Working from Albania as a Belgium resident

At a glance

Rule coverage

What the rules say about Albania

The rules below are the ones most likely to shape a stay in Albania, in plain words and with the source behind each one. Your own report tells you which of them apply to you.

1. Significant issuePermanent establishment risk

   Running any company's real management from Albania can make the company itself Albanian tax resident

   Article 28 of Law 29/2023 is direct: a company is an Albanian tax resident if its place of effective management sits in Albania. There is no threshold or partial version of this. If you are the one making the real management and commercial decisions for a company while physically based in Albania, day to day, that company can be treated as an Albanian tax resident in its own right. Once that happens, the company's entire worldwide profit becomes taxable in Albania at 15 percent, not just the portion connected to Albania, and this covers active income like consulting or development fees just as much as passive income like dividends or royalties. This is a separate and broader rule than Albania's CFC regime, it does not depend on any 30 percent passive income test and does not care what the company's effective tax rate is elsewhere.

2. Significant issueImmigration and visa

   Past 90 days without a US passport, you need the Unique Permit or another residence route

   For Dutch and other EU nationals, and everyone outside the US bilateral arrangement, the 90 day visa-free window is a hard ceiling. There is no grace period and no extension available from inside the country simply by asking. Beyond it you need Albania's Unique Permit or one of the other residence routes, such as the EU Registration Certificate, arranged before the 90 days run out.

3. Significant issueTax residency

   Past 183 days in the calendar year you become an Albanian tax resident on worldwide income

   Article 8 of Albania's Law No. 29/2023 on Income Tax counts you as tax resident once you spend more than 183 days in Albania in a calendar year, counted as a tax year rather than a rolling twelve month window. Once you cross that line your worldwide income, not just what you earn inside Albania, comes into the Albanian tax net for that year. This is one of two independent tests, the other being where your centre of vital interests sits, so day counting alone does not tell the whole story.

4. Needs checkingPersonal income tax

   One dominant client can get your freelance income reclassified as employment, at 13 to 23 percent instead of 0

   Since the 2025 tax year, reported through new declaration forms rolled out in 2026, Albania applies an anti-avoidance test to separate genuine business income from disguised employment. If 80 percent or more of your income comes from a single client, or 90 percent or more from fewer than three clients, the tax authority can treat you as an employee for tax purposes rather than as a small business. That reclassification moves you off the 0 percent small business track and onto personal income tax rates of 13 or 23 percent instead. The rule targets the common pattern of someone leaving payroll to invoice their old employer as a contractor while doing the same job. Crucially, the concentration test does not apply where the dominant client or clients are non-resident in Albania or have no Albanian permanent establishment. In that case the income keeps its business treatment however concentrated it is. For a Dutch freelancer invoicing Dutch or other EU clients this risk therefore usually does not arise at all. Sources differ on which instrument codifies the carve-out, one attributes it to Law 81/2025 of 11 December 2025, so confirm it applies to your own client mix before relying on it.

5. Needs checkingPension

   A Dutch pension does not automatically escape Dutch tax just because you retire to Albania

   Article 18 of the Netherlands Albania treaty sets the general rule that a private pension is taxable only where you are resident, which would mean Albania once you qualify as resident there. But the same article carries an important carve-out, the country the pension came from keeps a right to tax it if the pension entitlement was tax exempt when it built up, or if the contributions that funded it were tax deductible at the time. Most Dutch pension arrangements are built on tax deductible contributions, so this carve-out is likely to matter for exactly the kind of pension a Dutch retiree would be bringing. A separate treaty article covers government and civil service pensions, which generally stay taxable at source unless you are both resident in and a national of Albania.

6. Needs checkingMoving your company

   Owning a low-tax foreign company passively while Albanian tax resident can get its profit attributed to you personally

   Albania's controlled foreign company rules, under Article 19 of Law 29/2023, apply only to individuals, not to companies holding shares through an Albanian entity. They bite when an Albanian tax resident controls more than 50 percent of a foreign company, by ownership, voting rights or profit entitlement, and that foreign company's effective tax rate is below 7.5 percent, half of Albania's own 15 percent, and more than 30 percent of its profit is passive income such as interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains on securities or financial leasing income. If both conditions are met, the company's undistributed profit is attributed to you personally in the year it is earned, taxed as your own income, with a credit for foreign tax already paid. Genuinely active income, consulting, development work, product sales, does not count toward the 30 percent passive threshold, and this rule is entirely separate from the place of effective management rule, which catches active income too but only when you are actually directing the company's management from Albania.

Tax treaty between Belgium and Albania