Iraq Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN IRAQ. 1. THERE ARE FOUR DIFFERENT ANSWERS, NOT ONE, AND THEY DIFFER BY UP TO 13 POINTS. General sector, Iraqi national: 12% employer + 5% employee. General sector, foreign national: 20% + 5%. Oil and gas, Iraqi national: 25% + 5%. Oil and gas, foreign national: 25% + 5% with the employer also carrying the State's 8%. Any single "Iraq social security rate" is wrong for at least three of the four cases. 2. THE STATE IS A THIRD CONTRIBUTOR, AND ONLY FOR IRAQIS. Law No. 18 of 2023 raised the combined contribution from 17% to 25% of wages but placed the additional 8 points on the Treasury for Iraqi employees. The employer's own rate stayed at 12%. Commentary reporting that "contributions rose to 25%" is describing the FUND's income, not the employer's bill, and reading it as an employer rate overstates Iraqi employer cost by two-thirds. 3. FOR A FOREIGN EMPLOYEE THE EMPLOYER PAYS THE STATE'S SHARE INSTEAD. 20% employer. This is the opposite of the Gulf pattern where expatriates fall outside the contributory scheme altogether. In Iraq the expatriate is inside it and is the more expensive hire, before the flat per-head fees are even counted. 4. THE BASE IS WAGES AND ALLOWANCES, NOT BASIC SALARY. The law speaks of the total of what the insured receives by way of أجور ومخصصات. Contributing on basic pay alone under-contributes across the board. 5. THE LAW IS A COMPLETE REPLACEMENT, NOT AN AMENDMENT. Law No. 18 of 2023 repealed Social Security Law No. 39 of 1971. Anything derived from the 1971 law — including its own 12%/5% general and 25%/5% oil-sector split, which look deceptively similar — should be re-derived from the new law rather than assumed to have survived, because the scope, the branches and the enforcement provisions all moved. 6. COVERAGE WIDENED SHARPLY. The 2023 law extends to the private, mixed and joint sectors and reaches workers in the INFORMAL as well as the organised sector — a substantial expansion on the 1971 position. An employer that treated casual, seasonal or informally engaged workers as outside the scheme under the old law is likely to be non-compliant under the new one. 7. THE FLAT FOREIGN-EMPLOYEE FEES ARE NOT A PERCENTAGE AND WILL NOT APPEAR IN ANY RATE TABLE. IQD 2,000,000 on entry and IQD 750,000 on status regularisation, per foreign employee, employer-borne. 8. THERE IS NO CEILING. The percentages run on the whole of wages and allowances at every level of pay. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: the rates in this record are those of the federal law and apply across federal Iraq. The Kurdistan Region operates its own administrative arrangements for parts of the labour and social-security framework; nothing in this record has been verified against Kurdistan Region practice, and an employer operating in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah or Duhok should confirm the position locally rather than assume the federal position applies unchanged. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: I put no number on the following, deliberately. THE BRANCH-BY-BRANCH SPLIT OF THE EMPLOYER'S 12%. Eight of the twelve points are allocated to the retirement insurance branch; the destination of the remaining four points across the occupational-injury and sickness branches was not established from the law text and is not stated here. The total is reliable; the internal allocation is not served. THE ARTICLE NUMBERS. The contribution provisions are cited by content rather than by article number, because the numbering could not be confirmed against the gazette text (see the confidence note). THE KURDISTAN REGION POSITION — not researched, and deliberately flagged rather than assumed. PENALTY AND ENFORCEMENT RATES — the law carries substantial employer penalties for non-registration and late payment; they are not quantified here. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE: nothing found. The 2023 law is the operative instrument and no amending law was located. Note that implementation has been staged through instructions and regulations issued under the law and through the Department's digital contribution system, so an employer's practical obligations may have commenced later than the gazette date; the rates themselves are those of the law as enacted. Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://mearef.dev/v1/iq/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://mearef.dev/v1/iq/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://mearef.dev/provenance/iq/social-contributions

Other Iraq series: CBI Policy Rate (سعر السياسة النقدية) · Value-added tax (VAT) · VAT registration threshold · National minimum wage (الحد الأدنى للأجور) · Public holidays · Consumer Price Index (latest month) · Corporate income tax rate · Withholding tax rates · Legal delay interest (فوائد قانونية) · Personal income tax (progressive bands)

The same figure elsewhere: Israel · Jordan · Kuwait · Oman · Qatar · all 9