Starting a Business in Latvia from Abroad

Starting a business in Latvia from abroad takes four steps: settle the founders, the board and the registered address; pay the share capital in full into an account in the future company's name; sign electronically or before a Latvian sworn notary; file with the Register of Enterprises. The bank, not the Register, sets the calendar. We can handle all four.

The route below is for the SIA, the Latvian limited liability company, including its small-capital version. Figures were checked in September 2026 against the Latvian texts in force: the Commercial Law, the Law on the Register of Enterprises, Cabinet Regulation No. 664 of 11 October 2016 on the Register's fees, the tax laws and the Register's published service descriptions. Laws are named in English for convenience; only the Latvian text is legally binding.

What to decide before you apply

Four answers go into the application itself, so they have to be settled before anyone signs anything.

Who founds the company. A founder can be a natural person, a legal person or a partnership (Commercial Law, Section 140, Paragraph one). The provision sets no condition about nationality or country of residence, so a founder living in Sweden, the United States or the United Kingdom is as eligible to found an SIA as one living in Riga. The Register of Enterprises does check sanctions: if an international or national sanction applies to a founder, the entry is postponed, and where that person is the only founder, it is refused (Law on the Register of Enterprises, Section 4.2).

Who sits on the board. A board member of an SIA can be any natural person with legal capacity (Commercial Law, Section 221, Paragraph three), and again the provision says nothing about citizenship or residence. What can bar a person is a prohibition imposed by a court, restricted legal capacity, or a restriction imposed on that person in another EU member state, Iceland, Norway or Liechtenstein (Sections 4.1 to 4.3). Each board member signs a consent to take the post, and that consent either names any obstacle or confirms there is none.

Who the beneficial owners are. A beneficial owner is a natural person who directly or indirectly holds more than 25 per cent of the shares or votes, or who controls the company directly or indirectly (Law on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorism and Proliferation Financing, Section 1, Clause 5). A holding of exactly 25 per cent does not meet the share test on its own, though control can still make that person a beneficial owner. The details go into the application, including each beneficial owner's nationality and country of permanent residence, and the Register may ask for the documents behind the control and a notarised copy of an identity document. Later changes are reported to the Register within 14 days of learning about them (Section 18.2 of the same law).

How much capital, and in what form. The minimum share capital of an SIA is EUR 2,800 (Commercial Law, Section 185), and a share cannot have a nominal value below one cent (Section 186). Capital can be paid in money or in kind. A contribution in kind is valued by an expert from the approved list, although the founders may value it themselves if all contributions in kind together come to no more than EUR 25,000 and to less than half of the capital. A small-capital SIA may have less than EUR 2,800, but only if all four conditions of Section 185.1, Paragraph one hold at once: the founders are natural persons, no more than five; the members are natural persons, no more than five; every board member is a member; and each member belongs to only one such company. It pays its capital in money only and sets aside at least 25 per cent of each year's profit into a reserve. If living in Latvia is part of your plan, read the section on that below before choosing the small-capital version.

Company formation through the Register of Enterprises

Company incorporation, company establishment, company formation: whatever a guide calls it, in Latvia it is one application and one entry in the commercial register. The Register of Enterprises (Uzņēmumu reģistrs, UR) is the Latvian company register, and the commercial register is one of the registers it keeps. The documents are drawn up in Latvian. Anyone the founders entrust can hand the application in, but every founder signs it (Commercial Law, Section 149, Paragraph two).

The Register's e-service at registrs.ur.gov.lv takes the application online. Documents are either signed inside the service or attached with a signature made with an eID card, an eParaksts card or eParaksts mobile; with a secure electronic signature and a secure time stamp, no notarial certification of signatures is needed. The service can also prepare the documents automatically, but the Register describes that option for an SIA with a single founder who is a natural person. For any other set-up, count on the documents being prepared outside the service and attached.

