Hiring your first employee in Albania: seven steps from role to payslip

Hiring your first employee in Albania goes faster when the role is pinned down on paper before anyone talks about money. The Albanian contract has to state the job description, place of work, normal weekly hours and start date, so you will need those details eventually; settling them now also tells you which salary benchmark to use.

Be concrete about three points. Where will the person work: from home in Shkodër, in a coworking space in Tirana, or part of the month at your headquarters abroad? What hours will they keep, and will any of those fall after 19:00 to overlap with colleagues in another time zone? And will they need a company laptop and phone, or use their own? Each answer feeds a clause later, and each has a cost attached under the Labour Code.

Telework is common for first hires, and Article 15 of the Code deals with it directly. Someone working from home cannot be put on worse terms than an office colleague, and unless they choose to work on their own laptop, supplying, setting up and servicing the equipment is your job. If the plan is remote work from day one, say so in the job outline.

Finally, decide who the person reports to and in which language. Your first employee in Albania has no colleagues there to ask, so a named manager abroad, a weekly call and written access to the tools they need do more for retention in the first months than any perk. Settle the language of documents as well. The contract and payslips will be issued in Albanian, so ask for an English version alongside if your managers will read them, and agree which text prevails.

Pay is agreed as a gross monthly figure in lek, and the floor is the national minimum wage of ALL 50,000 a month in 2026, about €543.60. Very few skilled first hires sit near that floor, so the useful reference points are the national averages published by INSTAT.

In the first quarter of 2026 the average gross wage across Albania was ALL 90,119 a month. Sector averages run higher in the fields where foreign firms usually recruit, with ICT employers paying a mean of ALL 131,747 and banks and insurers ALL 157,434. Treat these as orientation rather than offers. A senior engineer with ten years behind them will aim well above the sector mean; the developer salary we use as a worked example elsewhere on this site, ALL 200,000 monthly, sits at roughly 1.5 times the ICT number.

Quote gross and net together when you make the offer. Albanian candidates think in take-home pay, and the gap is easy to work out: in 2026 the employee loses 9.5% to social insurance (charged on a base capped at ALL 186,416), 1.7% to health insurance, and income tax from the monthly table. On ALL 80,000 gross, for instance, net pay is ALL 64,540.

• Minimum wage, 2026: ALL 50,000 gross a month.
• National average, Q1 2026: ALL 90,119 gross a month.
• Mean pay in ICT firms: ALL 131,747.
• Mean pay at banks and insurers: ALL 157,434.

Someone in Albania has to be the legal employer, and for a foreign company without an Albanian presence there are two realistic choices. One is registering an SHPK of your own; the other is letting an employer of record sign the contract in your place. Engaging the person as a freelancer is a third option only if the work is genuinely independent.

For a single first hire, the company route means registering with the National Business Centre (QKB), getting a tax number, opening a bank account and hiring an accountant before the first payslip can be issued. The EOR route skips those steps; the provider signs the contract as employer and runs payroll while you manage the work. Our comparison of an EOR and an SHPK in Albania sets out the costs of each.

The freelance option deserves caution. Albanian courts look past the title of an agreement to how the work is really done and paid, and the tax rules treat a freelancer as employed once one client supplies at least 80% of their income. A full-time first hire who works only for you will usually fail that test; our article on freelancer or employee status in Albania explains the risks.

Once the candidate accepts, the terms go into a written employment contract, which Article 21 of the Labour Code requires. Article 21(4) gives an employer who missed the start date a week, seven days, to get it signed. Aim to have it signed before day one; a hire who starts on a handshake begins with a breach.

Article 21 lists what the contract must contain. Beyond the basics of names, role and start date, first-time employers most often leave out the notice period, the pay date, the disciplinary procedure and a reference to any collective agreement. Indefinite contracts are the default. To use a fixed term you must point to an objective reason, such as cover for work that is genuinely temporary, and letting a fixed-term contract run on after its end date turns it into an indefinite one.

• Probation: three months at most, or less if you choose; while it lasts, five days is all the notice either party owes.
• Annual leave: at least 22 working days a year, pro rata in the first year.
• Hours: no more than 40 a week and 8 a day as the normal schedule.
• Pay: monthly, at the end of the month, by bank transfer, with a payslip.
• Intellectual property: an express assignment of software and other work, since the Code’s default for computer programs is limited.

Our guide to Labour Code contracts in Albania covers each clause in more depth, including overtime and fixed-term rules.

The employer must declare the new hire to the General Directorate of Taxes (DPT) electronically before work begins, and the deadline is the day before the start date. Missing it means the first day of work is undeclared, which is exactly what labour and tax inspectors look for.

Collect the employee’s identity details and the bank account the salary will be paid into, because Article 118 of the Labour Code allows pay only through the banking system. If the employee has children under 18 and wants the annual deduction of ALL 48,000 per child, note it now; it is claimed through the employer once a year.

If your first hire is not an Albanian national, the timeline changes. A non-EU citizen employed in Albania needs the employee unique permit (leje unike), with an employment approval from AKPA and an application on e-Albania. The April 2026 amendments mean a temporary permit is issued one working day after the application, with the plastic biometric card due inside a month. EU citizens staying more than three months now obtain a free online registration certificate instead of a permit. The digital nomad permit is not an alternative for someone on an Albanian payroll.

Salary for the first month is paid at the end of that month. The listëpagesa reporting it, and the income tax and both sets of contributions it shows, go to DPT afterwards, with the 20th as the last day. So a developer joining on 1 March receives March pay on the last working days of March, and DPT must have the March figures and money by 20 April.

For a first hire on ALL 80,000 gross, the 2026 numbers look like this. Your side of the bill: ALL 12,000 in social insurance at 15%, ALL 1,360 in health insurance at 1.7%, so ALL 93,360 altogether each month. The employee pays 9.5% social insurance (ALL 7,600), 1.7% health insurance (ALL 1,360) and ALL 6,500 income tax, and receives ALL 64,540. Pay it on time: Article 120 charges late wages with interest at 10% a year or more.

Expenses need a decision too. Unless the contract says otherwise, Articles 125 and 126 put work tools and work expenses on the employer, and an attempt to bundle expenses into the monthly salary has no legal effect. Agree a simple claims process in the first week, before the first receipt arrives. For a fuller picture of the monthly cycle, see our explanation of Albanian payroll and the listëpagesa.

Probation is the window to confirm the hire works, and in Albania it lasts at most three months. Put a review in the calendar for week ten, so there is time to act before the period ends and the full notice scale starts to apply. Write down what good performance looks like at that point, so the conversation is about agreed goals rather than impressions.

After probation, notice depends on service: two weeks in the first six months, one month up to two years, then two and three months for longer service. Once probation is over, ending the contract on the employer’s side means the Article 144 steps: invite in writing, meet and listen, then decide in writing with reasons.

Keep a simple file from the start: the signed contract, the DPT declaration, each payslip, leave records and any written warnings. When the labour inspectorate, ISHPSHSH, finds a breach of the rules on contracts, pay, hours or leave, the fine can reach ALL 1,500,000 in 2026. A tidy file is the quickest way to show an inspector that the basics were followed.

Use the early weeks to settle leave plans. The employer fixes holiday dates, but must give 30 days’ warning and weigh what the employee wants. Plan around the 15 official holidays of 2026 too, remembering that a Saturday or Sunday holiday produces a weekday off instead. If you would rather hand all of this to someone else, Employer of Record Albania can take your first hire onto its payroll and carry out each of the steps above, from the contract to the listëpagesa; the EOR onboarding timeline shows how that sequence runs.