Bulgaria Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

What a payroll engine gets wrong in Bulgaria, in order of how much money it costs: 1. BULGARIA IS ON THE EURO FROM 1 JANUARY 2026, AND EVERY FIGURE IN THIS SYSTEM CHANGED UNIT. Contributions, the minimum wage, the minimum insurable income table and the insurable-income ceiling are all denominated in euro from 1 January 2026. Historic lev figures convert at the fixed rate of 1,95583 BGN to the euro — the 2026 minimum wage of 620,20 euro is 1 213 lev, the January ceiling of 2 111,64 euro is 4 130 lev, and the August ceiling of 2 300 euro is 4 498,41 lev. Any engine still storing Bulgarian parameters in lev, or converting at a market rate, is wrong in both the amounts and the rounding. 2. EVERY PARAMETER MOVED ON 1 AUGUST 2026, NOT 1 JANUARY. The 2026 state social insurance budget act was not adopted until 28 July 2026 (ДВ бр. 68) after the original draft was withdrawn in December 2025. Until it took effect the 2025 parameters ran on, converted into euro. So calendar 2026 has TWO parameter sets: 1 January–31 July (ceiling 2 111,64 euro, минимални осигурителни доходи per приложение № 1, ТЗПБ per приложение № 2) and 1 August–31 December (ceiling 2 300,00 euro, приложение № 1А, приложение № 2А). An annual-constants model is wrong for one half of the year whichever set it loads. 3. THE PROPOSED TWO-POINT PENSION INCREASE DID NOT HAPPEN — DO NOT SERVE IT. The withdrawn draft budget would have raised the фонд "Пенсии" contribution by 2 percentage points, from 19,8 % to 21,8 % and from 14,8 % to 16,8 %. It passed a first reading in November 2025 and is widely reported as if it were law. It did not appear in the July 2026 bill and is not in the adopted act. The operative 2026 rates are unchanged at 19,8 % and 14,8 %. This is currently the single most likely way to get Bulgaria wrong. 4. WHAT DID CHANGE ON 1 AUGUST 2026 APPLIES TO CIVIL SERVANTS, NOT TO PRIVATE-SECTOR EMPLOYEES. The act brought a new group into personal contribution liability — state civil servants, judges, prosecutors, investigators, court officers and judicial staff — who had previously had their contributions borne wholly by the state employer. For that group only, and only until 31 December 2026, the split is approximately 80:20 (pensions 15,8 / 4 for the pre-1960 cohort and 11,8 / 3 for the post-1959 cohort, sickness and maternity 2,8 / 0,7, unemployment 0,8 / 0,2), moving to the ordinary 60:40 from 1 January 2027. Those figures circulate in 2026 change summaries and must NOT be applied to an ordinary private-sector employee. 5. DATE OF BIRTH IS A REQUIRED PAYROLL INPUT. Persons born after 31 December 1959 pay 14,8 % to the state pension fund plus 5 % to a universal pension fund; persons born before 1 January 1960 pay 19,8 % to the state fund and nothing to a universal fund. Combined pension cost is 19,8 % either way, but the fund allocation and the declaration differ. Few imported payroll models carry a birth-date dimension at all. 6. THE SECOND PILLAR IS AN ADD-ON, NOT A CARVE-OUT. Unlike Poland's OFE routing and Romania's Pillar II, Bulgaria's 5 % ДЗПО-УПФ contribution is charged IN ADDITION to the 14,8 %. Modelling it as a redirection of part of the state contribution under-collects five percentage points. If the employee exercises the чл. 4б КСО election to move back to the state fund, the 5 % disappears and the state pension rate rises to 19,8 %, with the extra 5 points split 4 to the employer and 1 to the employee — so the election is NOT cost-neutral for the employer, which gains 1,2 points of cost while the employee saves 1,2. 7. THE SPLIT RATIO IS NOT UNIFORM. Sickness and maternity (2,1 / 1,4), unemployment (0,6 / 0,4) and health (4,8 / 3,2) are exactly 60:40. The pension fund is not: 8,22 / 6,58 and 11,02 / 8,78, roughly 55,5:44,5. The universal pension fund is 2,8 / 2,2, i.e. 56:44. Deriving any of the pension splits from the 60:40 ratio produces the wrong number. 8. HEALTH IS CAPPED IN BULGARIA. The 8 % health contribution rides on the same insurable income as the social funds and stops at the same ceiling. This is the reverse of Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia and Slovenia, where the health branch is uncapped precisely so that it keeps running when the social branches stop. Carrying the neighbouring pattern across over-collects on high earners. 