The EOR role in Bulgaria: what the employer of record carries for you

The EOR role in Bulgaria is to be the employer on paper and in law for someone who works on your projects. In law, the person you recruit is employed by the EOR: its name goes on the labour contract (трудов договор), it registers that contract with the National Revenue Agency, it calculates and pays the salary in euro, and it files and pays the contributions and income tax that Bulgarian law attaches to every payslip.

You keep the part of employment that matters commercially. Picking the candidate is your call, as are the salary and the job itself, and it is your team that works with that person every day on your product, your clients and your deadlines. Duties that the Labour Code (Кодекс на труда) places on an employer, and those set by the Social Insurance Code, sit with the EOR, and you pay a monthly fee for carrying them.

That split is the whole idea. Without an EOR, employing someone directly would mean forming and registering a company of your own first, which is the gap the EOR fills. Here at Employer of Record Bulgaria, that means we sign a Bulgarian labour contract with each person you pick and pay them through our payroll, and the rest of this article lists what that involves, duty by duty.

Most of the legal weight of a Bulgarian hire lands before the person writes a single line of code. The contract must be in writing (Labour Code, Art. 62(1)), and Art. 66 lists its required content: who employs whom, where and from when, the job title, how long the contract lasts, paid leave, notice, pay and pay period, and working time, among other points. The EOR drafts that document around the terms you have agreed with the candidate and signs it as employer.

The clock for the employment register (регистър на заетостта) is short: the NRA must have the contract’s data no more than 3 days after signature. Many guides still call this the Article 62 notification. Before starting, the new employee needs two papers in hand, their copy of the signed contract and an NRA-certified copy of the register entry, and Article 63 forbids admitting anyone to work until that has happened. Getting this order wrong is one of the breaches the Labour Inspectorate fines under Article 414, so the EOR plans the start date around it.

Other first-week items fall to the employer as well:

• agreeing a probation period of 6 months at most under the Labour Code (1 month on a contract shorter than a year);
• collecting proof of earlier work so the length-of-service supplement (клас прослужено време, “klas”) is set correctly;
• confirming whether the person was born before 1 January 1960, which changes the pension split and removes the universal pension fund (UPF) contribution;
• recording the remote-work terms and the place of work, if the role is not office-based.

The calendar for all of this, step by step, is in our EOR timeline for Bulgaria explainer.

Each month the EOR turns an agreed gross salary into a payslip, a bank transfer and a set of payments to the state. Since 1 January 2026 every one of those amounts is in euro; the lev survives only as the fixed conversion rate of 1 EUR = 1.95583 BGN.

For an employee born after 1959, the 2026 rates split as follows: 18.92% is charged to the employer, 13.78% is deducted from the employee, covering pensions, sickness and maternity, unemployment, the UPF second pillar and health insurance. The 18.92% figure assumes a 0.4% work-accident rate, which is our working assumption for software roles; the rate is set by economic activity and runs up to 1.1%. Contributions stop at a monthly insurable ceiling of €2,111.64 for January to July 2026 and €2,300 for August onwards. The 10% income tax is then charged on what is left of gross pay once the employee’s contributions are taken off; there is no personal allowance.

The EOR withholds the employee’s share and the tax, adds the employer’s share, files the monthly declarations and pays the total to the National Revenue Agency (NRA, НАП). The deadline is the 25th: September’s contributions, for example, are due on 25 October. If the person had only one employer at year end, the year’s tax is reconciled by the EOR no later than 31 January, which usually spares the employee a tax return.

One-off payments follow the same logic. A bonus is taxed at 10% like ordinary pay, and contributions on it stop at the same monthly ceiling, so a bonus paid in a month where the regular salary already exceeds €2,300 adds no contributions at all. The EOR needs to know about a bonus before payroll closes for the month, because it changes the declaration filed for that month.

To give a sense of scale, a Sofia developer on €40,000 a year gross comes to about €44,972.46 of employer cost in 2026 once contributions are added, and takes home about €32,740.57. The cost build-up is explained line by line in what a Bulgarian employee really costs.

