Armenia is one of the fastest places in the region to start a business. An LLC costs nothing in state fees and is usually registered within two working days. An individual entrepreneur registration costs AMD 3,000 and is typically done the same day y…
Armenia is one of the fastest places in the region to start a business. An LLC costs nothing in state fees and is usually registered within two working days. An individual entrepreneur registration costs AMD 3,000 and is typically done the same day you file.
Company registration in Armenia is the easy part. The decisions that actually determine what you pay and how much administration you carry happen in the twenty days after you register, and most people make them by accident, by missing a deadline.
This guide covers the whole arc from choosing a legal form, preparing your documents, filing, electing a tax regime, and surviving your first year of compliance. It is written for the people we meet every week at Letters and Numbers, freelancers going legitimate, relocated founders rebuilding a company from scratch, and small teams opening an Armenian entity for the first time.
An IE is not a separate legal person. It is you, registered to do business. Your business debts are your personal debts, and there is no corporate veil to hide behind.
In exchange you get the lightest possible setup. Registration happens on the day you submit documents. There is no charter to draft, no participants' meeting, no share register. Accounting is simpler, and for a solo operator on the turnover tax the monthly filing burden is genuinely small.
Certain fixed costs apply whether or not you earn anything. As of 2026, an IE owes an annual stamp duty of AMD 12,000 (income up to AMD 12M) or AMD 120,000 (above it), and IEs whose prior-year income reached AMD 2,400,001 or more owe AMD 129,600 annually in mandatory health insurance, due by 20 April. Dormant months only stop the clock if you formally suspend or close the registration.
The default choice for anything with ambition. Liability is capped at your contribution to the charter capital. You can have up to 49 participants. Foreign individuals and foreign companies can be founders, and there is no requirement for a local partner, local director, or local employee.
There is no meaningful minimum charter capital in practice. Founders set the figure themselves.
One important exception is coming which is from 1 November 2026, foreign nationals seeking residency on the basis of owning an Armenian LLC are expected to need charter capital of at least AMD 2,000,000. If residency is part of your plan, set your capital with that in mind rather than defaulting to a token amount you will have to increase later.
Still deciding?
The honest test is that tax regimes are broadly available to both forms. It is about risk and growth.
Choose an IE if you are one person, selling your own labour, with no inventory, no employees, no significant contractual liability, and no plan to raise money or bring in a partner.
Choose an LLC the moment any of those change. Converting later is not a conversion at all: Armenia has no formal mechanism to turn an IE into an LLC. You register a new company, migrate your contracts and assets, and close the IE. Doing that after you have clients and a payment history is considerably more painful than starting correctly.
Preparation is where registrations stall. Get these four things right and the filing itself is administrative.
The name must be in Armenian, must include the legal form, and must not duplicate an existing registered name. Latin and other-language versions can be registered alongside it.
Check availability yourself before you get attached to anything, the Ministry of Justice runs a public register search at e-register.moj.am.
One rule that catches foreign founders repeatedly is that using "Armenia", "Armenian" or "Arm" in a company name requires an advance permit and an annual state fee of AMD 600,000. If you were planning "ArmSomething LLC" as a throwaway placeholder, plan something else.
Every registered entity needs a legal address, and it goes into the charter. This is the requirement that most often blocks otherwise-ready founders, particularly people who have just arrived.
Two things worth knowing: renting a dedicated office solely to have a legal address is not mandatory, and multiple companies may share the same address. What matters is that the address is real, that correspondence reaches you, and that you can produce a basis for using it if asked.
In practice, new founders in Yerevan solve this in one of three ways:
The third is the only one that also solves the problem of where you will actually work, which is why so many first-year companies in Yerevan run out of a coworking space rather than a lease.
For an LLC you need a charter (կանոնադրություն) and a founder's decision or founders' meeting minutes. The State Register can provide standard template documents on the spot, which is fine for a straightforward single-founder company.
It is not fine for a company with partners. The charter governs how shares transfer, how decisions get made, and what happens when founders disagree. A template charter answers all three questions with whatever the default is, and you will find out what that default was during your first serious disagreement. If there are two or more of you, have the charter drafted.
Foreign citizens require a passport plus a notarised Armenian translation. Documents issued abroad generally need apostille or consular legalisation, though notarised Armenian translations are often accepted without apostille for CIS-issued documents. Confirm the requirement for your specific country before you pay for legalisation you did not need.
Go to the Agency of the State Register of Legal Entities (Ministry of Justice), 49/3 Komitas Ave, Yerevan. Submit your documents. Straightforward LLC registrations are frequently completed within about an hour, and the registry is bound by law to complete legal-entity registration within two working days. An IE registration is completed on the day of submission.
File through the state portal at e-register.am. This requires an Armenian qualified electronic signature. Options include an ID-card-based signature, a SIM-based Mobile ID, or EKENG's cloud signing service. Foreigners generally need Armenian residency and a Public Service Number (PSN) to obtain Mobile ID, which makes this route better suited to people already established here than to someone applying from abroad.
Filed correctly, an online LLC registration typically completes in one to three business days.
A notarised power of attorney lets a local representative ( a law firm, or a trusted individual) file on your behalf. This is how the large majority of foreign-owned Armenian companies are actually registered.
The power of attorney should be drafted in Armenian or bilingually; foreign-language documents require apostille or consular legalisation. Make it broad enough to cover post-registration steps too, or your representative will be unable to collect your certificate, register you with the tax authority, or handle the bank introduction.
This is the most consequential twenty days of your company's life, and it passes quietly.
You must elect your tax regime with the State Revenue Committee within 20 days of registration. If you do not, you are placed on the general system by default and you generally cannot switch until the following tax year, by application before 20 February.