9. THE FLOOR IS A TABLE, NOT A NUMBER. Bulgaria retains минимални осигурителни доходи — minimum insurable incomes set for each combination of economic activity and qualification group of occupations, in an annex to the annual budget act. They start at the minimum wage of 620,20 euro for unqualified positions and run past 1 300 euro for senior positions in some sectors. Contributions are computed on the greater of actual pay and the applicable МОД, so a Bulgarian employee can be assessed on more than they earn, and the correct floor cannot be derived from the minimum wage alone. The 2026 table was restored on a qualification-group basis by the August act (приложение № 1А). 10. THE HEADLINE EMPLOYER FIGURE IS A RANGE, NOT A NUMBER. For an ordinary post-1959 employee in the third labour category the employer pays 8,22 + 2,80 + 2,10 + 0,60 + 4,80 = 18,52 %, plus a work-accident contribution of 0,4 %–1,1 % by economic activity, i.e. 18,92 %–19,62 % in total. The employee pays 6,58 + 2,20 + 1,40 + 0,40 + 3,20 = 13,78 %, flat. Those two figures — 18,92 %–19,62 % employer and 13,78 % employee — are the correct summary for 2026, before the МОД floor and the ceiling are applied. 11. CONTRIBUTIONS ARE DEDUCTIBLE BEFORE INCOME TAX. Bulgaria's 10 % flat personal income tax is charged on employment income reduced by the employee's mandatory social and health contributions. Compute the 13,78 % first; taxing gross directly overstates the tax by roughly 1,4 points of gross. 12. THE EMPLOYER PAYS THE FIRST THREE DAYS OF SICK LEAVE FROM ITS OWN POCKET, at 70 % of average gross daily remuneration, before the sickness fund takes over on the fourth day. That is a real and recurring employer cost that no contribution percentage captures and that most cross-country employer-cost comparisons omit. 13. NATIONALITY IS IRRELEVANT; APPLICABLE-LAW RULES ARE NOT. Liability attaches to employment performed in Bulgaria. What displaces it is EU coordination under Regulation (EC) No 883/2004, evidenced by an A1 certificate, or a bilateral social-security agreement. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none. All rates, the insurable-income ceiling, the minimum wage and the МОД table are national. Bulgaria has no oblast- or municipality-level payroll levy and no regional rate variation. The system's differentiation is by ECONOMIC ACTIVITY and QUALIFICATION GROUP (the МОД floor table and the ТЗПБ rate annex), by DATE OF BIRTH (pension cohort), by LABOUR CATEGORY (first and second category work carries additional occupational contributions), and by OCCUPATION (the Teachers' Pension Fund) — never by geography. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: 1. The work-accident contribution as a single national rate — rate_employer and rate_total are deliberately null. It is set per economic activity in an annex to the annual budget act, re-legislated every year, and changed mid-2026. The published range 0,4 %–1,1 % is given instead of a fabricated average; the full annex is not reproduced as verified values here. 2. The complete минимални осигурителни доходи table is not served. It is a large matrix of economic activity by qualification group, it changed on 1 August 2026, and reproducing it partially would be worse than pointing at приложение № 1А. 3. First and second labour category additional contributions to the професионален пенсионен фонд are not priced. They apply to defined arduous and hazardous occupations, not to an ordinary employee. 4. tax_deductible is null for the employer-only branches (ТЗПБ, Учителски пенсионен фонд): the question as framed concerns income-tax relief for an EMPLOYEE contribution, and there is none to attach to. 5. The Фонд "Гарантирани вземания на работниците и служителите" (guaranteed employee claims fund) is not served as a branch. Its employer contribution rate is fixed annually in the same budget act and has been set at zero; the arithmetic confirms it, since the widely published employer totals of 18,92 %–19,62 % are exactly accounted for by the branches above with no residue. If a future budget act sets it above zero it becomes a new employer-only branch. