Cost of setting up a company in Lithuania, 2026.

The four legal forms, side by side

Every fee above was read off the Centre of Registers price list on 20 September 2026. The fee for registering a branch or representative office of a foreign legal person is €41.75; the equivalent for a Lithuanian company's own branch is €26.57. Reserving a name costs €6.75 and a name identity check €8.04. Deregistration is €8.92. UAB minimum share capital was reduced from €2,500 to €1,000 with effect from 1 May 2023. Notarial costs are separate and apply only if you use bespoke documents rather than the standard electronic forms.

How many foreign companies have actually done this

We counted them. On 20 September 2026 the Lithuanian register of legal entities held 234,415 registered entities, of which 745 were representative offices of foreign legal persons and 700 were branches of foreign legal persons. All 1,445 were active.

That split is worth sitting with. Seven hundred and forty five foreign companies decided Lithuania was worth a permanent, registered presence and then chose the legal form that cannot invoice anybody. Some of those were deliberate. Many were a compromise made because the alternatives looked like a subsidiary or nothing, and nobody mentioned that a commercial agent sits between the two.

Source: Register of Legal Entities open data, file JAR_IREGISTRUOTI, published daily under CC BY 4.0 by the Centre of Registers. Counted on 20 September 2026.

What it really costs to run a UAB, per year

Tax, 2026

• Corporate income tax: 17 % standard.
• 7 % reduced rate for small companies meeting the statutory size conditions.
• 0 % for the first two tax periods for a qualifying new small company: revenue under €300,000 and members who are natural persons. A subsidiary of a foreign company does not qualify, because its member is a company.
• VAT registration threshold: €45,000 of taxable supplies in Lithuania over the preceding twelve months, effective from 1 May 2025. The intra-EU acquisitions threshold is €14,000.
• Foreign taxable persons may have a Lithuanian registration obligation regardless of that threshold, because the threshold applies to persons established here. This is exactly where you need an adviser rather than a web page.

What an employee costs

This is the number that surprises German and Nordic companies, in a good way.

The employer add-on of 1.77 percent means total employer cost is very close to gross salary. Compare that with roughly 23.6 percent in Latvia, 33.8 percent in Estonia and around 20 percent in Finland. Lithuania puts the burden on the employee side, not the employer side. A fixed-term contract and a higher accident risk group both raise the employer rate, so state your assumption when you model it.

Sources: Ministry of Social Security and Labour for the 2026 minimum wage, Statistics Lithuania for the Q2 2026 average wage, Sodra for the contribution rates. See our research file for the full citation list.

So should you set up a company at all?

If your plan is to sell into Lithuania and you do not yet know whether the market works, the honest answer is usually no, not yet. A commercial agent costs less than the employee you would have to hire to justify the entity, starts in weeks rather than months, and tells you within two quarters whether the market is real. Set up the company once you have customers, not in order to look for them.

If you are already winning here, if you need to hold stock, employ people or bid for public tenders that require a local entity, then register and get on with it. The cost is trivially small and the process is genuinely fast.

The full comparison of hiring against appointing an agent