The Register decides within three days, not counting weekends and public holidays, from the day it receives the application, and sends the decision within three more such days (Commercial Law, Section 10, Paragraphs three and five). Its own service page says one to three working days, not counting the day of filing, and adds that the period can be extended under Section 64, Paragraph two of the Administrative Procedure Law. There is also a longer extension. The Register can send the application to the State Revenue Service (VID) for review and add 10 working days to its decision period when several entities are already registered at the address, when a board member already sits on several boards, or when a founder is already a member of several companies or founded several entities within a year. Where VID advises a further check, the period can run up to three months from receipt. If VID's opinion points to tax risk, the Register refuses and the fee is not returned (Law on the Register of Enterprises, Section 4.16). A decision of the Register can be appealed (Commercial Law, Section 10, Paragraph six).

If the question is how much it costs to open a company in Latvia, the only figures fixed by law are the Register's fees. As checked in Cabinet Regulation No. 664 on 28 September 2026: EUR 75.00 for entering an SIA in the commercial register, EUR 20.00 for a small-capital SIA, EUR 30.00 for an individual merchant. A review within one working day costs three times the fee, which makes EUR 225.00 for an SIA with two or more founders. A company with a single founder and an individual merchant pay the standard fee for the one-day review. If the Register cannot keep to one day after a tripled fee was paid, the Chief State Notary may order the overpayment returned. Online, the fee is paid in the service once the application is prepared; by post, the company is registered only after the fee reaches the Treasury account. Notary, translations, apostille, bank and address are separate costs, and we do not put figures on them here.

The forms, the order of documents and the costs are laid out in our guide to registering a SIA step by step. This article stays with what changes when the founders are not in Latvia.

Starting a business in Latvia as a foreigner: signing remotely

Starting a business in Latvia as a foreigner turns on one practical question: how does each person's signature reach the Register? The law gives two ways to meet the requirement that a signature be certified. A Latvian sworn notary (zvērināts notārs) certifies it, or the document is signed with a secure electronic signature (Commercial Law, Section 9, Paragraph one, and Section 10, Paragraph two).

Whether you can set up a company in Latvia fully remotely therefore depends on the signature tool. The Register's guidance names the Latvian ones: the eID card, the eParaksts card and eParaksts mobile. If your only electronic signature was issued in another country, confirm with the Register that your specific signature will be accepted before you build the plan around it.

On paper, the signatures on the application (form KR4), on the register of members and on the board member's consent are certified by a sworn notary. An orphan's court can do the same only for a person with a Latvian personal code, and only in a municipality that has no notary. For a non-resident founder, that leaves the notary. A foreigner without a Latvian personal code is also entered in the Natural Persons Register through a questionnaire, which he or she has to sign personally with a secure electronic signature; without such a signature, the questionnaire is not filed.

A power of attorney does not remove the certification step. It moves it to a different document. Where a signature has to be certified, the authority given to someone else to sign that document is certified as well (Section 9, Paragraph one). Handing in the application and signing it are different acts: the first can be delegated freely, the second cannot be delegated without that extra certification.

Foreign documents add two layers. Public documents issued abroad are legalised under the relevant international agreements and filed with a notarised translation into Latvian; private documents in a foreign language need a certified translation (Commercial Law, Section 9, Paragraph 1.1; Law on the Register of Enterprises, Section 4.4). For a public document from a country party to the 1961 Hague Convention, legalisation means an apostille; for other countries, the procedure set by the Cabinet (Document Legalisation Law, Section 11).

For readers in Britain: under this law, UK documents sit with EU ones, not with the rest of the world. The Document Legalisation Law does not apply to public documents issued in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, excluding its overseas territories, in the same way as it does not apply to documents from an EU or EEA state or from Switzerland (Section 3, Paragraph two). What stays is the translation: public documents still go in with a notarised Latvian translation, private ones with a certified translation.

Registered address and a company bank account

The application carries a board statement on the company's legal address. It gives the cadastral designation of the building, flat or premises and confirms that the company can be reached there and has a legal basis to be there (Commercial Law, Section 149, Paragraph three, Clause 7). The address has to match the State Address Register, it can only be in a building or a group of premises, never on land alone, and in a building with several flats it needs the exact flat number. The board has to make sure post is actually received at that registered address.