For a small service business, that default can be the difference between a manageable tax bill and a serious one.
Everyone's fallback and, for larger or capital-intensive businesses, genuinely the right answer. Profit tax at 18% is charged on actual profit, so real expenses reduce it. VAT-registered exporters can reclaim input VAT, which is why some exporters register for VAT voluntarily even below the threshold.
VAT registration becomes mandatory once turnover passes AMD 115 million. VAT returns are filed monthly, by the 20th of the following month.
The normal regime for small business. A single tax on gross revenue replaces both profit tax and VAT.
Two things changed in 2025 that anyone reading an older guide will get wrong. First, the rates roughly doubled, trade went from 5% to 10%, production from 3.5% to 7%, catering from 6% to 12%, other activities from 5% to 10%. Second, a documented-expense deduction was introduced to soften that, letting you reduce the liability using properly documented costs, subject to minimum effective floors (for trade, the floor is 1% of turnover; production 3%; catering 3.5%).
The practical consequence is that turnover tax now rewards good bookkeeping. A business with sloppy documentation pays the headline 10%. A business with clean records can pay a fraction of that. The regime stopped being the "no-accounting-needed" option in 2025, and a lot of people have not noticed.
Also note that several professional categories, including notaries, lawyers, and various engineering, construction and real-estate brokerage services, were moved out of turnover tax entirely. Confirm your specific activity qualifies rather than assuming.
A 0% rate on business income for entities under AMD 24 million in annual turnover. It sounds like the obvious choice and usually is not available.
The exclusion list is long and was tightened significantly in 2025. Financial services are out. So are professional services delivered in Yerevan, consulting, legal, accounting, audit, engineering, advertising, design, marketing, translation, medical. Retail and wholesale trade in Yerevan are excluded. IT and software development are excluded.
What remains is small-scale services, artisan work, and various activities outside the capital. If you are a Yerevan-based consultant hoping for a 0% rate, this is not your regime.
Armenia runs a support programme for the technology sector running through 2031, administered via a High-Tech Registry with quarterly filings through a government self-service platform. Registration in the Registry is mandatory to access the benefits.
The headline elements: a 1% turnover tax rate for qualifying high-tech activity within the turnover regime, a 60% refund of income tax on the salaries of specialists newly entering the sector, a 50% refund for employees in certified training or retraining, a reduced 10% income tax rate for R&D specialists, and double deduction of qualifying salary costs against corporate income tax (capped at 50% of the taxable base).
Eligibility is strict broadly, at least 90% of sales must come from government-defined high-tech activities, with no overdue tax liabilities. And the AMD 115M ceiling still applies to the 1% rate.
Armenia is unusually open. There are no restrictions on foreign ownership, no local director requirement, no local shareholder requirement, and no state registration fee for an LLC.
You do not need to be in the country. A notarised power of attorney covers registration end to end.
Banking is the real bottleneck, not registration. Some banks have offered power-of-attorney or remote account opening with enhanced due diligence, but most prefer in-person verification, and approval is never guaranteed — banks make independent compliance decisions. Plan for the possibility of a trip.
If residency is the goal, read the November 2026 changes carefully. Armenia is introducing formal financial thresholds for business-based residency from 1 November 2026. Charter capital of at least AMD 2,000,000 for LLC owners, or an AMD 1,000,000 bank balance or AMD 1,000,000 of turnover in the prior 60 days for individual entrepreneurs. Revocation triggers are also being introduced, including capital falling below AMD 1,000,000 and no tax data for 180 days. Both entity types are treated equally for immigration purposes.
A shell company with no activity was already a weak residency application. From November it becomes a formally non-compliant one.
A registration certificate does not give you anywhere to work, take a client call, or meet a co-founder. For most people setting up here, that turns out to be the harder problem.
Working from an apartment is free and works for roughly two months. Then the isolation starts costing you more than rent would, not because you need a desk, but because a new business in an unfamiliar country runs on information you can only get from other people. Which bank actually approves foreign founders this quarter. Which accountant is worth the fee. Whether the person you are about to sign with is reliable.
That information does not live in guides. It lives in a ++professional community in Yerevan++, the specific, unglamorous kind where someone two tables over registered the same entity type six months ago and will tell you what went wrong.
Letters and Numbers was built as exactly that, a ++coworking space in Yerevan++ for people who need a room to think in, a reliable address, and a network they did not have to construct from nothing.
If you are weighing options, our guide to choosing the ++best coworking place in Yerevan++ covers what to compare beyond the price of a hot desk, address support, meeting rooms, community density, and whether anyone there does what you do.
Two changes have quietly made accounting services in Armenia more important than they were three years ago.
The first is the 2025 turnover tax reform. When the regime was a flat 5% with no deductions, bookkeeping was a compliance chore. Now that documented expenses reduce your liability against a minimum floor, the quality of your records determines your tax bill directly.
The second is the near-universal personal income declaration requirement phased in from the 2025 tax year, alongside mandatory health insurance from January 2026. More filings, more deadlines, more ways to be quietly non-compliant.
What you need scales sharply with structure:
The failure pattern is always the same; founders postpone accounting until something goes wrong, then pay someone to reconstruct a year of records from an inbox. Setting it up in month one costs a fraction of that.
Registering a company in Armenia takes two days. Building something that lasts takes considerably longer, and almost nobody does it well alone. Whether you need a desk to work from, a legal address for your charter, a meeting room for your first client, straight answers about banks and accountants from people who have just been through it, or simply a community of like-minded expats and founders in Yerevan, ++Letters and Numbers++ is built to support all of it.
Come see the space before you commit to anything. Book a day pass, work a full day, talk to whoever is sitting next to you. That conversation is usually worth more than the desk.