How the EOR process works in the Czech Republic

It starts with three facts about the hire: the role, the gross salary and the start date you want. From those we price the engagement and tell you what the month will actually cost, because the fee is only one part of it. 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), and the employer’s statutory contributions of 33.8% of gross pay for 2026 sit on top of the salary itself.

Two questions come back the other way at this stage, and both are there for a reason. The first is what a comparable employee of your own company is paid for equivalent work, because § 309 odst. 5 zákoníku práce requires that an assigned employee’s working and pay conditions are no worse than those of a comparable employee of the user company. The second is how long you expect the engagement to run, because § 309 odst. 6 caps the assignment of the same employee to the same user at 12 consecutive calendar months, subject to exceptions.

The candidate is yours. We do not source, screen or select the person, and the arrangement assumes you have already agreed terms in principle with someone. What we price is the employment of that named person on Czech terms. If you want the full breakdown of what the month costs before you talk to anyone, it is on the pricing page.

The output of this stage is a written scope: who is being employed, on what gross salary, from what date, in what place of work, and what happens if the engagement ends early. Everything after this point is execution.

Next comes the pracovní smlouva, drafted in Czech and, in practice, bilingually. § 34 odst. 1 zákoníku práce requires only three things in the contract itself: druh práce, the type of work; místo nebo místa výkonu práce, the place or places of work; and den nástupu do práce, the start date. It must be in writing under § 34 odst. 2, and each party keeps a copy.

A zkušební doba, where you want one, has to be agreed in writing no later than the day the employment arises, and it cannot be bolted on afterwards. It runs to a maximum of 4 consecutive months, or 8 for a vedoucí zaměstnanec, and on a fixed-term contract it cannot exceed half the agreed term. A fixed term itself has to be agreed in writing, or the relationship is indefinite.

The pay does not have to be in the contract. It can sit in a mzdový výměr, an internal regulation or a kolektivní smlouva instead, and most Czech employers put it in a mzdový výměr so that a pay review does not require a contract amendment. Whichever route is used, § 37 zákoníku práce then requires the employer to give the employee, in writing and within 7 days of the employment starting, everything the contract does not already say: the leave entitlement and how it is worked out, the probation terms, the procedure and notice period on termination, the working week and how it is scheduled, the rest breaks, the pay details and the pay date, and which social security authority the employer pays contributions to.

That last item is a small thing with a large effect. The employee has to be told where their contributions go, which means the employing company has to have decided its registrations before the contract is signed rather than after. A fuller walk-through of the documents and the order they are signed in is set out in how to hire an employee in the Czech Republic.

Before the start date, and in the first days after it, the employing company has to appear in three separate registers. It is registered with Česká správa sociálního zabezpečení in the evidence zaměstnavatelů, and each new employee is entered in the evidence zaměstnanců within 8 days of starting work. For a foreign employee that entry has to be made before the moment work starts, not within 8 days of it. ČSSZ takes these filings electronically only, through its data box, the ePortál or the data interface, and publishes the requirements at cssz.gov.cz.

The health insurer is a separate filing to a separate body. The employee chooses their own insurer from the seven Czech health insurers, and the employer reports the start of the employment to that insurer on a Hromadné oznámení zaměstnavatele within 8 days of the event. From 1 January 2026 that report and the monthly contribution statement must be filed electronically only; paper is no longer accepted. In practice an employer needs a Czech datová schránka, because the filings are electronic.

Statutory accident insurance needs no application. Every employer with at least one employee is insured by operation of law against its liability for occupational injury and disease from the day the first employment relationship starts, with Kooperativa, and the employer notifies the insurer without undue delay and pays quarterly.

On the immigration side, citizens of EU and EEA states and Switzerland, and their family members, have free access to the Czech labour market and need no work permit, no zaměstnanecká karta and no modrá karta. Separately, employers must notify the Úřad práce before a foreign national starts work, and failure to do so is the offence of nehlášená práce.

