Lithuania Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

What a payroll engine gets wrong in Lithuania, in order of how much money it costs: 1. LITHUANIA SHIFTED THE CONTRIBUTIONS ONTO THE EMPLOYEE IN 2019, AND THIS HAS TO BE SAID PLAINLY. Before 1 January 2019 the employer paid roughly 31 per cent of gross and the employee about 9 per cent. The reform abolished almost the whole employer side, moved it onto the employee, and required every gross salary in the country to be multiplied by 1,289 so that net pay was unchanged. The operative position today is EMPLOYEE 19,5 PER CENT (12,52 state social insurance plus 6,98 health), EMPLOYER 1,77 PER CENT. Together with Romania, Lithuania is one of the two countries in the region where this happened, and it is the most common source of wrong payroll-cost estimates: a model built on pre-2019 data overstates Lithuanian employer cost by about thirty percentage points, and a comparison that puts Lithuanian gross salaries next to Polish or Czech ones is comparing different things, because a Lithuanian gross already contains the money that sits above the line elsewhere. 2. THE 1,77 PER CENT EMPLOYER RESIDUE IS FOUR SEPARATE ITEMS AND TWO OF THEM MOVE. It is unemployment insurance 1,31, work-accident insurance 0,14, Guarantee Fund 0,16 and Long-Term Employment Benefits Fund 0,16. Unemployment rises to 2,03 per cent on a FIXED-TERM contract, and the accident component rises to 0,49, 0,70 or 1,40 per cent depending on the tariff group Sodra has assigned to the employer. The realistic employer range is therefore 1,77 per cent to 3,75 per cent, not a flat 1,77. 3. THE CEILING COVERS STATE SOCIAL INSURANCE BUT NOT HEALTH INSURANCE. The 'Sodros lubos' for 2026 is 60 times the average wage — 138 729,00 euro a year (60 × 2 312,15 euro) — and it is annual and cumulative. Above it the 12,52 per cent stops but the 6,98 per cent health contribution keeps running on the full salary, so the marginal employee burden above the cap is 6,98 per cent, not zero. Self-employed persons have a different and lower ceiling of 43 VDU (99 422,45 euro), which must not be applied to employees. 4. THE SECOND PILLAR IS AN ADDITIONAL 3 PER CENT, NOT A CARVE-OUT, AND IT IS IN FLUX. A participant's total employee deduction is 22,5 per cent, not 19,5. Participation is auto-enrolled with a right to decline, and the pension reform in force from 1 January 2026 opens a window to 31 December 2027 in which any existing participant may leave regardless of age, with tax-free withdrawal of their own contributions and investment gains. The 3 per cent must be a per-employee flag that can switch off mid-year during 2026 and 2027 — treating it as universal over-deducts, treating it as absent under-deducts. 5. THERE IS A FLOOR TIED TO THE MINIMUM WAGE. Where the employee works the full working-time norm, contributions are computed on not less than the MMA, 1 153,00 euro a month for 2026, even if actual pay is lower. 6. NOTHING IS SHARED. Not one Lithuanian branch is split between employer and employee. Pension, sickness, maternity and health are wholly employee-borne; unemployment, work accident, the Guarantee Fund and the Long-Term Employment Benefits Fund are wholly employer-borne. An engine that assumes any branch is matched will misallocate every line. 7. THE WORK-ACCIDENT RATE IS ASSIGNED BY SODRA, NOT DERIVED FROM AN INDUSTRY CODE. Four tariff groups — 0,14 / 0,49 / 0,70 / 1,40 per cent — assigned on the employer's own accident and occupational-disease record. The group II rate changed for 2026; the table is re-set annually and must be re-read rather than indexed. 8. THE EMPLOYER PAYS THE FIRST TWO DAYS OF SICK LEAVE. Under the Labour Code sickness benefit for the first two calendar days is paid by the employer from its own funds; Sodra pays from the third day. That liability is additional to the 1,77 per cent and is captured by no contribution percentage. 9. CONTRIBUTIONS ARE DEDUCTIBLE BEFORE INCOME TAX; THE SECOND-PILLAR CONTRIBUTION IS NOT. The gyventojų pajamų mokestis base is gross pay less the compulsory VSD and PSD contributions less the non-taxable amount. The employee's own 3 per cent pension accumulation is funded from pay and carries no deduction. 10. NATIONALITY IS IRRELEVANT; APPLICABLE-LAW RULES ARE NOT. Liability attaches to employment performed in Lithuania. 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 ceiling, the minimum wage and the accident tariff groups are national. Lithuania has no municipal payroll levy and no regional rate variation. The system's differentiation is by CONTRACT TYPE (fixed-term unemployment insurance at 2,03 instead of 1,31 per cent), by EMPLOYER ACCIDENT RECORD (the four tariff groups), and by SECOND-PILLAR PARTICIPATION — never by geography and never mechanically by industry. 