Fines for illegally employing a foreign worker in Albania

Employing a foreign national without a single permit is punished by a fine of 350,000 to 400,000 lekë per person under article 141, point 1, letter ll, of law no. 79/2021 on foreigners. The fine is set per person, not per inspection, and it does not displace the separate sanction imposed by the labour inspector.

This is the number usually missing from the saving calculation. An employer with ten unregistered workers is not exposed to a single fine of 400,000 lekë but to ten of them, up to four million lekë, before unpaid contributions and the consequences for future AKPA files are counted.

The scale of fines under the law on foreigners

Law no. 79/2021, amended by law no. 43/2025 of 26 June 2025, lists the sanctions in article 141. Five of them bear directly on an employer bringing workers in from abroad.

Letter f deserves separate attention. A single permit as an employee is granted for one employer and one position. A foreign worker moved from the hotel kitchen to a building site on the same property changes the ground of residence, and the law treats that as its own breach even though the employer has not changed.

Letter n, added by law no. 43/2025, ties the law on foreigners to labour inspection: an employer who fails to make records on the employment of foreigners available to the labour inspector, and who breaches their rights during the employment relationship, is sanctioned under the law on labour inspection.

The second fine, the inspector's

The State Labour and Social Services Inspectorate acts under law no. 9634 of 30 October 2006 on labour inspection and the State Labour Inspectorate, as amended. Article 33, point 1, letter b, provides for a fine of 10 to 50 times the minimum wage for breaches of labour legislation outside the Labour Code, applying the principle of proportionality.

Since the national minimum wage has been 50,000 lekë gross per month from 1 January 2026, that range today means 500,000 to 2,500,000 lekë. For repeat breaches already recorded by the inspector, point 2 of the same article doubles the maximum value set for that type of breach.

The inspection does not stop at the document. Article 76 of the law on foreigners allows the employment approval to be revoked when the foreign worker has been employed on conditions less favourable than those of Albanian citizens, and the conditions compared are the ones the employer declared on the standardised job offer form: gross monthly salary, hours, night work, rest days, accommodation and meals. An eight hour shift on the form and a ten hour shift in practice is a mismatch the inspector reads off the payroll.

The order of the inspection and what has to be ready

In practice an inspection reads three files in sequence: the single permit or the proof of application, the contract and payroll, and the working time records. The register of employees is required separately by article 36 of the Labour Code, law no. 7961 of 12 July 1995 as amended, while the register of data on foreigners is required by the law on foreigners and carries its own fine when it is missing.

The only deadline that gives the employer room is the appeal. Against an inspector's decision, review and appeal follow the law on inspection, while against a refusal or annulment of the single permit article 73, point 2, of the law on foreigners gives an administrative appeal that must conclude within 30 days.

Right to work checks across the European Union follow similar logic and are set out in right to work verification checks. The housing rules that produce the second most common fine are in accommodation duties for foreign workers, and the file that precedes any inspection is in the Albanian single permit procedure.

The distance between a clean file and a fine of 400,000 lekë per person is usually four weeks of planning, the same period article 56, point 4, gives the authority to decide. The duties Werklist carries in that chain are listed on the employers page.