Latvia Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

What a payroll engine gets wrong in Latvia, in order of how much money it costs: 1. THE CONTRIBUTION CEILING DOES NOT RELIEVE ANYTHING — IT SWAPS ONE LEVY FOR ANOTHER. VSAOI stops at 105 300 euro of annual income, and the excess immediately becomes the object of the solidarity tax at 25 per cent under the Solidaritātes nodokļa likums. The marginal burden above the cap is 25 per cent, not zero. This is the defining feature of Latvian payroll and the most expensive thing to get wrong: an engine that models Latvia as a straightforward capped system under-collects a quarter of everything a senior employee earns above the cap. 2. AND DURING THE YEAR THE SOLIDARITY TAX IS COLLECTED AT 34,09 PER CENT, NOT 25. Under 6.2 pants the tax is paid at the same rate as the compulsory contributions throughout the year; the 9,09 percentage-point overpayment is refunded by the State Revenue Service only by 1 September of the FOLLOWING year. Payroll therefore looks identical above and below the cap all year, and any reconciliation that expects 25 per cent in-year will not balance. 3. THE CEILING IS FROZEN UNTIL THE END OF 2027. 105 300 euro is fixed by law for 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2027. Unlike Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia and Lithuania, Latvia's cap does not move with the average wage, so it does not need re-reading each January — but it erodes in real terms and must be re-read for 2028. 4. LATVIA HAS ONE MERGED CONTRIBUTION AND THEREFORE NO PER-BRANCH RATES. VSAOI covers pension, disability, maternity and sickness, parental, unemployment, work-accident and occupational-disease insurance, plus a health-care earmark, in a single 34,09 per cent. There is no work-injury risk rating, no industry tariff and no experience rating anywhere in the system. Any comparison table that itemises Latvian employer cost by branch is inventing a structure the law does not have. 5. THE MINIMUM IS QUARTERLY, IT IS TESTED AFTER THE FACT, AND THE EMPLOYER PAYS IT. Where an employee's income for a quarter falls below three times the minimum monthly wage — 2 340 euro for 2026 at a 780 euro minimum wage — the employer must pay the contributions on the shortfall from its own funds. The State Revenue Service calculates and charges it after the quarter closes, so it does not appear in the payroll run at all and is habitually unbudgeted. Statutory exceptions exist, including for the first months of an employment, pensioners and persons with disability. 6. THE RATE DEPENDS ON THE EMPLOYEE'S PENSION AND DISABILITY STATUS. The general rate is 34,09 per cent; it falls to 30,02 per cent once the employee has reached retirement age or been granted a state old-age pension, and to 31,70 per cent for recipients of an early old-age pension and for persons with disability. These attach to individual status, not to age alone, and reduce both sides. 7. THE SECOND PILLAR IS A CARVE-OUT. Six per cent of the wage is routed out of the VSAOI already collected into the employee's funded pension account. It changes destination, never the amount withheld; adding it on top over-deducts. 8. THERE IS A FLAT PER-HEAD EMPLOYER LEVY THAT NO PERCENTAGE MODEL WILL CATCH. The uzņēmējdarbības riska valsts nodeva is 0,36 euro per employee per month for 2026, unchanged, due by the 23rd of the following month. It does the job that a percentage wage-guarantee contribution does elsewhere in the region. 9. THE MINIMUM WAGE MOVED FOR 2026, from 740 to 780 euro a month, which moves the quarterly minimum contribution object from 2 220 to 2 340 euro. 10. CONTRIBUTIONS ARE DEDUCTIBLE BEFORE INCOME TAX. The personal income tax base is gross pay less the employee's VSAOI less the allowances. Compute the 10,50 per cent first. 11. NATIONALITY IS IRRELEVANT; APPLICABLE-LAW RULES ARE NOT. The solidarity tax statute expressly reaches domestic employees of foreign employers and foreign employees of foreign employers, which shows how broadly liability is drawn. What displaces Latvian liability 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, the quarterly minimum object and the per-head levy are national. Latvia has no municipal payroll levy and no regional rate variation, and because VSAOI is a single merged contribution there is no industry dimension either. The only differentiation is by EMPLOYEE STATUS — retirement age, early old-age pension, disability — and by income level, through the ceiling and the solidarity tax. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: 1. NO PER-BRANCH RATES. The law levies one contribution and allocates it administratively between special budgets. Splitting 34,09 per cent into notional pension, sickness, unemployment and work-injury percentages would be fabrication. 