Before you commit to an address, ask how many companies are already registered there. Several companies at one address is one of the grounds on which the Register can pass your file to VID, and that review adds ten working days or more to the decision period.

Now the part that sets the calendar. The founders open a payment account in the name of the company being founded and arrange the payment into it (Section 147, Paragraph one), and the whole capital is paid before the application is filed (Section 146, Paragraph one). The bank account comes before the Register, not after it. For a cash contribution, the account is needed whatever the amount of capital. The law we checked gives the Register a period of days; it gives the bank none, and what a particular bank asks of foreign founders is that bank's own policy.

What you can prepare is the information the Register will ask for anyway: who the beneficial owners are, their nationality and country of residence, and the documents that show how control works. If the bank asks about the same people, one consistent set, with identical names and numbers in every document, removes one reason for a follow-up question from either side.

Four shortcuts to drop before you file

The left column is wording you may meet in guides, bank pages and search answers. The right column is the text in force on 28 September 2026.

Tax residency and the first months

A company formed and registered under Latvian law is a Latvian tax resident (Law on Taxes and Duties, Section 14, Paragraph four). From the day of the entry, three things run on their own clock: enterprise income tax, VAT and the books.

Enterprise income tax. As long as profit stays in the company, there is no tax on it as such. Tax is due when profit is distributed, and some spending is taxed as if it had been distributed even without a dividend: expenses unrelated to the business, doubtful debts and excess interest among them (Enterprise Income Tax Law, Section 4, Paragraph two). The rate is 20 per cent of the taxable base after that base has been divided by 0.8 (Section 3, Paragraph one; Section 4, Paragraph nine). In our arithmetic, not in the wording of the law, that comes to 25 per cent of the amount the member actually receives. Since 1 January 2026, a company whose members during the period are all natural persons may choose an alternative 15 per cent rate for the dividends it calculates, with a divisor of 0.85 (Section 3, Paragraph five; Section 4.2). How that choice combines with the tax on the person receiving the dividend is outside this article. The tax period is a calendar month, or a quarter in the cases the law allows.

VAT. This is a decision for the formation stage, not for the day of the first invoice. The registration threshold is EUR 50,000 of domestic supplies of goods and services, without VAT, in a calendar year (Value Added Tax Law, Section 59, Paragraph one, in the version in force since 1 January 2025). Exceeding it by no more than EUR 5,000 allows registration to be deferred to the end of the year, provided the application is made by 30 November, or by 31 December if the threshold was crossed after 30 November. Without deferral, the application is due by the 15th of the month after the month in which the threshold was exceeded. The threshold slides: once exceeded in one year, it cannot be relied on in the next. For a founder with customers elsewhere in the EU, the exception that matters most is this: the threshold does not apply at all if the company supplies services to a taxable person in another member state under the general place-of-supply rule (Section 59, Paragraph eight). There are other cases in which registration is required before the threshold is reached, including certain purchases from abroad. The standard rate is 21 per cent. The Register's SIA service includes a step for joining the VAT register together with the formation documents.

Books and annual report. An SIA keeps its books by double entry (Accounting Law, Section 10, Paragraph one), and the head of the undertaking, in an SIA the board, is responsible for keeping them and for storing the documents (Section 33, Paragraph one), wherever that person lives. Since 1 July 2023, outsourced accounting services may be provided only by licensed providers: each needs a VID licence and appears in VID's public register. The annual report goes to VID within a month of its approval, and no later than five months after the end of the financial year for micro and small companies, or seven months for medium-sized and large companies and for parent companies that consolidate (Law on Annual Financial Statements and Consolidated Financial Statements, Section 97, Paragraph one, in the version in force since 17 October 2024). It is filed on paper or through VID's Electronic Declaration System. If you read four months elsewhere, check the date of that text.

