Almost every foreign founder who sets up a tech entity in Minsk asks us the same thing during the first call: do we actually need the Hi-Tech Park? The honest answer is that most product and outsourcing companies do, and a meaningful minority do not. The difference comes down to salaries, margins, the activities you plan to run and how much reporting discipline you are ready for.
Belarusian law has no separate legal form for an IT business. A software company is registered as an ordinary LLC and then lives under one of two sets of rules. It either follows the general tax regime that applies to every company in the country, or it joins the special regime of the Hi-Tech Park (HTP).
Below we go through both options, put real numbers next to each other and show where the Park pays for itself and where it turns into an expensive formality. If you already know the basics of Hi-Tech Park residency, feel free to jump straight to the payroll comparison.
The HTP is not a business park in the physical sense. It started in 2005 with Decree No. 12, took its current shape in 2017 with Decree No. 8 on the development of the digital economy, and is set to run until 1 January 2049. It works as a legal regime: a company registered anywhere in Belarus can become a resident and keep its office in Brest or Grodno without losing a single benefit. The Park now has more than 1,000 resident companies.
Residents may only do what the HTP Regulations allow. The Ministry of Economy lists 37 permitted areas of activity, from software development and data processing to AI, fintech, operations with tokens, microelectronics, unmanned systems, biotech and esports. Within that list, the package looks like this:
One item on the official list needs a footnote. The Regulations still name a 9% personal income tax rate for HTP employees, but that rate has not applied since 2021. Belarus raised it to 13% “temporarily”, extended the increase once, and the Tax Code changes that took effect in January 2025 kept the 13% rate until 2028.
In practice, an engineer at a resident company pays the same income tax as anyone else in the country. Today the payroll saving sits almost entirely on the employer side, in social contributions.
A company that never applies to the Park, or that does something the HTP list does not cover, is taxed under the general rules of the Tax Code. There is nothing unusual about that. Plenty of Belarusian studios, integrators and resellers have worked this way for years.
The general regime means:
Smaller companies can move to the simplified tax system, which replaces profit tax with a percentage of gross revenue (6% in the standard case). It comes with a limit of 50 employees at registration and turnover thresholds that change from year to year. It suits a studio or a team in its first year, not a development centre that plans to grow.
The bigger gap is not any single tax. It is the legal toolkit. Outside the Park, an option plan or a convertible loan has to rest on general civil law, where these instruments are far less developed, and investors notice. Founders who expect to raise money or give equity to key staff usually feel this long before they feel the tax difference.
Tax rates stay abstract until you plug in a real payroll. Take a senior engineer on a gross salary of BYN 10,000 a month, a normal figure for an experienced developer at a foreign-owned centre in Minsk. The 2026 budget assumes an average national wage of just under BYN 3,000, so for this illustration we round it to that.
| Per employee, per month | General regime | HTP resident |
| Gross salary | BYN 10,000 | BYN 10,000 |
| Base for employer FSZN | BYN 10,000 | about BYN 3,000 (average wage) |
| Employer FSZN at 34% | BYN 3,400 | about BYN 1,020 |
| Personal income tax | 13% | 13% (until 2028) |
That is roughly BYN 2,380 a month for one person, or close to BYN 28,500 a year. A team of 25 engineers at that level saves around BYN 700,000 a year on contributions alone. The Park describes the average-wage cap for social contributions as one of its core payroll benefits, and in our experience it is the main reason mid-sized development centres apply.
The cap only helps above the average wage, though. A team of juniors, QA engineers and support staff earning close to BYN 3,000 gets very little out of it.
Now the profit side. Suppose the company books BYN 5 million of export revenue a year at a 15% margin, which leaves BYN 750,000 of profit.
This is where many founders get caught out. The 1% is charged on revenue, not on profit, so the comparison flips when margins are thin. One percent of revenue equals 20% of profit at a 5% margin. A company running at 3 or 4%, which is common in body-shop outsourcing and in licence reselling, pays more to the Park than it would pay in profit tax. The payroll saving usually still covers the difference, but it is worth running the numbers before you file.
The benefits are real, and so are the strings attached to them.