Time away from work generates as much administration as pay does, and the employer handles it. Paid annual leave (платен годишен отпуск) cannot drop below 20 working days, the Labour Code minimum. Someone in their first job has to complete 4 months of service before taking any. Unused days are paid out when the contract ends, so the EOR tracks the balance from the first month.

Bulgaria’s public holidays are set in Article 154. When one falls on a weekend (Easter aside), the next working day or days become days off: in 2026 that gave employees 25 May, 7 September and 28 December off. There was also a one-off non-working day on 2 January 2026 for the euro changeover.

Illness is shared out between the employer and the state. For the first 2 working days covered by a sick note, the employer pays 70% of the person’s average daily gross pay. After that, the National Social Security Institute (NSSI, НОИ) takes over with a benefit worth 80% of average daily insurable income. The EOR receives the sick note, runs the two employer days through payroll and passes the rest to the NSSI.

Maternity leave lasts 410 days per child, of which 45 come before the birth, and the NSSI pays 90% of average insurable income with nothing charged to the employer. A new father is entitled to 15 days once mother and child leave hospital, and separately to 2 months of his own that cannot be handed over and must be used before the child’s eighth birthday. The EOR’s job here is to record the leave correctly, keep the contract alive and handle the return to work.

Parents of children under 12 can also make a written request for remote work or different hours, and the employer has to deal with that request. With an EOR, you and the EOR agree the answer together, and the EOR puts it into an amended contract if the arrangement changes.

You still run the working relationship. You set the goals, review the output, decide on pay rises and tell the EOR when something needs to change. The EOR acts on those decisions in the form Bulgarian law requires: a pay rise becomes a contract annex, a change of hours or place of work becomes an amended contract, and both changes go into the NRA register within the same 3-day window.

A few points deserve early attention, because they are easy to get wrong when you are used to another system:

• The normal week is five days of 8 hours, 40 in total. Overtime tops out at 150 hours a year, and the premium is a minimum of 50% for a working day, 75% for a rest day and 100% for a public holiday.
• Since 2024 staff can ignore employer messages sent during their daily and weekly rest periods, unless contact in rest time was agreed in their contract or a collective agreement.
• A remote employee’s laptop and other equipment, software, internet and phone costs, and data protection are paid for by the employer.
• A clause stopping someone from joining a competitor after they leave cannot be enforced in Bulgaria. Confidentiality duties can outlast the contract, and by default the code an employee writes in the job is the employer’s copyright.

If the relationship ends, the EOR applies the Labour Code. An open-ended contract normally carries 30 days’ notice, dismissal with notice is possible only for a reason Article 328 lists, and some groups need the Labour Inspectorate’s prior permission. You decide that it should end; the employer carries it out.

If you are about to make your first appointment, the stage-by-stage hiring plan shows what happens in which order.

An EOR suits a company that wants people in Bulgaria before it wants a Bulgarian company. If you need one to ten engineers, are testing the market, or cannot yet justify an accountant, a registered office and a payroll provider, the monthly fee (from €599 per employee per month) replaces all of that set-up.

Your own single-member limited company (EOOD) or multi-member one (OOD) starts to make sense once Bulgaria becomes a permanent part of the business. The minimum share capital is €1, but the company then needs a bank account, double-entry bookkeeping, internal pay rules, an occupational health service and its own employer access with the NRA before the first payroll. For the side-by-side numbers, read EOR vs EOOD in Bulgaria; the fee itself is broken down on our services page.

Hires from outside the EU add another layer. Someone without EU citizenship must hold a single permit or an EU Blue Card before day one; the Ministry of Interior’s Migration Directorate decides, and the Employment Agency has a say. Whoever appears as employer must back the application, so raise any non-EU candidate at the very start of the conversation.

Whichever way you lean, the useful test is the same: list every employer duty in this article and ask who on your side would carry it. If the honest answer is nobody yet, an EOR is the shorter path. When you reach the point of choosing a provider, work through our checklist for picking an EOR in Bulgaria.