What an Estonian company actually costs

The Calculator

Tick what your company needs. The totals add the state fee, the subscription, the annual report and VAT, and a provider that does not publish one of those is marked not comparable rather than being given a cheaper-looking total.

An unknown is not a zero. If a provider does not publish its annual-report fee, the total is unknown, not lower. Treating a missing figure as €0 would put the least transparent provider at the top of a cheapest-first list — which is how most comparison sites end up recommending whoever discloses least. Providers with gaps sort to the bottom here, and the gap is named.

What the State Charges

€265 is the whole state cost of forming the company. The Centre of Registers and Information Systems puts it plainly: the state fee for founding a private limited company electronically is €265. Estonia's e-Residency programme says the same, twice, and one provider's own page confirms the pass-through as "€265 + VAT".

Share capital stopped being a barrier in 2023. The minimum is €0.01 per shareholder and it does not have to be paid before registration. Only above €50,000 does capital have to go through a deposit account.

A good deal of published guidance gives €265 as an "expedited" fee against a €200 "standard proceedings" alternative, implying you can choose the cheaper route. No official source draws that distinction. RIK's own help portal, e-Residency's knowledge base and a provider's pass-through page all give one electronic fee, and none uses the words expedited, ordinary or general procedure. There is one electronic fee and it is €265. Budget €200 against it and you will be charged €265.

What You Are Legally Required to Buy

This is where the recurring money goes, and both items are obligations rather than upsells. They are conditions to satisfy, not a sequence to work through.

An Estonian legal address — or a contact person. These are alternatives, not a mandatory pair. Either the company has an address in Estonia, or it uses your own address abroad and appoints a licensed contact person here. Non-resident founders almost always buy both from one provider, which is why they are sold as a bundle.

The contact person must be licensed. Not a friend in Tallinn. It has to be a licensed company or a notary. Their legal role is narrow — they receive official notices on the company's behalf and have no authority to act for it.

The appointment expires. The contact person is entered in the register with an end date, and the entry is deleted automatically when it passes. This is the renewal that catches people: nobody chases you, the entry simply lapses.

The annual report, within six months. Compulsory whoever files it. Miss it and the registrar may fine both the company and every person obliged to file, without warning, under § 71 of the Commercial Code.

The annual report has teeth, and no published fine. If the report is still unfiled six months after the deadline, the registrar starts supervisory proceedings, and RIK states those "may end with the deletion of the legal person from the register or compulsory dissolution". RIK publishes no euro amount for the fine itself. Losing the company is the published consequence.

Why the Spread Is So Wide

For a solo founder needing the annual report filed, the recurring cost ranges from about €670 to €1,470 a year. Three things explain almost all of it.

The calculator excludes introductory tiers deliberately. A plan priced for "the first 12 months only, until €4,000 revenue" tells you nothing about year two, and comparing it against a competitor's steady-state price is the single most common way these comparisons mislead.

Cheapest is not the same as least work. The cheapest recurring option here is an address-and-contact-person bundle with accounting bought separately or done yourself. That is genuinely cheaper and it is genuinely more work — you are filing your own declarations monthly if you register for VAT. Bundled providers cost roughly double and absorb that. Neither is the right answer for everyone, which is why the arithmetic below matters more than a winner would.

Where Providers Contradict Themselves

Three of the four contradict themselves or the state somewhere in their own published material, and that is worth seeing before you choose.

Enty's free tier cannot lawfully run your company. Enty publishes a €0 subscription, and its own documentation states that the contact person is included in all plans except the free one. A company whose board sits abroad is required to have a contact person. So the free tier is not a cheaper way to do this — it is a plan that does not meet the legal requirement, and the calculator excludes it rather than showing you a €0 row.

The Costs No Provider's Price List Contains

Everything above compares the same three lines, because those are the three lines providers sell: address, contact person, accounting. Four costs sit entirely outside that comparison, they are all charged by somebody other than your provider, and one of them is larger than every other number here put together.

The licence is one cost the formation price lists leave out. The other is the account the company needs before it can be paid at all.

The bank account is the constraint, and no provider price list prices it. The e-Residency programme's own estimate is €0–€200 and 1 hour to 7 days. The only Estonian bank that publishes a non-resident business tariff is LHV: €300 to open for an EU-connected company and €600 elsewhere, then €30 or €60 a month. That monthly figure alone is comparable to the whole address-and-contact-person bundle, and it is on nobody's formation price list. Solve banking before you register, not after — see business banking.

One sanity check the state gives you for free. The e-Residency programme publishes its own view of the private market: €200–€400 a year for a legal address and contact person, and accounting "from €50 per month". That accounting figure is a floor rather than a typical price — the managed accounting actually sold by the providers above starts at €135 a month — but a quote far outside the state's own range is worth a question.