Admission is a project, not a form. A foreign group first registers a Belarusian LLC. It then submits an application, a business project in the approved format, and copies of the charter and registration certificate to the Secretariat of the HTP Supervisory Board. The Board weighs how significant the project is, and a decision usually comes four to six weeks after a complete filing. The HTP business project is where most applications stall, because it has to describe the activity in the terms the Regulations use and back it with believable headcount and revenue figures.
The 1% is due every quarter. It is paid by the 20th of the month after the quarter closes, whether or not the company made a profit.
Only listed activities are allowed. If you also sell hardware, run a marketing agency or sublet office space, those lines often have to move to a separate legal entity. Mixed businesses end up with two companies and two sets of books.
Reporting never stops. Residents file reports with the Secretariat and have to keep their work within the approved project. Drifting away from the business plan, leaving changes unreported or booking ineligible revenue can end in exclusion. When a company loses its status, the tax authorities can go back over earlier periods and assess the taxes and contributions that would have applied under the general rules.
Accounting becomes specialised. Splitting eligible from ineligible revenue, applying the FSZN cap correctly every month and calculating the 1% base are routine for an accountant who works with residents. For one who does not, they are a steady source of mistakes.
After more than ten years of setting up entities for foreign clients, we see a fairly consistent pattern.
The HTP usually makes sense if:
Staying in the general regime is a reasonable choice if:
Geography plays a part as well. Founders picking a base for an R&D centre often weigh Belarus against the IT regimes in Uzbekistan and Armenia, and the answer tends to depend less on headline rates than on where the engineers already live and how client contracts are structured.
The choice is not always binary, and it does not have to be made on day one.
Some companies start without a Belarusian entity at all. Under an Employer of Record arrangement, a local provider hires the engineers on its own payroll, handles contracts, income tax and FSZN, and invoices the foreign company each month. For the first five to fifteen hires this is often the fastest and least risky way to start.
Others register an ordinary LLC, run it under the general regime for six to twelve months and apply to the Park once revenue and headcount justify it. A year of real numbers also makes the business project far more convincing to the Supervisory Board.
What we advise against is the setup many teams drift into by accident: a group of developers registered as individual entrepreneurs, each sending invoices to the company abroad. It is cheap at the start, but it carries reclassification risk and leaves the business with no local entity, no clean chain of IP rights and no route into the Park.
No, and this catches out a lot of first-time applicants. Only a company registered in Belarus can hold residency, so you open a local LLC first and apply through it. Foreign ownership is not an issue: the LLC can belong entirely to your parent company in Cyprus, the UAE or anywhere else, and the parent never has to move.
The Regulations don’t set one. What the Supervisory Board reads closely is the business project: what you are building, who pays for it, how many people work on it and what you expect to earn. Product teams of three or four people do get accepted, and much bigger companies get sent back when their plan says very little.
Plan for two to three months from a standing start. Registering the LLC and preparing the business project take most of that time, and the Board’s decision usually follows four to six weeks after a complete filing.
Not at the moment. The 9% rate in the Regulations is suspended, and employees of residents pay 13% until 1 January 2028, the same as everyone else. The saving now comes from capped social contributions, which the employer pays.
No. The regime applies across the whole country, so a resident can work from any city in Belarus. The only benefit tied to the Park’s physical territory is the exemption from real estate and land tax.
Usually not. For most IT services sold to a foreign client, the place of supply is outside Belarus, so Belarusian VAT does not arise. The details depend on the type of service and the client’s country, and sales to Russia follow EAEU rules.
The company moves to the general tax regime from the date it loses status. If it was excluded for violations, the authorities may also review earlier periods and charge the difference in taxes and contributions.
For most foreign-owned development centres with ten or more well-paid engineers, the Hi-Tech Park pays for itself several times over, mainly through capped social contributions and the profit tax exemption. For a small, low-margin or mixed business, the general regime is often simpler and not much more expensive. Either way, the decision rests on a handful of numbers you probably already have: average salary, expected margin, the activities you plan to run and how long you intend to stay.
Work through those figures before you register anything, because changing course later always costs more than choosing well at the start. If you would like someone to check the math against your own plans, get in touch with our team and we will tell you plainly which route fits.
