How to choose an employer of record in the Czech Republic

Ask it first, and ask for the answer in writing. Czech law regulates zprostředkování zaměstnání, and one of its three statutory limbs is employing people in order that they perform work for a uživatel, a user company, under § 14 odst. 1 písm. b) zákona č. 435/2004 Sb. A company carrying on that activity needs a povolení ke zprostředkování zaměstnání granted by the Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí, and must lodge a kauce of 1,000,000 CZK (approximately €41,068 at 24.350 CZK to the euro, ČNB fixing for 21 September 2026).

The licence is a fact, and facts are checkable. MPSV grants it by administrative decision and keeps a register of the agencies that hold one, so a provider either appears in it or does not. A licence for that limb of the activity runs for three years before it has to be renewed, and the holder has to stay free of arrears throughout its life, which is re-verified every six months. MPSV publishes the regime at mpsv.gov.cz.

A licence is required in the Czech Republic to assign employees to a user company, and ours holds one. Our Czech company holds an employment agency licence, a povolení ke zprostředkování zaměstnání, issued by MPSV. We publish the fact and not the number, on the client’s instruction, and a client who needs to satisfy its own audit can verify it through the ministry.

What a licence does not do is certify an outcome. It is permission to carry on an activity, granted against conditions about who runs the company, what it owes and what it has deposited. It says nothing about whether any particular engagement has been run properly, which is why a provider that answers this question with a blanket assurance about compliance has changed the subject. The useful follow-up is: show me the entry.

The second question is who actually signs the employment contract, and it is often answered vaguely. Some providers employ through a company they own in the country. Others sell the service and then subcontract the employment to a third party, so that the contract your hire signs is with a company you have never spoken to, whose finances you cannot see, and whose relationship with your provider can end without your involvement.

The employment sits with our own Czech s.r.o. rather than with a third party we have contracted to do it. That company is registered in the Czech Republic, holds the agency licence, sits in the ČSSZ employer registry and carries statutory accident cover. The person you hire signs a pracovní smlouva with it under the zákoník práce.

Three follow-ups separate a direct model from a resold one. What is the registered name and IČO of the company that will appear on the contract? Is that company in the same group as the entity invoicing us? If a third party is involved, what happens to our employee if your agreement with them ends? A provider that employs directly can answer all three in a sentence each.

There is a related question about the money. Where an employee is assigned to a user, the worker may never be charged a fee, and no deduction may be taken from their wages for the agency’s benefit. Ask to see a sample Czech payslip so that you can see exactly what leaves the employee’s gross pay: 7.1% social, 4.5% health and zálohová daň, and nothing else.

Two conditions travel with the Czech regime and a serious provider will raise them before you do. The first is comparable conditions. Under § 309 odst. 5 zákoníku práce, an assigned employee’s working and pay conditions must be no worse than those of a comparable employee of the user company, and the duty falls on the agency and the user together. That has a practical consequence for you: the provider needs information about what your own people are paid for equivalent work, and a provider that never asks for it has not thought about the rule.

The second is duration. Under § 309 odst. 6 zákoníku práce, the assignment of the same employee to the same user is capped at 12 consecutive calendar months, subject to exceptions, including where the employee asks for it or where the assignment covers maternity or parental leave. Ask a provider what it does at month twelve. The answer should be specific, and it should not be that the question never comes up.

Neither of these is a reason to avoid the route, and neither is something a provider can quietly absorb. They are conditions on how the work is done, and the only bad answer is a provider that says they do not apply to it.

One more thing about how the question gets answered. No provider, ours included, can tell you how Czech law characterises your particular arrangement, and a provider that offers an opinion on that in a sales call is telling you something about its risk appetite rather than about the law. Route the characterisation question to your own Czech counsel and judge the provider on what it holds and does.

Czech payroll has a structural feature that catches providers who run it from a template built for somewhere else: there are two separate compulsory systems with two different collectors. Social security goes to Česká správa sociálního zabezpečení. Public health insurance goes to whichever of the seven Czech health insurers the employee has personally chosen, not to the state and not to ČSSZ. Ask a provider to name the health insurers it files to. If the answer is a single one, ask what happens when your hire is with a different one.

Ask about the numbers too, because they have moved. Employer statutory contributions are 33.8% of gross pay for 2026, being 24.8% social and 9% health. Compulsory accident insurance sits on top of that and is rated by the employer’s activity, so the true employer overhead is roughly 34.1% to 34.8%. A provider quoting a flat 33.8% as the total employer cost has left something out, and a provider quoting a single all-in percentage without saying which activity rate it used has left out more.

Ask about deadlines and filing channels. Contributions are remitted between the 1st and the 20th day of the following calendar month. Since 1 April 2026 the separate filings an employer used to make have been consolidated into one monthly employer report, filed with ČSSZ between the 1st and the 20th of the following month. Since 1 January 2026 the health insurers accept their employer reports electronically only. A provider whose description of Czech payroll administration comes from pre-2026 material will describe a system that no longer exists.

Then ask what you get to see. A monthly breakdown that separates gross pay, employer contributions, accident insurance and the fee is a reasonable thing to expect, and it is what makes the cost checkable against the cost of hiring in the Czech Republic.

Most disagreements about an employer of record invoice are about what was outside the fee rather than about the fee. Our own 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 it sits on top of the employee’s gross pay and the statutory employer contributions, which you would pay on any route. The full basis is on the pricing page.

The list below is what to ask about specifically, because these are the lines that turn up later if they were not agreed at the start.

• Statutory accident insurance, and which activity rate is applied
• Accrued dovolená paid out when the employment ends
• Odstupné where severance becomes due, and who funds it
• Pay during the výpovědní doba after a role has effectively stopped
• Sick pay for the first 14 calendar days, which the employer pays
• Onboarding, offboarding and any deposit held against the above

Ask whether the fee is in euro or koruna, and who carries the movement between them. Ask whether it changes with salary, because a percentage-of-payroll fee and a flat per-employee fee behave very differently on a senior hire. And ask what the notice period is on the services agreement itself, which is a separate thing from the employee’s own notice.

Price is a poor first filter and a good last one. Two providers quoting within ten percent of each other can be running structurally different models, and the cheaper one is not the cheaper one if a third party holds the employment contract. The comparison of providers is set out in the best EOR provider in the Czech Republic.

The last set of questions is about the end of the relationship, because that is where Czech employment law is least forgiving and where a weak provider becomes obvious. Ask what grounds the provider would rely on if you wanted to end a role. An employer’s výpověď has to be in writing and has to rest on one of the exhaustive grounds in § 52 zákoníku práce; there is no at-will route and no general “business reasons” ground that is not one of the listed ones.

Ask when the notice period 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. Any provider still telling you it runs from the first day of the following month is working from stale material, which is a useful signal about the rest of its briefing. The routes, the grounds and the two-month deadline to challenge a dismissal in court are set out in terminating employment in the Czech Republic.

Ask what severance would cost. Odstupné is 1× average monthly earnings for less than a year’s service, 2× from one year and 3× from two years, and it stops at 3× however long the person has been there. Then ask who pays it, and out of what.

Finally, ask the administrative questions nobody enjoys. Who holds the osobní spis, the personnel file, and on what basis? Which entity is the data controller? Can you get a copy of the signed contract and the monthly filings on request? A provider that has answered every question on this page in writing has told you more than any capability deck will. That is the standard Employer of Record Czech Republic is written to.