The OÜ Against Its Alternatives, Priced on the Same Basis

Every figure above prices one decision — an Estonian company, run through a provider. Estonia offers three other ways for one person to be paid for their own work, and comparing them on cost floor rather than on tax rate produces an order most people do not expect.

The cheapest thing to register is the most expensive thing to hold. Registering as a FIE costs €20 against €265 for a company — and then carries a minimum social tax obligation of €3,509 a year, collected as four advances of €877, whether or not the business made any money. That floor is higher than the entire annual running cost of an OÜ at every provider on this page. An OÜ that trades at zero owes an annual report and nothing else; a FIE that trades at zero owes €877 a quarter until the registration is deleted.

Two qualifications matter before reading that as a recommendation. The FIE minimum is not a pure cost — it is what buys health insurance, and a FIE's cover follows the register entry rather than the profit, so a loss-making FIE is still insured. And the two cheap routes are closed to anyone forming a company from abroad: the FIE and the entrepreneur account are for people resident in Estonia. Working for yourself compares all four on tax as well as on cost.

Your First Year, as a Calendar of Obligations

The annual figures above are subscriptions. What they do not show is when anything is actually due — and almost every expensive mistake in an Estonian company's first year is a date rather than a price.

One threshold turns a quiet year into a busy one. Below €40,000 with nobody on the payroll, the whole calendar above collapses to one filing a year. Cross the threshold and you have added twelve returns with a payment attached to each. That single fact is what decides whether the cheap unbundled route is a saving or a second job, and it is worth deciding against where your turnover is heading rather than where it is — see VAT.

What the Accounting Fee Actually Buys

"Accounting from €50 a month" is on the state's own page and it tells you nothing about what the work is. Here is the work.

Nothing here is legally required to be done by an accountant. The obligation is that the filing happens, not that a professional performs it, and you can file in e-MTA, through accounting software over X-tee, or at a service bureau. What you are buying is deadline discipline — and the value of that is set almost entirely by whether you are VAT-registered, because that is the difference between one filing a year and twelve.

Every price above is quoted excluding VAT. At 24% that is more than the gap between two tiers on most of these price lists, which is why it is the commonest reason a first invoice does not match the budget.

Getting the Money Out, and What Each Route Costs

The running costs above are the small half of the year. For a company whose owner intends to be paid, the larger number by far is the tax on moving money from the company to a person — and it is not on anybody's price list because it is not a price, it is a rate.

Three points decide most of this, and none of them is about the headline rate.

The 22% is the company's tax, on the way out. It is written in the law as 22/78 of the net, which is the same number seen from the other end: for every €78 that reaches the shareholder, the company owes €22.

Paying yourself less than the minimum base saves nothing. Social tax is charged on a minimum monthly base of €886, so the company owes €292.38 anyway. A fee below €886 buys no health insurance and reduces no bill.

A dividend is not a substitute for a board member fee. Payment for directing the company carries social tax wherever the director lives; a distribution of profit does not. Relabelling the first as the second is the arrangement tax authorities look for, and the Tax Board can deem dividends to be salary income where a working board member takes no reasonable remuneration.

One legacy rate survives, and it only reaches companies that existed before 2025. The reduced 14/86 rate on regular distributions was abolished on 1 January 2025. The 7% withholding on dividends to a natural person out of profits taxed at 14/86 up to 31 December 2024 survives it, reducible to 5% or 0% under some treaties. A company you register in 2026 will never meet it; a company you buy or inherit might.

None of this settles your own position. Where the money is taxed once it reaches you is decided where you live, and place-of-effective-management rules can make a one-person company tax-resident in your own country because the management is wherever you are sitting. See company tax.

Hiring Your First Person

The moment a one-person company becomes a two-person company, a whole cost line appears that no formation price list contains — and it is not the salary.

Estonia puts the social contribution on the employer, not inside the gross. That is the opposite of Lithuania and Poland, and it means an Estonian gross salary understates what the employee costs. A salary of €2,000 costs the company €2,676: €2,000 gross, plus €660 of social tax, plus €16 of employer unemployment insurance. The employee separately pays 1.6% unemployment insurance, a second-pillar contribution if they joined, and 22% income tax on what is left.

What the employer adds on top is never deducted from the employee:

• Social tax at 33% — 20% pension, 13% health.
• Unemployment insurance at 0.8%.
• Charged on at least a €886 monthly base whatever the person is actually paid — so part-time costs proportionally more.

What the paperwork adds are obligations that arrive with the hire:

• Registration in the employment register before they start — the health-insurance clock runs from the entry, not from their first day.
• A payroll declaration every month a salary is paid.
• Cover begins after 14 days and only where the contract runs longer than a month or is open-ended; it continues 2 months after termination is registered.

