Posting workers from Serbia into the EU under Directive 96/71/EC

A Serbian company sending its own employees to a site in Germany, Austria or Croatia does not step outside European rules because Serbia is not a member state. Article 1(4) of Directive 96/71/EC says plainly that undertakings established in a non member state must not be given more favourable treatment than undertakings established in a member state.

That is the whole logic of the regime. A Serbian contractor on an Austrian site gets no discount for arriving from outside, and carries the same floor of employment terms as the local competitor.

What the host country may require

Article 3 of Directive 96/71/EC sets the hard core of terms the host state must apply. It covers maximum work periods and minimum rest periods, paid annual leave, minimum rates of pay including overtime rates, the conditions for hiring out workers, health and safety at work, protection of pregnant women and young workers, and equal treatment.

Directive (EU) 2018/957 added a time limit. Where a posting exceeds 12 months, a period extendable to 18 months on a motivated notification from the employer, all the terms and conditions of employment of the host country apply, except the procedures for concluding and terminating the employment contract and supplementary occupational pension schemes.

For project planning that makes month twelve the pivot, not the end of the contract. A contractor who stretches a project from ten months to fourteen changes the pay regime mid job, and usually discovers the difference during an inspection.

Social security travels a different road

This is where the expensive misunderstanding lives. The A1 certificate is an instrument of Regulation (EC) 883/2004 and applies inside the European Union, the European Economic Area and Switzerland. Serbia is not in that regulation, so a Serbian employer does not obtain an A1 for its workers.

Bilateral social security agreements apply instead. Serbia holds them with roughly 30 states, among them Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary and Poland. The certificate of applicable legislation is issued by the competent insurance carrier in Serbia, with the Social Insurance Institute acting as the liaison body for those agreements. While the certificate holds, contributions stay in Serbia, including the 15.15 percent of gross pay on the employer under Article 44 of the Law on Contributions for Mandatory Social Insurance.

The last row is the one that breaks schedules. A Nepali worker employed by a Serbian firm has no right of entry into the Union on the strength of a Serbian single permit. A separate basis is required in the destination state under its own rules, and how sharply those rules diverge is set out in the single permit across the EU.

Notification, paperwork and enforcement

Every member state runs its own posting notification register and requires the declaration before work starts, as a rule electronically. Documentation is kept on site: the employment contract, working time records, proof of pay and the social security certificate. The European Labour Authority coordinates cooperation between national inspectorates, so a finding in one country increasingly triggers a check in another.

The paperwork outlives the crew. Member states generally require posting records to stay available for a set period after the works finish and to be produced on request, translated into the language of that state. A contractor who ships the file back to Belgrade and archives it untranslated technically meets the duty to retain, but not the duty to produce within the deadline, and findings are written on that second half.

Three failures repeat with Serbian contractors. The first is a notification filed after works begin, which is treated as undeclared posting however tidy the contracts are. The second is payroll run at Serbian hourly rates on a job in a country with a higher minimum. The third is the subcontracting chain, where the main contractor answers for the subcontractor's liabilities, so recovery follows solvency rather than fault.

The control points clients in the Union ask suppliers for are set out in the employer sponsorship compliance chain, and the pre start checks in right to work verification.

Posting out of Serbia into the Union is therefore workable and well mapped, but under the rules of the country where the work is done, with Serbian insurance holding only for as long as the bilateral certificate does. For a project running past a year, our employer desk maps the 12 month threshold and the notification duties country by country before the contract is signed.