How to register a company (LLC) in Uzbekistan as a foreigner — complete 2026 guide

Uzbekistan registers companies through one state portal, and the state part of it takes two working days. Every identity gate in that portal assumes you are Uzbek. This is the procedure as it actually runs, screen by screen, and the places where a foreign founder has to step outside it.

What you are registering

The entity most foreign founders want is the mas’uliyati cheklangan jamiyat — MChJ in Uzbek, OOO in Russian, limited liability company in English. All three names go into the charter and all three are the company’s name: the registry records the Latin Uzbek form, and the bank, the tax filings and the invoices each lean on a different one.

It is one of eight commercial legal forms the portal offers. A foreign individual or a foreign company may hold 100% of the charter capital — there is no local-partner requirement and no nationality condition. The company becomes a legal person on the day the registry enters it, not on the day the charter is signed.

One thing surprises almost everyone: the activity code you choose does not limit what the company may do. The portal says so on its own screen, quoting Article 19 of the Law “On Guarantees of Freedom of Entrepreneurial Activity” — a business may carry on any activity not prohibited by law, and a legal entity may carry on activities its founding documents never mention. The OKED code is a registry label, not a permission. What does gate you is licensing.

The registration is one online form

Registration runs through the state’s single window for business registration, part of the unified portal of interactive government services. You choose between registering without forming a legal entity — a sole trader — and with one; you pick the legal form; then you check the name.

The name check is live and strict about one thing: Latin script. Type a name and the portal answers immediately whether it is correct and available, and there is an optional “addition to the name” field for a descriptor. A taken name surfaces in seconds rather than after filing, which is why it pays to arrive with a ranked list rather than one favourite.

Once the name clears, an application opens under its own number, with nine numbered steps:

• 01 · Applicant — who is filing, and under what authority
• 02 · Location — the cadastre number of the premises
• 03 · Activity — the tax regime, and the OKED activity code
• 04 · Founding data — capital, headcount, founders, beneficial owners
• 05 · Director — the person who will run it
• 06 · Data check — the charter, and every consent
• 07 · Payment — the state fee
• 08 · Review — the registry decides
• 09 · Bank account — a request routed to a bank you choose

Steps 01 to 06 are yours to fill in. 07 to 09 happen to you.

What the six steps actually ask

Location does not want an address in words. It wants the cadastre number of the premises — the state property register’s identifier — and fills in the region, district, mahalla and street itself from that number; you only say whether the premises are owned or rented. A banner on the screen states that the applicant carries the liability for a false registration address. This is the step at which a virtual office fails: there is no cadastre number to type.

Activity puts two decisions on one screen, and the first is the expensive one. You choose the tax regime at registration — turnover tax, or VAT plus profit tax — and then pick the OKED activity from a tree. The portal shows the size band that activity implies (for computer consulting, 62.02.0, a microfirm is 1–10 employees and a small enterprise 11–25) and asks whether you want to be registered as a participant in the state electronic procurement system. A company that will not bid for state contracts answers no; it can be added later.

Founding data collects the capital currency, the headcount — at least one, since the company has a director from day one — then each founder, then the beneficial owners. A founder is added by identity document and personal identification number: the portal looks the person up in the state population register and fills in their name, sex and date of birth. You type only the contribution; the percentage is computed from it.

The Law on Limited Liability Companies sets no minimum charter capital, and for ordinary activities nothing else imposes one: you choose the figure and contribute it in money. Some licensed activities do carry a minimum, and those are outside this procedure anyway.

The beneficial-owner questionnaire is not conditional — it is answered on every filing. Four questions on whether the beneficiary, their close relatives or their friends are senior public officials, and two on whether they operate accounts in the interests of third parties. A “yes” to any of them has to be explained in writing in the box underneath.

Director is the same lookup once more: document type, number, identification number, and the register supplies the rest.

Where a foreign founder falls out of it

Step 06 is where the application stops being data entry. The portal generates a charter, and then every founder and the director must each consent separately, from their own account on the portal — a QR code and a link, a status reading “awaiting”, and a confirmation that is a live camera check against the biometric record the state already holds.

