Every week, someone who has just registered a company in Belarus asks us a version of the same question: I own the business and I want to run it myself, so what permit do I need to walk into my own office in Minsk? It sounds like it should have a one-line answer. It does not.
The confusion comes from treating this as one problem when it is really two, sitting one behind the other. The first question is whether you are allowed to work as the director at all. The second is whether you are allowed to live in Belarus while you do it. They run on different laws, they are decided by different procedures, and the answer to one tells you very little about the answer to the other. There is also a third issue, the one that strands directors at the border, and we come to it near the end.
What follows is a practical account of the 2026 rules — when a foreign director needs a work permit and when the requirement falls away, how temporary residence is secured on business grounds, what the documentation costs, how long each step takes, and where owners routinely waste weeks by addressing the wrong issue at the outset.
Begin with the single fact that settles the most cases, which is your citizenship.
If you hold the passport of an EAEU country, meaning Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia or Kyrgyzstan, you do not need a work permit to head a Belarusian company. The Union’s common labour market puts you, for employment purposes, on roughly the same footing as a local. No special permit, no waiting period, no employer petition. For a large share of the founders who come to us, the work-permit question ends right there.
Everyone else starts from a different place. Under the Law ‘On External Labour Migration’ (No. 225-Z of 30 December 2010), a foreign national generally needs a special work permit to work for a Belarusian employer. The permit is applied for by the employer, and it is tied to one job at one company. That is the default. The part that trips people up is the exception for company heads, which is narrower than it used to be. The Department of Citizenship and Migration under the Ministry of Internal Affairs is the authority that applies it.
For years the advice was simple. If you founded the company and appointed yourself its head, you did not need a work permit. That was true, and plenty of outdated pages online still say exactly that. Since 1 July 2023, it is only half true.
The exemption for a foreign manager who took part in creating the company, as owner, founder or participant, still exists. It now comes with conditions. To rely on it, the director has to show professional qualifications backed by education documents and at least two years of relevant work experience, together with a monthly salary of more than five times the national minimum wage. Clear all three and you head your own company without a permit. Fall short on any one of them, for instance by paying yourself a token director’s salary, and you are back in ordinary work-permit territory.
This is the exact point where generic answers contradict one another. One article insists a foreign director always needs a permit; the next swears a founder never does. Each is describing the rule as it stood at some moment in time, and neither reflects the current, conditional version. Before you assume the exemption applies, it is worth checking your documented experience, your role and your actual salary against the threshold, because the migration office certainly will.
So the exemption doesn’t apply to you, and you’ll need a permit. That’s fine — the process is manageable — but it comes with a few quirks worth knowing in advance rather than stumbling into halfway through.
The first one trips up nearly everyone: your company applies, not you. The Belarusian entity petitions the migration authorities on behalf of its own director — which, yes, feels absurd when you’re the person who owns that entity. It’s simply how the law is structured. You submit a fixed list of documents, the office reviews them over roughly 15 calendar days, and the permit comes back, typically valid for a year and renewable thereafter. Highly qualified specialists fare somewhat better: up to two years, with an extension available.
Two things worth hearing from people who file these regularly. Don’t trust the 15 days as your real timeline. Preparing documents, sorting out legalisation and translation, waiting on papers from abroad, none of that is inside the window, and one rejected document is usually all it takes to push a clean case out by a month. The other thing: this permit is narrow. One role, one company. It won’t let you work elsewhere in Belarus, and it’s gone the day you leave the job.
A work permit lets you work. On its own it does not let you settle. If you mean to spend real time in the country rather than fly in and out, you need a temporary residence permit, and this sits under a different statute altogether, the Law ‘On the Legal Status of Foreign Citizens and Stateless Persons’ (No. 105-Z of 4 January 2010).
Residence is always granted on a stated basis, and the basis matters, because it is what the permit stands or falls on. Running a business is one of the recognised grounds: a foreigner who founded a Belarusian company, most commonly an LLC, that trades legally and contributes to the economy can apply on that footing. Holding a work permit is a separate basis. So are owning residential property, close family ties, and study. If you own the company outright and it is genuinely operating, you already have a solid basis to build the application on.
One point catches people out. You generally need a valid long-stay (type D) visa in hand before you apply, which creates a wrinkle for those who entered under a visa-free regime and then try to convert their stay from inside the country. Sort the visa question out early, not at the counter.