The wage floor moves inside the year, which matters if you are budgeting across it: the minimum wage is €886 a month and €5.31 an hour to 31 March 2026, then €946 and €5.67 from 1 April 2026.

The minimum base is waived more often than people realise. The €886 floor does not apply to employees receiving a state pension, people with partial or no work ability, a parent raising a child under 3 or three or more children under 19, registered students, people who were unemployed for six months before being hired, or anyone absent for a full calendar month on sick leave, maternity leave, conscription or strike. If your first hire is a student or a returning long-term unemployed person, the arithmetic above changes.

What It Costs to Get It Wrong — and Who Actually Chases You

Two different institutions enforce two different things, with two different instruments, and people worry about the wrong one. The registrar cares whether the company files its annual report, and its ultimate instrument is taking the company away. The Tax Board cares about the tax, and its instruments are interest, a penalty payment and striking a registration off.

The published consequence is losing the company, not paying a fine. This is the part worth internalising, because it inverts how enforcement works in most countries. RIK publishes no figure for the § 71 fine — what it publishes is that proceedings may end in deletion from the register or compulsory dissolution. So the risk attached to a missed annual report is not a bill you can budget for; it is the asset itself. No euro amount is published anywhere.

Two smaller mechanisms are worth knowing because they turn a manageable problem into a surprise. Any overdue liability is settled out of money owed back to you first, including an enforcement agent's claim — so a refund you were counting on can simply fail to arrive with nothing failing and nobody explaining. And share capital below €2,500 leaves the shareholders personally liable for the unpaid portion: the €0.01 minimum is real, but it is not free of consequence, and guides that describe €2,500 as a capital requirement have the mechanism pointing the wrong way.

The interest rate deserves one line of arithmetic in its own right. 21.9% a year is more expensive than almost any commercial credit available to a small company, and it runs from the day after the due date rather than from an assessment. Late tax is the most expensive way to borrow money in Estonia.

Closing It Down

Formation pages stop at the moment the company exists. The end of its life has costs too, and the commonest mistake is assuming that stopping trading is the same as stopping.

What stops when you stop trading is genuinely nothing:

• The annual report is still due within 6 months of the year end, for a company that did nothing at all.
• The contact person entry still expires on its own term, and the company is non-compliant when it does.
• A VAT registration still requires a return every month until it is removed.
• Your provider's subscription runs until you cancel it, not until you stop invoicing.

What you have to actively do is each a filing, not an absence:

• Deregister for VAT, showing turnover has not exceeded €40,000 in the current or previous calendar year.
• Settle the tax on goods you still hold whose input VAT you deducted — stock and equipment carry a bill on the way out.
• Wait for the date in the Board's decision: deletion takes effect then, not when you applied.
• End the address and contact person arrangements deliberately.

Being struck off is a consequence, not an exit. The registrar can dissolve a company for a missing annual report and the Tax Board can remove a VAT registration after 6 silent periods, but arriving at either by neglect leaves the § 71 exposure on the people obliged to file along the way. One further asymmetry applies to a business operating from another EU member state: it must have been VAT-registered for at least 2 calendar years before it may apply to be deleted, where an Estonian business has no general minimum.

The sole-trader route is worth contrasting, because its exit is defined much more precisely. A FIE's deletion from the register runs on a 5-working-day timetable, and suspension is available as an alternative — but if a suspension runs past 12 months, assets previously deducted are deemed taken into personal use and their market value is added back to business income. Termination does the same immediately for anything unsold. Neither form lets you simply walk away.

Common Mistakes

Budgeting the formation fee and stopping there is the first mistake. Registration is a one-off; the address, contact person and accounting are annual, and they exceed it inside the first year at every provider here. Comparing headline monthly prices is the second, because they cover different things — one provider's €99 includes accounting and the annual report, another's €24 is an address and a mailbox. Forgetting VAT is the third: every provider quotes excluding it, and at 24% that is the difference between two tiers on most price lists.

Two more are about tiers. Taking an introductory tier as the price mistakes a discount for a rate — "First 12 months, until €4,000 revenue" is a discount, and year two is the number that matters. And a free tier is not a cheaper route if it excludes the contact person, because then it does not meet the legal requirement for a board sitting abroad.

The last three are about what the paperwork does when you are not watching. Do not trust a provider's "government fee" without checking it: one of the four quotes €290 for a fee the state sets at €265, so check the pass-through against the statutory figure. Do not let the contact person entry lapse either — it is registered with an end date and deleted automatically, and nobody chases you for the renewal. And do not confuse any of this with residency or tax residency: forming a company here gives you neither, as e-Residency is not residency sets out.