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. The four tariff-group rates are given instead, together with the fact that assignment is made by Sodra on the employer's own record and cannot be looked up from an activity code. 2. tax_deductible is null for the four employer-only branches: the question as framed concerns income-tax relief for an EMPLOYEE contribution, and there is none to attach to. 3. No ceiling field is carried on the Guarantee Fund and the Long-Term Employment Benefits Fund. Sodra states that the 60 VDU limit applies to social insurance contributions and expressly does not apply to health insurance; those two funds are collected alongside the social contributions on the same base, but their treatment above the ceiling was not separately confirmed and is not asserted here. 4. No 2027 values. The 2027 VDU, ceiling, MMA and accident tariff table do not yet exist. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE / RE-VERIFY POINTS: 1. SECOND-PILLAR WITHDRAWAL WINDOW — runs from 1 January 2026 to 31 December 2027 for participants who joined before 31 December 2025 and have not signed a payout agreement. Expect the participating population, and therefore the number of employees carrying the 3 per cent, to fall materially during that window. This is a data problem, not a rate problem, but it changes aggregate payroll cost. 2. VDU, CEILING AND MMA FOR 2027 — the VDU applicable to the contribution base and the resulting 60 VDU ceiling, and the minimum monthly wage, are re-set annually with effect from 1 January and published by Sodra in December. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-12-01. 3. ACCIDENT TARIFF GROUPS FOR 2027 — re-set annually; group II moved for 2026 while the others held. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-12-01. 4. From 2026 employer-paid supplementary voluntary health insurance above 350 euro a year became subject to social insurance contributions — a base change rather than a rate change, and one that catches a common Lithuanian benefit package. No enacted change to any of the headline percentages (8,72 / 1,99 / 1,81 / 6,98 / 1,31 / 0,16 / 0,16 / 3,00) is on the statute book. SOURCING CAVEATS: The 2026 rates, the VDU of 2 312,15 euro, the 60 VDU ceiling of 138 729,00 euro, the MMA of 1 153,00 euro, the fixed-term unemployment rate of 2,03 per cent, the four accident tariff groups (0,14 / 0,49 / 0,70 / 1,40) and the change to group II for 2026 all come from Sodra's own published 2026 rate information — Sodra is the administering institution. That the ceiling does not apply to compulsory health insurance is likewise stated by Sodra. The second-pillar contribution of 3 per cent with a state incentive of 1,5 per cent of the average wage, and the 2026–2027 withdrawal window, are from the Ministry of Social Security and Labour's own pages on the pension reform. RESIDUAL LIMITS, STATED PLAINLY: sodra.lt and the Valstybinė ligonių kasa return HTTP 403 to automated retrieval, and Sodra's 2026 rate leaflet is served as a PDF behind the same block, so the figures were confirmed from Sodra's own text as surfaced in search together with independent Lithuanian tax-practitioner sources that reproduce it; the numbers reconcile exactly (8,72 + 1,99 + 1,81 = 12,52; 12,52 + 6,98 = 19,50; 1,31 + 0,14 + 0,16 + 0,16 = 1,77). The requirement to compute contributions on at least the MMA where the employee works the full working-time norm is long-standing and is applied by every Lithuanian payroll source, but the statutory subsection was not read verbatim. Article numbers within the valstybinio socialinio draudimo įstatymas, sveikatos draudimo įstatymas and pensijų kaupimo įstatymas are not cited because the consolidated texts were not read section by section; the statutes are named and the administering institution's own rate publication is used as the operative source. Reported branches are those applying to an ordinary private-sector employee on an employment contract. Not covered: savarankiškai dirbantys asmenys (the self-employed), whose base is 90 per cent of taxable income and whose ceiling is 43 VDU rather than 60; verslo liudijimas (business certificate) holders, who pay fixed amounts derived from the MMA; small partnership members, who are on a transitional base in 2026; and persons drawing a pension or otherwise outside particular branches. 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/lt/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/lt/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/lt/social-contributions

Other Lithuania series: Policy interest rate · Value added tax (PVM) · VAT registration threshold · National minimum wage (MMA) · Public holidays · Consumer price index (annual inflation) · Corporate income tax (pelno mokestis) · Withholding tax rates · Personal income tax (GPM) · ECB main refinancing operations rate (fixed rate) · Late-payment interest (EU Late Payment Directive) · Statutory default interest (palūkanos, CK 6.210)

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