The document set is where most residence applications succeed or fail. At a minimum you will need:
Income is easier to evidence than people expect, provided your accounting is clean and your salary or dividends actually run through the books rather than existing only on paper. Foreign-issued documents, such as a criminal-record certificate or a qualification diploma, have to be apostilled or consularised and translated before they will be accepted.
On timing and cost, the migration department decides within 15 days of a complete submission, and the state duty is modest, in the region of three base units. The permit runs for up to a year and renews for as long as the basis behind it still holds. Close the company or lose the role, and the permit falls away with it, which is why the residence file and the corporate housekeeping have to stay in step.
A small thing that saves a wasted morning. When you first register your stay online through the unified e-services portal, enter your passport and border-crossing details exactly as printed. The Internal Affairs Ministry has said publicly that the great majority of online registration refusals come down to a single mistyped character. A five-minute task becomes a half-day one when you get it wrong.
Here’s the detail that catches directors off guard — occasionally with a hefty price tag. A temporary residence permit entitles you to live in Belarus. It does not, on its own, entitle you to leave and re-enter.
For that you need a separate annual entry-and-exit visa, issued on the strength of the residence permit. Directors who miss this find out in the worst way, flying off to a board meeting or a holiday and then struggling to return cleanly. If your role involves any regular travel, and most directors’ roles do, treat the entry-exit visa as part of the same package rather than an afterthought to sort out later. The State Border Committee publishes the current border-crossing rules, and they change often enough to check rather than assume.
Strip out the noise and most foreign directors land in one of four situations.
There is a fifth path that is easy to forget. If you only ever intend to visit a few times a year and leave the day-to-day to someone on the ground, you may need none of this. A local director or a management arrangement is often more sensible than a stack of immigration paperwork you did not have to file.
This is worth talking through instead of just ticking boxes, because none of these factors sits on its own. Your nationality, your role, what you earn, the experience you can actually prove on paper, how long you’ll be in the country, whether you’ll be travelling — each one tugs the answer somewhere different. Line them up the wrong way and you end up grinding through a process you never had to touch in the first place.
Yes. Any individual over 18 can be appointed director regardless of nationality. The question is never whether you can hold the role; it is whether that role requires a work permit and, separately, whether you need residence to perform it from inside Belarus.
No. As an EAEU national you are exempt from the work-permit requirement. If you plan to live in Belarus rather than commute, you would still look at temporary residence, but the permit itself is not needed.
Not automatically. The no-permit treatment is tied to EAEU membership specifically, which is Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. Other CIS countries, such as Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan or Tajikistan, do not carry the same exemption. A director from one of them is treated like any other non-EAEU national: you look first at whether the founder-director conditions apply, and if they do not, at a work permit.
The statutory review is about 15 calendar days once a complete application is filed. In practice, budget longer, because preparing and legalising the supporting documents usually takes more time than the review itself.
No, and this surprises people. Residence gives you the right to stay. To leave and return you need a separate annual entry-and-exit visa, issued on the basis of that permit.
A permit granted on business grounds depends on that basis continuing. If the company is closed, sold or stops operating, the ground falls away and the permit can be revoked. Where another basis is available, such as family or property, it may be possible to move the permit onto it before that happens.
The company itself can be set up through a representative under power of attorney. The work-permit and residence steps, however, involve elements that require your presence, such as biometrics for the residence card. We usually sequence the remote and in-person parts so that you make one efficient trip rather than several.
Yes, they can. Once your own temporary residence permit is in place, your spouse and children apply for theirs on family grounds. The thing to know is that their permits hang off yours, so we almost always tell clients to move the whole family at once rather than go ahead alone and bring everyone over later. Each person still puts together a separate file, though: their own passport, translated documents, and proof of where you’ll all be living.
Registering the company is the fast part, and for most foreign owners it goes smoothly. Permits and residence are where the weeks disappear, almost always because someone solved the wrong problem first, chasing a work permit they were exempt from or a residence permit they were not yet positioned to get. The current rules reward preparation: know whether your passport exempts you, whether the 2023 conditions apply to your role, and whether you actually need to reside in Belarus or simply to visit it.
Tell us your nationality, your role in the company, your salary and documented experience, and how you intend to spend your time in Belarus, and we will map the exact set of documents you need, and, just as usefully, the ones you do not. Talk to our team and we will take it from there.
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