Albania repealed its annual quotas for employing foreign workers in 2025

Albania no longer has an annual ceiling on the employment of non Albanian nationals. Law no. 43/2025 of 26 June 2025 repealed article 78 on the labour market and annual employment quotas for foreigners, and article 79 on exemptions from those quotas, of law no. 79/2021. The remaining filter is the individual AKPA approval.

For a procurement lead this changes how the year is planned. In quota systems, such as the Italian flows decree, the number of places is allocated once a year and the employer competes for a slice of it. In Albania, after 26 June 2025, there is no such number to compete for. There is only a file that clears or does not.

What replaced the quota

Article 74, point 1, of the amended law keeps the link to the labour market in general terms: the single permit is issued having regard to the developments and needs of the labour market in the Republic of Albania. Quantitative control was replaced by a case by case check that happens at three points.

The first is the publication of the vacancy. Under article 74, point 9, the request must stay public on the employment services portal for no fewer than five calendar days, and under point 11 it must have been posted no later than 90 days before the approval request. The second is the priority list in point 8, which covers Albanian jobseekers and citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia and North Macedonia. The third is the check on working conditions under point 6, where pay and hours have to match Albanian labour legislation.

How many foreign workers Albania actually has

The repeal followed two years of fast growth. According to AKPA, 18,156 employment requests for foreign nationals were approved during 2025, up 43.4 percent on 2024. By June 2026 the number of foreign nationals working in Albania had reached 22,600, from about 18,100 in December 2025. Of those, roughly 20,300 are employees holding a single permit and 2,361 are registered as self employed.

The breakdown by nationality shows which corridors supply that workforce. In June 2026 the Philippines ranked first with 3,552 workers, or 16 percent of the total, followed by India with 3,423, Egypt with 3,283, Turkey with 1,503, Italy with 1,306, the United States with 619, Indonesia with 229 and China with 212. In 2025 the Philippines and India each accounted for 18 percent of approved requests, with 3,279 and 3,251 permits.

Nepal's numbers in Albania are still small, but it is the same corridor that supplies Central Europe and the origin side rules do not change with the destination. The licensing checks that apply at origin are set out in verifying a licensed Nepali recruiter.

What the absence of a quota means for planning

Without a quota, the start date no longer depends on the month a yearly window opens. It depends on three deadlines the employer controls: the five days of publication, the single day of AKPA approval, and the four weeks that article 56, point 4, gives for examining the request and issuing the single permit. That makes Albania a corridor with a predictable deadline, unlike the quota systems described in bilateral quotas and seasonal work in Greece.

The new constraint is not volume but source. Article 56, point 1/1, added in 2025, gives the Council of Ministers the power to conclude bilateral labour migration agreements, and article 74, point 8, letter dh, places nationals of countries holding such agreements on the priority list. The memoranda signed with Vietnam and Indonesia in July 2026 are covered in Albania's bilateral labour agreements.

What remains after the quota is payroll cost. The Albanian minimum wage has been 50,000 lekë gross per month since 1 January 2026 and serves as the minimum contribution base, on which the employer pays 16.7 percent. The national average gross wage was 92,150 lekë in the second quarter of 2026 according to INSTAT, and in elderly care the pay offered to carers runs between 55,000 and 70,000 lekë a month for eight hour shifts.

The quota is gone; the control is not. It moved from a number published once a year to a file examined every day, and employers still planning against the old quota calendar are waiting for a window that no longer exists. How Werklist tracks that calendar with employers is set out on the employers page.