None of this is visible to the employee, and all of it has to be right before the first payslip, because the registrations are what the payroll files against.

The first payroll run produces a Czech payslip, a bank transfer to the employee and three separate payments out. Income tax is withheld as zálohová daň and paid to Finanční správa. Social security contributions go to ČSSZ. Health insurance contributions go to the employee’s own insurer. Two of those payments are due between the 1st and the 20th day of the following month; the tax advance is due by the 20th day of the month in which the duty to withhold arose.

The withholding itself has one step that catches new arrivals. If the employee has signed a prohlášení poplatníka with this employer for the year, the monthly tax credits are applied at source, starting with the sleva na poplatníka of 2,570 CZK a month for 2026 (approximately €106 at 24.350 CZK to the euro, ČNB fixing for 21 September 2026). Without that signed declaration the advance is computed with no credits at all, and the employee gets the difference back only through the annual reconciliation. Getting the form signed in the first week is worth more to the employee than almost anything else in the onboarding pack.

The rates for 2026 are 15% of the monthly withholding base up to 146,901 CZK and 23% above it. The employee also pays 11.6% of gross in contributions, being 7.1% social and 4.5% health. The employer pays 33.8%, being 24.8% social and 9% health, plus statutory accident insurance rated by activity. The mechanics, the rounding rules and the two collectors are set out in full in Czech payroll explained.

You see all of this as a single monthly invoice: gross pay, employer contributions, accident insurance and the fee. What you do not see, and do not have to run, is the filing calendar behind it.

After the first run, the cycle repeats and tightens into a rhythm. From 1 April 2026 a single monthly employer report replaced several separate filings, and is made to ČSSZ between the 1st and the 20th of the following month. The health insurers take their own monthly contribution statement, the Přehled o platbě pojistného zaměstnavatele, on the same monthly beat and electronically only since 1 January 2026.

Statutory accident insurance runs on a quarterly calendar instead: the premium is due by 31 January, 30 April, 31 July and 31 October, and late payment increases the debt by 10% for each month started. It is a small line on a payroll of one or two people and an easy one to forget entirely, which is one of the practical arguments for not running Czech payroll as a side task from another country.

Leave is tracked in hours, not days. The statutory minimum for a private employer is four weeks a year, which is 160 hours on a standard 40-hour, five-day week, and the entitlement accrues against hours actually worked. Sick pay has two payers: the employer pays the first 14 calendar days and ČSSZ pays the nemocenské from day 15. There are no unpaid waiting days.

Changes are filed as they happen rather than at year end. A pay rise, a change of working pattern, a new address or a move to a different health insurer all generate their own notification, and § 37 odst. 3 zákoníku práce requires the employee to be told in writing of a change to the information they were given, at the latest on the day the change takes effect.

The arrangement ends the way any Czech employment ends, and the route matters more than the reason. A dohoda o rozvázání pracovního poměru ends it by agreement on an agreed date and is the cleanest route where both sides want it. A výpověď has to be in writing and, from the employer’s side, has to rest on one of the exhaustive grounds in § 52 zákoníku práce. Termination inside the zkušební doba is a third route and the simplest of them.

The point foreign employers most often get wrong is when the clock starts. Since 1 June 2025 the výpovědní doba begins on the day the notice is delivered to the other party, and ends on the day of the final month bearing the same number. It no longer runs from the first day of the following calendar month. Any guidance that still says otherwise predates the change.

Where severance is due, odstupné is 1× average monthly earnings under a year’s service, 2× between one and two years, and 3× from two years, and it stops there. A three-year employee and a twenty-year employee receive the same. The grounds, the protected periods and the two-month deadline to challenge a dismissal are set out in terminating employment in the Czech Republic.

Practically, we ask for as much notice of an exit as you can give, because the final payslip has to carry the leave balance, any severance and the deregistrations from ČSSZ and the health insurer within their own 8-day windows. The whole sequence, from the first conversation to the last filing, is the same one Employer of Record Czech Republic runs for every hire on the site.