Your HR Model Works at Home. Your Next Country Needs Its Own.

Employment law stops at each national border, even inside the EU. Every country sets its own rules for contracts, payroll, social security, statutory benefits, hours, holidays and notice. EU law only sets a floor, and countries go beyond it in different ways: even the deadline for giving a new employee their key terms in writing varies from the first working day in Germany to about a week elsewhere. Your home model is a useful guide to how you want to work; the employment setup itself still has to be built locally.

Not always. There are three common routes: a local entity, registering as a foreign employer so you can run local payroll without one, or an employer of record that employs your people for you. Each has trade-offs. In the Netherlands, for example, an employer based abroad can choose to register with the Dutch tax authority as a withholding agent, provided it keeps payroll records in the Netherlands, and it owes Dutch employee insurance premiums for staff insured there either way. In Germany, an employer of record arrangement is regularly treated as temporary agency work, with an 18-month cap. Having employees in a country can also create a taxable presence for your company, so we work alongside your tax adviser on the route you choose.

Only one country’s system applies to each employee at a time. As a rule, working 25% or more of the time in the country where the employee lives shifts social security to that country, and in September 2025 the EU Court of Justice confirmed that the test looks only at working time and pay. A multilateral agreement in force since 1 July 2023 lets employers keep an employee in the employer’s country while they telework from home less than 50% of the time, but only where both countries have signed, such as Germany, the Netherlands, France and Belgium, and only on request with an A1 certificate. The agreement covers social security, not tax.

Yes, and it is common. A posted employee can stay in your home country’s social security system for up to 24 months with an A1 certificate. They are still entitled to the new country’s core employment conditions from the start, and once a posting passes 12 months, or 18 with a motivated notification, most of the host country’s mandatory terms apply. Host countries also run declaration systems for postings: in 2023 around 1.5 million posted workers were reported in them, according to the European Commission, with Germany, Belgium, France and Austria receiving the most.

No. What you need at this stage is local expertise, not necessarily local headcount. We act as your HR partner in each new country: setting up employment, payroll, benefits and policies, then supporting the team once it is live, so you keep a lean central HR organization while the company grows abroad.

A typical market entry HR setup takes four to six weeks per country, and six to eight weeks or more when several countries run in parallel. Timing depends on the employment route: registering as a foreign employer or using an employer of record is usually quicker than setting up an entity, which adds company registration before payroll can be registered.

They can run side by side. A single team handles all of them on one method, so decisions made for the first market, such as your contract structure and benefits approach, carry into the next while each country still gets its own registrations, contracts and local rules.

Your culture, values, pay philosophy and the standard of benefits you want to offer can stay the same. Contract terms, payroll, social security, statutory benefits, working time and termination rules have to follow each country’s law. The skill is keeping the first list consistent while getting the second list right everywhere.

It depends on their permit. Holders of an EU Blue Card can carry out business activities in another Member State for up to 90 days in any 180-day period, and after 12 months in the country that issued the card they can move to work in a second one. Ireland and Denmark do not apply the Blue Card. Other permits need checking country by country, so we raise it early in the plan for your immigration adviser to handle.