What it costs to register and run a company (LLC) in Uzbekistan

Registration is the cheap part and almost nobody tells you what follows it. Here is every recurring cost an Uzbek LLC carries — what the law requires, what the market charges for the rest, and what the same company costs run three different ways.

What is actually required

Most cost writing about Uzbekistan quotes a registration fee and stops. The registration fee is the smallest number in this article. What decides whether an Uzbek company is worth owning is the list that starts the day it exists — and the useful thing to know first is how short the mandatory half of that list is.

Required, with no way around any of them: the state registration duty, once. A director — who is an employee, and must be paid. A registered address. A bank account, with whatever the bank charges for it. And taxes.

Optional, whatever anyone tells you: a lawyer or an agency to file the registration. An electronic signature — needed only if you file online. A nominee director. An accountant: you may lawfully keep your own books. Legal support on retainer. Card acquiring. Every one of those is a real cost for most companies and none of them is a legal requirement.

Registration: one duty, two routes

The state registration duty is 1× the base calculation value — the BCV — for a business entity, under the state duty schedule (the rates). Everything the state charges is expressed as a multiple of it rather than in som, which is why the figures below move on the day a decree moves the BCV and not before.

What differs is how you file. In person at a State Services Centre you pay the duty plus the centre’s service fee, and you need no electronic signature at all. Online you pay the duty plus a signature for each person who has to sign, and no service fee.

Which makes the online route cheaper, and that is roughly the point of it. Add a second signature for every additional person who has to sign. It is also the route a foreign founder cannot use unaided — filing online needs an Uzbek identification number and a face already in the state’s biometric records.

A lawyer or an agency to do the filing is a third cost, and it is genuinely optional. A classic law firm charges $300–4,000 for the registration itself, usually quoted after a call rather than published — a spread of more than ten to one, which tells you how little of that figure is the filing and how much is everything the firm assumes it will also do. Ours are published, with their modifiers, on the pricing page.

The director is the floor

This is the cost that surprises people, and it is unavoidable. An LLC must have a director. A director is an employee. An employee must be paid at least the minimum wage. So the cheapest lawful way to own an Uzbek company still runs a monthly payroll, and the minimum wage is the floor under the whole exercise.

On top of the gross salary the company pays 12% social tax (Tax Code, Art. 405). Out of the gross, 12% personal income tax (Art. 381–382) and a 0.1% pension contribution are withheld — so 24.1% in charges sits around every wage, of which the company’s own outlay is the gross plus the social tax.

A director does not have to be engaged full time. Half rate and quarter rate are ordinary arrangements, and the floor moves with them:

The address, and the rent that is not real

A company is registered to premises with a cadastre number, which means an address is a monthly cost from the first day and there is no lawful way to have none.

There is also a floor under what the lease may say. The State Budget Law sets minimum rent rates each year, in som per square metre per month, and a lease written below the rate for its location is not taken at its stated figure — it is reassessed at the floor. These are the 2026 rates, with the last column showing what the VAT regime’s 18 m² requirement costs at the floor:

Now compare that with what an address actually costs. A service address runs $150–200 a month on the turnover regime and $500–800 on VAT, where the 18 m² rule bites; real office space is around 2× the service figure. The gap between the statutory floor and the market is the thing to understand: the floor is a tax rule about what a lease may claim, not a price anyone will let you premises for.

What the market charges for the optional half

Ranges observed in August 2026, and they are observations rather than a price list — this is a market where the same service is quoted five ways.

• Accounting, filing and payroll. From $100 a month at the bottom, with $400–600 the usual figure for a company that actually trades. There is no ceiling — $10,000 a month exists for companies that need it. Legally optional: you may keep your own books, if you can file in Uzbek or Russian on Uzbek accounting standards.
• Legal support on retainer. From $300, with $800 typical.
• The bank account. Commonly no charge in the first month, then about 300,000 UZS a month, or 1% of transfers, depending on the bank and the tariff.
• Card acquiring. From 1% per transaction. It is in none of the totals below, deliberately: it is a cost of taking payments, not a cost of owning a company.

And then the taxes

The short version, because it changes the monthly figure more than anything above. Below 1,000,000,000 UZS of total income a year, and not importing goods, a company pays 4% turnover tax on revenue (Tax Code, Art. 461 for the threshold, Art. 467 for the rate). Above it — or importing at any size — 12% VAT (Art. 258) and 15% profit tax (Art. 337), monthly VAT filing, and premises of at least 18 m², which is what moves the address line. Payroll adds the 24.1% already described, on every salary and not only the director’s.

Three ways people actually run one

The same company, with the same obligations, costs very different amounts depending on how much of the work the owner keeps. Director payroll is at quarter rate throughout, and the address is the turnover-regime figure — a VAT company should read the address line at three to four times this.

The first column is what an LLC cannot lawfully go without, with the owner keeping the books. The second is the same company with the filings handed to someone who reads the Tax Code in the original, which is what most trading companies end up doing within a year. The third is an owner who is never in the country and wants it run properly anyway — and its top end is wide because a highly qualified nominee director is genuinely expensive.

What is not a cost, and what nobody quotes

The charter capital is not a fee. It is your own money, contributed in cash, and it stays the company’s — there is no statutory minimum for ordinary activities, so the figure is yours to choose. Budget it as capital, not as an expense.

What does get left out of quotes is everything that happens in your own country before a single som is spent in Uzbekistan: notarisation, an apostille or consular legalisation, and certified translation, running roughly $150–600 depending on where you sign and how many shareholders sign. It is one-off, it is unavoidable for a remote founder, and nobody in Uzbekistan can reduce it. The registration guide covers how that part works.