The Republic of the Union of Myanmar, previously known as Burma when it was a British colony, is a large country straddling South and Southeast Asia. Myanmar is now a part of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and BIMSTEC (the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation), and the country’s economy has grown impressively in the past two decades.

Currently totaling $62.94 billion, Myanmar’s GDP is recovering after a few years of downturn and is expected to grow by 1.9% in 2025. With 55.182 million people in the country, Myanmar has a per capita GDP of $1,180 per year and is considered to be a low-middle-income country by the World Bank.

Export CategoryExport Value (USD)
Petroleum Gas$2.9 billion
Dried Legumes$1.4 billion
Rare-Earth Metals$820 million
Clothing & Apparel$790 million
Precious Stones (e.g., jade)$600 million

Of Myanmar’s over 55 million inhabitants, 22.742 million are part of the country’s labor force, down somewhat in recent years. The country has quite a young population, and currently, the labor market is quite dynamic due to continuing political changes.

Around 49% of the country’s workers are employed in the agricultural sector, 17% in industry, and 34% in services such as communications, finance, insurance, storage, real estate, and transportation. Tourism was also previously a growing industry. Myanmar’s main exports include petroleum gas, dried legumes, rare-earth metals, clothing, and precious stones.

With a dynamic and growing economy, Myanmar provides international investors with plentiful opportunities in a wide assortment of industries. Its location between two giants – India and China – also makes this a highly strategic country to do business in.

In this review, we’ll look at how you can access the advantages the country offers by hiring and managing local workers with the help of a Myanmar PEO.

What is a Myanmar PEO?

A Myanmar PEO, or Professional Employment Organization, is a service provider that helps you manage HR and compliance for your workers in Myanmar. Working in Myanmar can be tremendously challenging without a professional partner to help you overcome local language, cultural, and legal barriers. You’ll need the help of tax, legal, and HR experts to ensure you employ Myanmar workers compliantly.

Instead of setting up in-house teams or paying expensive consulting fees, you can find all the help you require through a PEO service provider instead. When you partner with a PEO, your administrative burden is greatly reduced. The PEO, acting as a co-employer, manages HR for your local workers.

It handles payroll processing, administration of mandatory and optional benefits, paid time off (PTO) management, taxes, and general administration for you. It also plays an important role in helping you stay compliant with all Myanmar labor and tax laws, protecting you from penalties.

Modern PEOs provide their services through a combination of online platforms and professional staff, both of which you get to leverage to lower your operating costs and reduce your risk. You may also have heard of EORs, or Employers of Record. These providers are similar, yet they have a distinct difference that sets them apart from PEOs. 

EORs in Myanmar use their established entities to hire employees on your behalf so that you don’t need to incorporate your own entity in the country. PEOs, on the other hand, work with clients who own entities in Myanmar. Generally, though, these two terms are used interchangeably.

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Why Hire Through a Peo in Myanmar?

Myanmar is a dynamic and developing country, which means that there are lots of opportunities for foreign investors to introduce new products and services into the market. Myanmar also has a history as a British colony, and English is still widely used as an important language for business. Many Myanmar people also speak regional languages that can be an asset for cross-border trade. 

A Myanmar PEO can help you navigate the linguistic and regulatory differences that could otherwise prevent your success in the country. For example, it will help you follow employment rules like:

  • Regular hours: Myanmar factory workers work eight hours a day and up to 44 regular hours a week. Shop and establishment workers work up to 48 hours a week (normally eight hours a day, six days a week). Employees must receive one 30-minute break after working five hours.
  • Overtime: If they work more than their regular hours (44 or 48), Myanmar workers must be paid 200% of their normal wages for overtime. They can work no more than 11 hours a day, inclusive of breaks, and can’t perform more than 12 hours of overtime per week.
  • Annual Leave: Workers in Myanmar are entitled to annual leave only after they have worked for a full year and a minimum of 20 days per month. They receive ten consecutive days of leave as long as they work 24 days per month, and one day less if they haven’t worked this many days. Workers can accumulate leave for up to three years before they have to use it.

  • Maternity and Paternity Leave: Expecting mothers must be granted no less than 14 weeks of maternity leave, with six weeks taken before delivery. Mothers who have paid into social security schemes are entitled to receive 70% of their regular wages during this leave.

    Fathers receive up to 15 days of paternity leave upon the birth of a biological child. If the father has paid into social security for at least six months, he is entitled to 70% of his normal wages during this leave.

Doing business in Myanmar is quite challenging and, according to the World Bank, Myanmar is ranked 165th out of 190 countries for ease of doing business. This is largely due to the difficulties of getting electricity, registering property, trading across borders, and enforcing contracts. However, Myanmar is ranked 70th in the world for ease of registering a business.

Setting up a private limited company (PLC), for example, only requires six procedures and takes seven days. While this is a surprisingly easy part of getting started in Myanmar, help from a PEO can make the process even easier.

Most PEOs will help you register for a TIN (tax identification number) from the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), register your workers with a township labor office, and register with the Social Security Board (SSB). 

While not all PEOs provide recruitment services, some can help you source the talent you need in Myanmar. Almost all PEOs will help onboard your workers, manage their leaves and other entitlements, and prepare legally compliant contracts for you.

Services Offered by Myanmar PEOs

Partnering with a Professional Employment Organization in Myanmar gives you access to a co-employer with local knowledge and professional experience. With their cloud-based administration platforms and expert staff, modern PEOs generally provide these services to their clients:

Payroll Management

Payroll is a sufficiently challenging function to perform in your home country. In Myanmar, your PEO partner will provide you with the help you need to run payroll accurately and compliantly.

