What is an employer of record in the Czech Republic?

An employer of record in the Czech Republic is a company that is already registered in the Czech Republic and already runs Czech payroll, and that employs the person you have chosen on a Czech employment contract so that you do not have to open a company of your own. The contract is a pracovní smlouva under the zákoník práce, zákon č. 262/2006 Sb. The employer named on it is our Czech company, and our Czech company is the party that pays the wages, withholds the tax and makes the statutory filings.

Your company never becomes the employer. You choose the candidate, agree the role and the pay, direct the work from day to day and decide when the role ends. The statutory employer duties, the payroll, the contributions and the personnel file sit with the employing company. That split is the whole of the arrangement, and the contract, the filings and the liabilities all follow from it.

Czech law contains no statutory category called “employer of record”. The phrase describes a commercial service, not a legal status, and no Czech statute defines it. What Czech law does regulate is the activity of employing people in order that they work for another company, and that activity is licensed. Our Czech company holds an employment agency licence, a povolení ke zprostředkování zaměstnání, issued by the Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí. We employ through our own Czech s.r.o., not through a chain of third-party partners.

The practical result is employment from day one, on a Czech contract, with a named contact who works on Czech payroll and can answer a question about dovolená or tax. That is what Employer of Record Czech Republic sets out across this site, and the rest of this post explains what sits behind it.

The employing company is the legal employer, and you are the company the work is done for. In Czech terms the employer is the party to the pracovní smlouva, the party registered for that employee with ČSSZ and with the employee’s own health insurer, and the party that would have to serve a výpověď if the employment ended. Nothing in the arrangement moves those duties to you, and nothing in it moves the commercial decisions to us.

The division below is the one we work to. It is deliberately blunt, because most of the questions a first-time buyer asks turn out to be questions about which column something falls in.

One line in the left column needs a footnote. Setting pay is yours, and it is not unconstrained. Where an employee is assigned to work for a user company, a uživatel, § 309 odst. 5 zákoníku práce requires that the assigned employee’s working and pay conditions are no worse than those of a comparable employee of that user. The rule exists so that triangular arrangements cannot be used to undercut the terms of the people already doing the same work. In practice it means bringing your own pay structure to the conversation early rather than late.

Czech law regulates zprostředkování zaměstnání, the mediation of employment, and one of its three statutory limbs is the one that matters here. Under § 14 odst. 1 písm. b) zákona č. 435/2004 Sb., employing people in order that they perform work for a uživatel is a licensed activity. A company carrying it on needs a povolení ke zprostředkování zaměstnání from MPSV and must lodge a deposit, a kauce, of 1,000,000 CZK (approximately €41,068 at 24.350 CZK to the euro, the ČNB fixing for 21 September 2026).

We are licensed to employ staff in the Czech Republic and assign them to your company. The licence is granted by the Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí by administrative decision and it is checkable against the ministry’s own register of agencies, which is the point of saying it. We publish the fact of the licence and not its number, on the client’s instruction. MPSV sets out the regime itself at mpsv.gov.cz.

The employment side of the same regime sits in the zákoník práce. Temporary agency work in the Czech Republic is governed by §§ 307a–309a zákoníku práce, which set out a three-party structure: a genuine employment relationship between the agency and the employee, a written dohoda o dočasném přidělení between the agency and the user, and no employment relationship at all between the user and the employee, even though the user is the party that organises and directs the work.

Two conditions travel with that regime and they are worth knowing before you buy anything. The comparable-conditions duty in § 309 odst. 5 falls on the agency and on the user together, so it is not something a provider can absorb on its own. And under § 309 odst. 6 the assignment of the same employee to the same user is capped at 12 consecutive calendar months, subject to exceptions. Neither point is a reason to avoid the route. Both are reasons to ask a provider, in writing, how it handles them.

The Czech employment contract is short and the written information around it is long. § 34 odst. 1 zákoníku práce requires only three things in the pracovní smlouva itself: druh práce, the type of work; místo výkonu práce, the place of work; and den nástupu do práce, the start date. It must be in writing, and each side keeps a copy.

Everything else, pay, hours, leave and notice, may sit in a mzdový výměr, an internal regulation or a kolektivní smlouva, and must then be given to the employee in writing within 7 days of the employment starting under the information duty in § 37 zákoníku práce. A zkušební doba, if there is one, is agreed in writing no later than the day the employment arises, and runs to a maximum of 4 months, or 8 months for a vedoucí zaměstnanec.

Payroll runs monthly and touches three separate bodies, which is the structural point most foreign employers miss. Social security contributions go to Česká správa sociálního zabezpečení. Health insurance contributions go to whichever of the seven Czech health insurers the employee has chosen, not to the state and not to ČSSZ. Income tax is withheld from pay as zálohová daň and goes to Finanční správa. Employer statutory contributions come to 33.8% of gross pay for 2026, being 24.8% social and 9% health, and the employee pays 11.6% from their own gross.

There is a further compulsory employer levy on top of that. Statutory accident insurance arises by operation of law on the day the first employment relationship starts and is rated by the employer’s activity, so the real employer overhead is roughly 34.1% to 34.8% of gross pay rather than a flat 33.8%. The month-by-month mechanics, the two separate collectors and the payment deadlines are set out in Czech payroll explained.

The usual reason is that the hire is real and the entity is not. A company that has found one good candidate in the Czech Republic, or three, rarely wants to incorporate an s.r.o., obtain a živnostenské oprávnění, appoint an accountant and open a datová schránka before that person can start work. The employer of record route puts the person on a Czech contract without any of it, and the two routes are set side by side in employer of record vs a Czech entity.

The second reason is sequence. A company has to exist before it can employ anyone, and an s.r.o. comes into existence on registration in the obchodní rejstřík. The employing company in an employer of record arrangement already exists, is already in the ČSSZ employer registry, already holds statutory accident cover and already files every month.

The third is that the cost arrives as one line. Our fee is €499 per employee per month (approximately 12,151 CZK at 24.350 CZK to the euro, ČNB fixing for 21 September 2026), which sits on top of the employee’s gross pay and the statutory employer contributions you would pay whoever employed them.

What the route is not is a way to pay less. The statutory contributions are the same on any route, the minimální mzda floor of 22,400 CZK a month for 2026 is the same, and the comparable-conditions duty cuts directly against using the arrangement to set cheaper terms. Where a saving exists it is in setup, administration and the cost of getting Czech payroll wrong.

It does not repair a contractor arrangement that has already run. Engaging a Czech worker on an IČO where the relationship has the hallmarks of závislá práce may raise švarcsystém questions, and those questions attach to the relationship, not to the paperwork placed on top of it afterwards. Employing someone properly from the start is a different exercise from re-papering months of past work, and the statutory indicators are set out in employee misclassification in the Czech Republic.

It does not remove the conditions in the regime. The 12-month cap in § 309 odst. 6 zákoníku práce and the comparable-conditions duty in § 309 odst. 5 are conditions on how the work is done, and no commercial agreement contracts out of them.

And it does not make an employer of you, which matters if you need something an employment contract cannot give. If the person has to hold a Czech regulatory permission in your name, sign for your company or carry your corporate authority on your own paper, the employer of record route does not reach that far and your own company does.

What it does do is narrow and useful. It gives you a Czech employment relationship, run monthly, with the statutory employer duties sitting with the employing company rather than with you, and with a written contract the employee can take to a bank. The sequence from first conversation to first payslip is set out step by step in how the EOR process works in the Czech Republic.