Cost and timeline for hiring a foreign worker in Albania
From vacancy posting to biometric card takes about eight weeks in Albania, while the employer pays 16.7 percent in contributions on gross pay in 2026.
A single permit hire runs about eight weeks from the vacancy posting to the biometric card, when no step is repeated. The recurring cost is not the document fee but payroll: 16.7 percent on gross pay, on a minimum base of 50,000 lekë a month.
The two numbers come from different sources. The deadlines are set by law no. 79/2021 on foreigners, amended by law no. 43/2025, together with the joint instruction of the minister responsible for the economy and innovation and the minister responsible for internal affairs adopted in August 2026. The costs are set by the national minimum wage and the contribution scheme in force for 2026.
The timeline, phase by phase
The statutory deadlines measure only the part belonging to the institutions. Real elapsed time also includes document preparation in the country of origin, which has no statutory deadline and is usually the most variable stretch.
| Phase | Who acts | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| Vacancy posted on the employment portal | Employer | At least 5 calendar days public, article 74, point 9; no later than 90 days before the request, point 11 |
| Online single permit application | Employer, the worker, or a licensed agency | Article 56, point 3 |
| Employment approval | AKPA | 1 working day, joint instruction of August 2026 |
| Further information if requested | Employer | 1 week from the date of the request, article 74, point 10 |
| Decision on the single permit | Border and migration authority | 4 weeks from filing, article 56, point 4 |
| Type D visa and travel | Diplomatic mission and employer | Depends on the country of origin |
| Biometric card | Issuing counter | About 14 days after the decision |
| Registration in employment services | Worker, at AKPA | 10 calendar days from card issue, decision no. 240 of 1 April 2026 |
Until August 2026 the AKPA approval took ten working days under joint instruction no. 3 of 11 January 2023. Cutting it to one working day removed roughly two weeks from the chain, but it did not touch the four weeks in article 56, point 4, which remain the longest administrative stretch. The comparison with other European corridors is in the corridor by corridor timeline.
The monthly cost that does not fall
The national minimum wage rose to 50,000 lekë gross per month on 1 January 2026, from 40,000 lekë, and serves as the minimum base for calculating contributions. On gross pay the employer pays 16.7 percent, split into 15 percent social insurance and 1.7 percent health insurance, while 11.2 percent is withheld from the worker.
According to INSTAT, the average gross monthly wage in the second quarter of 2026 was 92,150 lekë, after 90,119 lekë in the first quarter, a yearly increase of 9.6 percent. For a job paid at the average, the employer contribution is about 15,400 lekë a month; for a job on the minimum wage, about 8,350 lekë.
In the sectors with the strongest demand, the pay offered sits above the minimum. In elderly care, carer positions were advertised at between 55,000 and 70,000 lekë a month for eight hour shifts by private facilities during 2026. That is the figure that belongs in the budget, not the minimum wage, because the AKPA approval under article 74, point 6, verifies that conditions comply with labour legislation and article 75 refuses a file when wages fall below the level set by collective agreements.
The costs that are not the worker's
The standardised job offer form introduced by the August 2026 instruction requires the employer to declare whether it covers accommodation and meals, and to declare that the worker will pay no fees or costs for the recruitment process. The bilateral memorandum with Vietnam of 29 July 2026 writes the same principle into travel, placing recruitment and travel costs on the employer before departure.
In practice a cross border hiring budget has four stable lines: gross pay and contributions, the ticket and the origin side documents, accommodation where it has been declared, and the internal time of the team holding the file. A fifth line, the fine, appears only when one of the first four is cut from the plan; article 141, point 1, letter ll, sets it at 350,000 to 400,000 lekë per person.
The phase that most often breaks the budget is none of these. It is restarting the five day posting when a file is submitted outside the 90 day window of article 74, point 11, which adds about two weeks and no value. That mechanism is set out in AKPA employment approval and the vacancy rule, while the document steps are in the Albanian single permit procedure. How Werklist shares that budget with the employer is set out on the employers page.
Eight weeks is the figure when every step happens once. Each document returned by AKPA inside the one week deadline of article 74, point 10, moves the start date by at least seven days.
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