Now count the identity gates in the whole flow. The applicant is identified by a personal identification number. Each founder is looked up by one. The director is looked up by one. And each of them confirms with their face. A founder who has never been to Uzbekistan has none of that — no identification number, no biometric record, and no account on the portal for a consent request to arrive in.

So the sequence is not the one the portal implies. Either the shareholders obtain Uzbek identification numbers and electronic signatures of their own and file it themselves, or — far more commonly — somebody in Uzbekistan holds a power of attorney and files it for them. That is what the “power of attorney” toggle on step 01 exists for: switch it on and the applicant declares the instrument’s number and date and uploads a scan. From then on the representative is the person the portal identifies, and the representative’s own face is what passes the biometric check. You are the person the paperwork identifies.

Identification numbers and electronic signatures

The personal identification number — PINFL — is the thing the registry, the tax office and the bank record every shareholder and the director by. A foreigner has three ways to get one.

• In person, at the district office of a State Services Centre, with a passport and a registration. It is a short application and it is normally issued in about five minutes.
• At an Uzbek consulate, in most countries where there is one — the way to get it without travelling.
• Through a representative, under a power of attorney that expressly carries the power to obtain a PINFL on your behalf.

Electronic signatures come in two layers, and conflating them is a common source of confusion. The first layer is personal: an individual signature belonging to whoever approves the filing — each shareholder, if they are filing for themselves, or the representative, whose signature initiates the incorporation when they are acting under a power of attorney. The second layer belongs to the company itself, is obtained by the director once the company exists, and is what the company signs its filings and bank instructions with afterwards. The first gets you registered; the second lets you operate.

The power of attorney, and the three routes it can travel

State registration takes two working days. A power of attorney takes one to three weeks, and it is the only step in the whole procedure that nobody can do on a founder’s behalf.

What it has to authorise is a good deal more than “register my company”. A workable instrument names the bodies the representative may appear before — the state services centres under the Ministry of Justice, the tax and law-enforcement authorities, banks, courts, the stamp-engraving workshops — and then lists the acts: obtain a personal identification number; obtain an electronic signature and go on using it; decide, sign, file and collect the founding minutes, the charter and the foundation agreement; sign the director’s employment contract; pay the state fees and duties; and open and operate the bank account. Powers left out are powers the representative does not have, and each omission is a second visit to the notary.

Then it has to survive the journey. Three routes, decided by the country it is signed in rather than by the document:

• Minsk / Kishinev convention states — most of the CIS. A notarised original drawn up in Russian is accepted as it stands: no apostille, no consulate, no translator.
• Hague Apostille countries — the EU, the UK, the US and most of the rest. Notarisation, then an apostille, then a certified translation into Russian or Uzbek. The convention has been in force for Uzbekistan since 15 April 2012.
• Everywhere else — notarisation, then consular legalisation through an Uzbek embassy, then translation.

The documents you actually need

For a single individual founder the list is shorter than most people expect.

• A passport — a clean colour scan. It is not apostilled: legalisation attaches to document type, and a passport is not one of the types that gets legalised.
• A power of attorney, notarised and legalised on the route for the country it is signed in — unless the founder is filing personally with their own identification number and signature.
• The company name in Latin script, with fallbacks ranked in order.
• The cadastre number of the registered address.
• The charter capital figure and — with more than one founder — the split, in percentages and in amounts.
• A description of the business in plain prose. This is not the OKED code, and the bank will ask for the same text later.

A corporate founder adds two documents: the registry extract or certificate of incorporation, and proof that whoever signs for it is entitled to. Both are legalised on the same route as the power of attorney and translated into Russian or Uzbek.

The charter the system writes, and the one you may want

Step 06 gives you both options and it is easy to miss. The portal generates a charter — a .docx and a .pdf, both named after the application number — and puts an upload slot directly beneath it for a charter of your own. Either will register.