2. THE SOLIDARITY TAX IS SERVED WITH NULL EMPLOYER AND EMPLOYEE SHARES. The statute fixes one 25 per cent rate, names employers, employees and the self-employed jointly as taxpayers, and resolves the incidence only through an after-the-fact refund of the difference between the contribution rate paid in-year and the 25 per cent actually due. There is no stable per-side percentage to state, and inventing one would misrepresent the mechanism. 3. THE BUSINESS RISK STATE FEE IS NOT PRICED AS A PERCENTAGE — it is a flat per-head amount and is served as such. 4. THE SPLITS OF THE REDUCED RATES (30,02 and 31,70 per cent) between employer and employee are not served. The totals are stated in the instrument field; the per-side figures were not confirmed. 5. tax_deductible is null for the solidarity tax and the business risk fee: neither is an ordinary employee social contribution with income-tax relief attached, and 10 of the solidarity tax's 25 points are themselves booked as income tax revenue. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE / RE-VERIFY POINTS: 1. THE CONTRIBUTION CEILING IS FIXED AT 105 300 EURO ONLY TO 31 DECEMBER 2027. A fresh determination is required for 2028 and, on past practice, it will move substantially when it does. RE-VERIFY FROM 2027-09-01. 2. MINIMUM WAGE FOR 2027 — set annually by Cabinet regulation and it drives the quarterly minimum contribution object directly. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-11-01. 3. BUSINESS RISK STATE FEE FOR 2027 — set annually by Cabinet regulation; it held at 0,36 euro for 2026. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-12-01. 4. VSAOI RATES — the general 34,09 per cent has held since 2021, when it was reduced by one percentage point and a one-point health-care earmark was introduced. Latvian tax reform proposals recur; treat the rate as re-verifiable at each autumn budget cycle. No enacted change to the 34,09 per cent, the 23,59 / 10,50 split, the 25 per cent solidarity tax or the 105 300 euro ceiling is on the statute book for 2026. SOURCING CAVEATS: The solidarity tax provisions are read from the consolidated text of the Solidaritātes nodokļa likums on likumi.lv, with the operative words of 3. pants, 5. pants, 6.1 pants ('Nodokļa likme ir 25 procenti'), 6.2 pants and 8.1 pants quoted or closely paraphrased, including the 1 / 14 / 10 percentage-point allocation which sums to 25. The 105 300 euro ceiling and its fixed term to 31 December 2027 are confirmed from Latvian professional sources reporting the Cabinet determination. The 34,09 per cent general rate and the 23,59 / 10,50 split, together with the 30,02 and 31,70 per cent reduced totals, are the rates published by the Valsts ieņēmumu dienests. The 2026 minimum wage of 780 euro is confirmed by the Valsts darba inspekcija's own notice, and the 0,36 euro business risk state fee for 2026 by the responsible ministry's notice. RESIDUAL LIMITS, STATED PLAINLY: the Valsts ieņēmumu dienests serves its rate table behind a navigation layer that could not be retrieved as text, so the rates were taken from Latvian professional consolidations of that table rather than read off the authority's own page in one retrieval; note that at least one such source wrongly states that Latvia has no contribution ceiling, which is a common error arising precisely because the ceiling transfers liability to the solidarity tax rather than removing it — that source is not relied on. Specific article numbers of the Likums 'Par valsts sociālo apdrošināšanu' are not cited because the consolidated text was not read section by section. The 6 per cent second-pillar share and the quarterly minimum-contribution mechanism are long-standing and are described from the administering agencies' guidance rather than from the statute verbatim. The per-side splits of the two reduced rates were not confirmed and are deliberately not served. Reported branches are those applying to an ordinary private-sector employee in an employment relationship. Not covered: pašnodarbinātie (the self-employed) and micro-enterprise tax payers, who have their own rates and bases; authors and performers; and seasonal agricultural workers on the special income tax regime. 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/lv/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/lv/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/lv/social-contributions

Other Latvia series: Policy interest rate · Late-payment interest (EU Late Payment Directive) · Statutory legal interest (likumiskie procenti, Civillikums 1765) · Value added tax (PVN) · VAT registration threshold · National minimum wage · Public holidays · Consumer price index (annual inflation) · Corporate income tax (UIN, distributed-profit model) · Withholding tax rates · Personal income tax (IIN) · ECB main refinancing operations rate (fixed rate)

The same figure elsewhere: Lithuania · Luxembourg · Malta · Netherlands · Norway · all 34