Cost
EOR or your own entity? The real cost for a five-person team
24 September 2026 · 6 min read · Aiko Tanaka, Head of Payroll
The question we hear most from finance teams is not "is an EOR cheaper?" but "at what headcount does an entity win?" The honest answer is that it depends on the country, and that most people underestimate the entity side.
Take five employees on average salaries. In the United Kingdom, an entity is cheap to form and the ongoing cost is mostly an accountant, a payroll bureau, a pension provider and your annual filings. Call it £6,000 to £9,000 a year, plus a few days of a finance person's time each quarter. Ubique's EOR fee for five people is £29,940 a year. On paper the entity wins, and for a UK team of five we will usually tell you so, or point you to our PEO.
Germany looks different. A GmbH needs €25,000 in share capital, a notary, a local managing director or a resident representative, a tax adviser who understands Lohnsteuer, and registration with the health insurers and the Berufsgenossenschaft. First-year costs land between €18,000 and €30,000 before you pay anyone a salary, and closing it later costs about as much again. Brazil is harder still: a limitada, a local administrator, eSocial filings and a monthly accountant that rarely costs less than R$4,000.
Our rule of thumb: below ten employees in one country, an EOR or a VEO is usually cheaper once you count your own time. Above twenty, an entity usually wins and we will help you move the team across. Between ten and twenty, run the numbers with the Ubique Calculator and talk to us.
Compliance
B2B contracts in Poland: where misclassification risk actually starts
10 September 2026 · 5 min read · Benedikt Maier, Head of Legal
Poland has one of the highest shares of self-employed engineers in Europe. The B2B contract (umowa B2B) is attractive to the engineer, who pays a flat tax and lower contributions, and to the company, which avoids employer contributions. The labour inspectorate (PIP) and the tax office both know this.
Reclassification does not hinge on the contract title. Polish courts look at how the relationship works in practice. Four signals matter most. First, subordination: does the contractor take instructions on how, when and where to work? Second, fixed hours and a fixed place, including a required presence in a specific office or on specific calls. Third, personal performance: can the contractor send a substitute, and has that ever happened? Fourth, exclusivity and economic dependence: one client, for years, with no other revenue.
If three of the four are present, the relationship is an employment relationship in all but name. The exposure is back-dated social contributions, interest, and in some cases penalties, plus leave and notice entitlements the person never received. It also tends to surface at the worst time: in a due diligence, or when the relationship ends badly.
What to do: run the free Misclassification Risk Check for each Polish contractor. For the ones that score high, offer conversion. Ubique runs its own entity in Poland, so converting to a Polish employment contract takes about a week and the person keeps their start date for seniority. For contractors who genuinely are independent, keep the evidence: invoices to other clients, their own equipment, their own hours.
Company
What a Series C due diligence taught us about compliance evidence
27 August 2026 · 7 min read · Hanna Lindqvist, CEO
In 2025 we went through a full Series C due diligence. We decided not to raise in the end, and we were not acquired, though you may have read otherwise. The process was still useful, because for eight weeks a team of lawyers and accountants asked us to prove everything we say about compliance. Here is what they asked for and what we changed.
They did not want policies. They wanted evidence that the policies ran. For each of the 40 countries where we operate our own entity, they asked for the last twelve months of filings, the registration certificates, and proof that contributions had been paid on time. We had all of it, but spread across local teams and local drives. Pulling it together took three weeks. It now lives in one place and is exported quarterly, and the same exports are available to enterprise customers under NDA.
They asked how we know which partner-served countries are compliant. Our answer was audits and contractual warranties, which was true but thin. We now run a formal annual review of every partner, with a scorecard, and we publish whether a country is Ubique-run or partner-served on every country page.
They asked about misclassification exposure in our contractor book. We could show the risk score for every contractor, which they liked. They also found a handful of long-running contractors we should have flagged for conversion earlier. We did, and we tightened the thresholds.
The lesson: compliance is a set of records, not a set of statements. Keep the records where you can find them in a day.
Remote
How we hire remote-first in 18 countries, and what we got wrong
13 August 2026 · 6 min read · Tomás Ribeiro, CPO
Ubique has never had a permanent office. We are 42 people in 18 countries, down from a peak of 60 in 2022. Seven years in, here are the hiring rules that survived and the ones we dropped.
What survived. We hire into time-zone bands, not countries. A role is advertised as "UTC-1 to UTC+3" or "UTC-8 to UTC-4", and the candidate's location inside the band does not matter. We pay in local currency on a single global salary band adjusted by a small number of cost tiers, and we publish the tier for every role. Every new hire gets equipment shipped before day one and a written 30-60-90 plan, and every manager has at most seven direct reports.
What we dropped. We used to hire anywhere, in any time zone. By 2022 we had people whose working day did not overlap with their manager's at all, and it showed in attrition. We now cap the spread of a team at six hours. We also stopped doing fully asynchronous interviews. A written exercise is still part of the process, but the final conversation is live.
What we got wrong. We grew to 60 faster than our management layer could absorb, and the 2023 reduction was the consequence. We should have hired more slowly and promoted more deliberately. We also underestimated how much a once-a-year in-person meet-up matters: it is now the biggest line in our People budget and we would cut almost anything else first.
We employ ourselves through our own platform, in the countries we run and through partners elsewhere. If it did not work for us, we would know.