When you hire new workers, it will add them to your payroll, setting up a unique calculation for each worker based on their salary, deductions, and tax withholdings.

It will run these calculations every pay period (typically monthly in Myanmar), but it will first need to receive time-tracking data from you as the worksite employer. You can usually use time-tracking tools built into your PEO’s platform to record your employees’ worked days and hours.

With this data in place, the PEO will calculate each employee’s deductions and tax withholdings, and then pay them their net salary for the month.

Employee Benefits Administration

We’ve already seen some of the benefits that Myanmar workers are entitled to, including annual and maternity leaves. In addition to PTO, employers with five or more workers must register them to receive health, accident, and social care insurance from the SSB. These deductions break down as follows: 

BenefitEmployee ContributionEmployer Contribution
Social Security Scheme2.0% (capped at 6,000 MMK/month, ~2.85 USD)3.0% (capped at 9,000 MMK/month, ~4.30 USD)

These are not, however, the only benefits you can offer your employees. If you want to enhance compensation packages to attract and retain top employees, you can also provide additional benefits with the help of your PEO.

These benefits frequently include private health insurance, life insurance, and pensions, and can be administered by most PEO providers in Myanmar.

Tax Compliance

In most countries in the world, employers are required to calculate and withhold income taxes from their employees’ salaries, and Myanmar is no exception. As a part of the payroll process, your PEO will calculate the taxes due on your employees’ earnings and withhold them appropriately.

These funds must be remitted to the IRD no later than 15 days after being withheld, and the PEO will manage this deadline for you. The tax rates on salaries in Myanmar are:

Salary (MMK)Tax Rate
First 2,000,0000%
2,000,001 to 10,000,0005%
10,000,001 to 30,000,00010%
30,000,001 to 50,000,00015%
50,000,001 to 70,000,00020%
Over 70,000,00025%

Recruitment and Employment Contracts

If you’ve already found the workers you want to employ in Myanmar, you can pass their names and details on to your PEO partner. If you haven’t, and you need help sourcing skilled workers, some PEOs can help you with active recruitment services.

Their professional recruiters search through their talent pools and create targeted ads to find the best candidates for your specific needs. Other PEOs give you tools to help you recruit on your own, like job ad templates and connections to job boards.

When you’ve selected your candidates, your PEO can help you hire them by recommending salaries and benefits and helping you negotiate terms. It will normally also prepare contracts for you in the Myanmar language and including all required particulars.

There are no limitations on the use of fixed-term contracts in Myanmar. Probationary periods are legal and can last up to three months, but must be stated in employees’ contracts.

Onboarding

After your candidates sign their contracts, they become your employees and need to be onboarded. As the worksite employer, you will normally need to give them an orientation to your company, provide them with job-specific training, and give them access to the tools and data they’ll need to start working.

Meanwhile, your PEO will handle the administrative side of onboarding. It will collect their personal information and banking details to set up their profiles and salary payments. It will also collect and store documents like their resumes, applications, contracts, and signed company policies.

Finally, it will add them to your payroll and register them as your employees with the appropriate authorities. Most PEOs can onboard workers in less than a week in Myanmar.

Terminations

When you need to dismiss workers, your PEO will help by assessing your reasons. Except in situations of gross misconduct, workers must normally be given one month’s notice of their dismissals, or payment in lieu of notice. If workers are terminated for gross misconduct or after receiving multiple warnings, they’re not entitled to severance pay.

In all other situations, workers who have worked longer than six months must receive severance pay that varies from 15 days’ salary to 13 months’ salary, depending on their length of service.

Advantages of Using a PEO in Myanmar

An increasing number of companies are choosing to partner with PEOs when they hire in Myanmar because of the following advantages they can receive:

  • Quick market entry: Most Myanmar PEOs can onboard your workers in just a few days, helping you to get started in the Myanmar market as soon as possible.
  • Cost savings: Myanmar employees are generally quite affordable for foreign employers. Businesses can also save money by working with PEOs instead of hiring in-house HR teams.
  • Risk mitigation: Experts in Myanmar law help you stay compliant and avoid costly fines and other penalties.
  • Reduced administrative burden: By outsourcing HR and compliance responsibilities to the EOR, you can free up resources to be applied to your core business activities.

Steps to Engage a Myanmar PEO

To engage a Professional Employment Organization in Myanmar and start employing local workers, follow these three steps:

1

Select a Provider

Set your hiring budget, then look for a PEO provider that provides all the services you need and holds a reputation for compliant hiring in Myanmar.

2

Set Up a Consultation

Meet with your selected partner to discuss the services it will provide and the fees it will charge.

3

Sign a Service Agreement

Sign a monthly or annual service agreement to engage the PEO and get it started onboarding your Myanmar employees.

Partner With a PEO in Myanmar To Expand Your Business Confidently

With a young workforce, strategic location between India and China, and growing export industries, Myanmar presents exciting opportunities for international businesses. However, navigating its evolving labor laws, payroll systems, and administrative rules can be challenging. A Myanmar PEO can streamline your entry and ensure full compliance.

Looking for a trusted PEO provider in Myanmar? Remote People connects global companies with reliable Myanmar PEO partners who manage HR, payroll, taxes, and legal compliance. Contact us today to build your team in Myanmar — fast, affordable, and risk-free.