The generated charter is very basic. It is a valid document and it will not be argued with, but it is written to the statutory minimum and does not address the things a multi-owner or foreign-owned company usually wants addressed — how decisions are taken and at what majority, what happens when a participant wants out, how a deadlock is broken, what a new participant may be admitted on. None of that is illegal to leave out. It simply means the default rules apply, and the default rules were not written with your cap table in mind.

Charters used for foreign-owned companies also tend to run bilingually, article by article, with English beside the Uzbek or Russian so the owner can read what they are signing without a translator at their elbow. The founding minutes do the same, down to writing the capital out in words in both languages: “51 687 720,00 (Fifty-one million six hundred eighty-seven thousand seven hundred twenty,00) soums”.

Two details in those minutes matter later. Each founder’s share is recorded as a percentage and as a nominal amount, and it is the amounts that must reconcile to the capital exactly — three equal founders produce 33.33 / 33.34 / 33.33 against three identical amounts, so a document checked percentage-by-percentage would be rejected for being right. And the meeting elects the director. Minutes without that resolution leave the company with no director on record from the day it exists.

What the state charges

Everything the state charges is denominated in multiples of the base calculation value — the BCV — rather than in som, so the figures move when the BCV is raised by decree rather than when a fee schedule is rewritten. Multiply by the BCV in force on the day you file.

The registration duty itself is 1× the BCV for a business entity registering at a State Services Centre, under the state duty rates (the schedule). That is the headline fee and the only one set there. The rest sit in their own acts and tariffs: the state services fee at 0.5×, and the electronic signature at 0.07× for an individual and 0.1× for a company — the signature being priced by the tax committee under its own published offer rather than by a duty schedule. A personal identification number carries no fee at all.

The second cost is the one incurred at home and it is usually the larger of the two: notarisation, apostille or consular legalisation, and certified translation, which run from about $150 to $600 depending on the country and the number of shareholders signing. Nothing about that is payable in Uzbekistan and nobody in Uzbekistan can reduce it.

If you use a provider rather than filing yourself, their fee is a third cost on top of both. Ours is published, with its modifiers, on the pricing page.

The honest timeline

Registration itself is two working days. The realistic total is three to five weeks, and the difference is almost entirely the power of attorney.

• Weeks 1–3 — notary, apostille or consulate, courier — the founder’s own steps
• +1–2 days — personal identification numbers for the founders and the director
• +2 working days — state registration
• +1 day — the company’s electronic signature
• +1–3 days — the bank account, after the visit

The name check, the charter and the activity description can all be prepared during the first row. Nothing after it can start until the original instrument is physically in hand — which is why the single most useful thing to do first is start the power of attorney and worry about the rest afterwards.

The bank account

The application’s ninth step is called “bank account”, and it is available to any company registering through the portal.

It is worth being precise about what it does, because the label oversells it. Onboarding is not digital. The step sends a request to a bank you choose; the bank then contacts you and assigns a time for someone to come in. What follows is the bank’s own procedure, unchanged.

And that procedure requires the director to identify in person before a corporate account opens. This is the one physical appearance in the whole process, and it is what quietly breaks “fully remote” offers made by providers with nobody on the ground: the company registers cleanly and then the account does not open. A foreign founder either appoints a director who will travel, or appoints one who is already there.

After registration: what starts on day one

The company exists from the registry’s entry, and so do its obligations. There is no grace month, and nothing waits for revenue.

Which rows apply depends on the regime chosen back at step 03, but the shape does not change: monthly returns on the 15th and the 20th, quarterly profit tax with monthly advances on the 23rd, and an annual cluster between January and March. Payroll adds 12% personal income tax withheld from the employee (Art. 381–382) and 12% social tax paid by the company (Art. 405). Everything is filed through the electronic cabinet, in Uzbek or Russian.

Three things become standing monthly costs the moment the company exists, whether they are hired locally or bought as a service: a director, who answers personally for what the company files and pays; a registered address, which has to keep passing the same two checks it passed at registration; and someone who can file in the original language. A first-year budget that counts only the registration is short by the larger number — see the pricing page for what those three cost here.