Product
VEO in Germany, explained: employing without a GmbH
30 July 2026 · 5 min read · Benedikt Maier, Head of Legal
German law allows a company with no German entity to employ people in Germany directly, as a non-resident employer. The employer registers with the tax office and the social insurance system, runs a German payroll, and takes on the obligations of any German employer. Ubique's VEO product does the registration and runs the payroll for you. You stay the employer; we do the administration.
How it differs from EOR. With an EOR, Ubique's German entity is the legal employer and your hire is seconded to you. With VEO, your own company is the legal employer. That matters when you want the employment relationship, and the intellectual property it creates, to sit with you directly. It also matters for teams larger than a handful, where EOR fees add up, and for companies that want to keep an employee's existing contract and seniority after closing an entity.
What it costs. A VEO registration takes four to six weeks and there is a one-off setup fee. The monthly fee is below the EOR rate because we are not carrying employer liability. You do still pay full German employer contributions, which run roughly 20 to 21 percent of gross salary, and you are bound by German dismissal protection once you pass ten employees.
Where it stops being the right answer. If you will sell in Germany, sign contracts there or have senior people making decisions there, you may create a permanent establishment and need an entity anyway. If you plan to grow past about 25 people in Germany, a GmbH becomes cheaper and simpler. We will tell you when you reach either point.
Kestrel Labs closed its German and Spanish entities in 2025 and kept every employee through VEO. The CFO's account is on our Why Ubique page.
Equity
Equity for EOR employees: what works, what does not
9 July 2026 · 6 min read · Tomás Ribeiro, CPO
An EOR hire is legally employed by Ubique, not by you. Most equity plans assume the grantee is your employee. That mismatch is the root of nearly every equity question we get, and it is solvable, but not by ignoring it.
What works. Most option plans allow grants to employees of a group company or to consultants and service providers. An EOR employee usually fits the second category, so the first step is to check your plan rules and, if needed, amend them once rather than per hire. The grant itself is between your company and the person. Ubique is not a party to it and does not hold the options.
Tax is where it gets country-specific. In the United Kingdom, EMI options are only available to employees of the granting company or its qualifying subsidiaries, so an EOR hire cannot receive EMI. Unapproved options still work, with income tax at exercise. In the United States, ISOs have the same employee requirement, so EOR hires receive NSOs. In many European countries the taxable event is exercise, and the employer of record has withholding obligations at that point. That is why Ubique needs to know about the grant: at exercise, we run the withholding through the local payroll and invoice you for it.
What does not work. Granting silently and hoping the exercise never happens. Treating every country the same. Issuing RSUs that vest monthly in countries where each vest is a payroll event, which creates twelve withholding runs a year for one person.
Our equity plan management add-on handles the paperwork: grant records, exercise withholding, and reporting to the tax authority where required. It will not design your plan. Your lawyers should.
Behind the scenes
How Ubique handles payroll errors
18 June 2026 · 5 min read · Aiko Tanaka, Head of Payroll
We run around 9,000 payslips a month across 160 countries. Some of them are wrong. In the last twelve months our error rate was 0.21 percent, which is 19 payslips a month. Here is what happens when one of them is yours.
Who notices. About a third of errors are caught by our own pre-payroll checks, which compare every payslip with the previous month and flag any net change above 5 percent that is not explained by a logged variable. Another third are caught by the customer when reviewing the payroll preview. The remaining third are reported by the employee after payday, which is the case we most want to avoid.
The first hour. The account manager acknowledges within one business hour and tells the employee and the customer what we know. We do not wait until we have the full root cause. If the employee has been underpaid, we issue an off-cycle payment the same or next business day, in the countries we run ourselves. In partner-served countries it can take two to three days, and we say so.
Who pays. If the error was ours, Ubique covers any bank charges, interest or late-filing penalties. If the error came from data the customer entered late or incorrectly, we correct it at no fee but the customer carries any penalty. Overpayments are recovered from the next payroll in instalments the employee agrees to, never silently.
Afterwards. Every error gets a written root cause within five business days, shared with the customer. Recurring causes become new pre-payroll checks. This is how the 5 percent net-change check was born.
Payroll
2026 minimum wage changes: the roundup
5 February 2026 · 4 min read · Aiko Tanaka, Head of Payroll
Most countries revise their minimum wage once a year, usually in January. A few do it in April or July. Here is what changed for 2026 in the countries where our customers employ the most people. The dashboard shows the live figure for every country, with the effective date, so treat this as a summary rather than a source.
Germany raised the statutory minimum to €13.90 an hour on 1 January, with a further step to €14.60 already set for 2027. The Netherlands indexed its hourly minimum in January and will do so again in July. Poland moved its monthly minimum to PLN 4,806 in a single step this year, after two steps in 2025. France indexed the SMIC in January in line with inflation. Spain's SMI is negotiated between government and social partners and was still being finalised when this went out.
The United Kingdom changes in April. The National Living Wage rises to £12.71 an hour for everyone aged 21 and over, with larger percentage increases for the 18 to 20 band. If you employ apprentices or junior hires in the UK, check their rate in March.
Outside Europe: several Canadian provinces indexed in October and will again in 2026; Australia's Fair Work Commission sets the national minimum from 1 July; Brazil's federal minimum rose in January; and several US states and cities moved on 1 January while the federal rate did not.
What to do. Ubique applies statutory increases automatically and notifies you before the payroll that includes them. Where a collective agreement sets a higher floor than the statute, we apply the agreement. If any employee is within 5 percent of the new floor, you will see a flag in the dashboard.
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