbers, or want a template already set up for your team and markup, talk to our team. One call is usually enough to tell whether the assumptions hold.
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