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE / RE-VERIFY POINTS: 1. CIVIL-SERVANT SPLIT REVERTS TO 60:40 ON 1 JANUARY 2027. The 80:20 transitional split for state officials and magistrates runs only to 31 December 2026. Not applicable to private-sector employees either way. 2. ALL INSURABLE-INCOME PARAMETERS FOR 2027 — the ceiling, the МОД annex and the ТЗПБ annex are re-set by the annual Закон за бюджета на държавното обществено осигуряване. The 2026 act was five months late; do not assume a 1 January effective date for the 2027 set. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-11-15 and again in January 2027 if no act has been promulgated. 3. THE TWO-POINT PENSION INCREASE IS NOT DEAD, ONLY DROPPED FROM THIS BUDGET. It has been proposed twice and passed a first reading once. Treat it as a live risk at each annual budget cycle. 4. MINIMUM WAGE FOR 2027 — fixed by Council of Ministers decree, normally in November, under the Labour Code mechanism tying it to 50 per cent of the average gross wage. It sets the floor of the МОД table. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-11-01. No enacted change to any of the headline percentages (14,8 / 19,8 / 5 / 3,5 / 1 / 8) is on the statute book. SOURCING CAVEATS: The insurable-income floor and ceiling and the ТЗПБ mechanism are read from the Закон за бюджета на държавното обществено осигуряване за 2026 г. as promulgated in Държавен вестник бр. 68 от 28 юли 2026 г., with the operative words of чл. 9 quoted ('550,66 евро' and '2 111,64 евро' for the first period, '620,20 евро' and '2 300 евро' for the second, minimum insurable income 'съгласно приложение № 1' and 'съгласно приложение № 1А'), and чл. 14 referring the work-accident rates to приложения № 2 and № 2А. The 1 August changes and the new group of insured persons are confirmed from the National Social Security Institute's own explanatory notice. The minimum wage is from Постановление № 243 на Министерския съвет от 13 ноември 2025 г. RESIDUAL LIMITS, STATED PLAINLY: lex.bg and several Bulgarian legal portals return HTTP 403 to automated retrieval and the National Revenue Agency's portal was unreachable, so the consolidated text of чл. 6 КСО and чл. 40 ЗЗО was not read verbatim; the per-fund rates and their absolute employer/employee splits (8,22 / 6,58, 11,02 / 8,78, 2,8 / 2,2, 2,1 / 1,4, 0,6 / 0,4, 4,8 / 3,2) are taken from consistent Bulgarian professional and pension-industry sources and are cross-checked by arithmetic against the published employer total of 18,92 %–19,62 % and employee total of 13,78 %, which they reproduce exactly. The 0,4 %–1,1 % ТЗПБ range is the published span; the annex was not transcribed row by row, and one movement within it for 2026 (food manufacturing 0,7 % to 0,9 %) is noted from a secondary summary. The Teachers' Pension Fund rate of 4,3 % is stated from the Кодекс за социално осигуряване but the subsection was not read verbatim. That the proposed two-point pension increase did not survive into the adopted act is established from independent Bulgarian budget reporting and from the absence of any such change in the National Social Security Institute's own list of what takes effect on 1 August 2026; a negative is inherently harder to prove than a positive, so treat it as the strongest available reading rather than as a quoted repeal. Reported branches are those applying to an ordinary private-sector employee on a labour contract in the third labour category. Not covered: самоосигуряващи се лица (self-employed), whose base is a freely chosen income between the МОД and the ceiling and whose sickness and maternity insurance is voluntary; first and second labour category occupational schemes; seafarers; and morticians and other special categories under чл. 4 КСО. Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://euroref.dev/v1/bg/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/bg/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/bg/social-contributions

Other Bulgaria series: Policy Rate (ECB Deposit Facility Rate) · Value Added Tax (Данък върху добавената стойност, ДДС) · VAT registration threshold · Statutory Minimum Wage (Минимална работна заплата за страната) · Public Holidays (Официални празници) · inflation rate (CPI) · Corporate Income Tax (Корпоративен данък) · Withholding tax rates · Personal Income Tax (Данък върху доходите на физическите лица) · ECB main refinancing operations rate (fixed rate) · Late-payment interest (EU Late Payment Directive) · Statutory legal interest (законна лихва)

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