One more thing arrives without being asked for. A company entered in the Register's registers must use an official electronic address, the e-adrese (Official Electronic Address Law, Section 5, Paragraph 1, Clause 2). Only state institutions get one created automatically; the company creates and activates its own in the e-adrese system (Section 7, Paragraphs 1 and 2). Decide on the first day who sets it up and who reads it.

If you also plan to live in Latvia

The company and the right to live here are separate questions, and nationality decides which rules answer the second one. EU, EEA and Swiss citizens fall outside the Immigration Law, which governs third-country nationals (Immigration Law, Sections 1 and 2). Their stay rests on Directive 2004/38/EC and a separate Latvian law, and a stay for a set period is confirmed by an EU citizen's registration certificate from the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs (PMLP).

For a citizen of any other country, founding a company and sitting on its board do not by themselves give a right to live or work in Latvia; that takes a visa or residence permit with the right to employment. Since 15 September 2026 the new Immigration Law keeps a residence permit through investment in company capital, with thresholds of EUR 50,000 or EUR 100,000, a EUR 10,000 payment to the state budget and a requirement on the taxes the company pays; the ground is not open to every nationality, and what changed in Latvian immigration law on 15 September 2026 sets out the conditions. One link back to the capital decision: the separate ground for board members requires, among its conditions, an SIA to have paid-up capital of at least EUR 2,800 (Section 27, Paragraph one, Clause 9), which a small-capital SIA does not have.

What you do yourself and what we handle

You do not need a middleman to start a business in Latvia: the application can be filed by the founders themselves or by anyone they entrust, and the Register's service is built for that. The question is where your own time goes.

Doing it yourself works well when:

• you are the only founder, a natural person, and hold a Latvian secure electronic signature, so the online service prepares the documents and takes the fee;
• the capital is paid in money into an account the bank has already opened;
• you already have an address in a building where the company has a clear legal basis to be.

Help saves time when:

• there are two or more founders, or one of the founders is a legal entity, and the documents have to be drafted separately, in Latvian;
• anyone who signs has no Latvian e-signature, so signatures, powers of attorney, legalisation and translations have to be lined up in the right order;
• the address or the people involved trigger a VID review, where an avoidable choice costs between ten working days and three months, and after a refusal the fee is not returned;
• the company is registered and the VAT decision, the books and the annual report start, which is where a licensed accounting provider comes in.

What we do for you

1. We go through who will found, run and own the company, where each person lives and what signature each one has, and choose the signing route and the order of steps.
2. We prepare the documents in Latvian (the memorandum or founding decision, the application, the board member's consent, the beneficial owner details) and tell you which of your documents need an apostille or a certified translation.
3. We check the address you plan to use against the Register's requirements and set out what has to be in place for the capital before filing.
4. We file, pay the fee and follow the application to a decision. If the Register sends it to VID, we tell you what that means for the timing.
5. After the entry we take the VAT decision with you and, if you wish, keep the books from the first month.

What you provide. Identity documents of every founder, board member and beneficial owner; for a company founder, its registration documents; the planned activity, the amount of capital and how it will be paid; the address and the document behind your right to use it; and either a secure electronic signature or the time for a visit to a sworn notary in Latvia.

What you have at the end. An application filed and followed through to the Register's decision, each document explained to you in English, a list of the company's first deadlines and, if you want it, bookkeeping by a provider on VID's register of licensed outsourced accounting providers. The decisions belong to the Register and to the bank; we cannot promise either of them, and we say so before you pay anything.

Latvia is not the only EU base we work with. We also help founders in Slovakia and Sweden, and that is a separate conversation with its own rules: nothing in this article applies there.

Tell us in the form below who will own and run the company and where each of them lives, or call +371 27053232, and we will set out the route for your case.

Short answers for founders abroad

Do I need to travel to Latvia to set up a company?

Not if everyone who signs holds a secure electronic signature that the Register accepts. The catch is in the word everyone: a document that several people sign can be filed electronically only if all of them sign it electronically. One founder without an e-signature turns that document into paper, and on paper every signature on it needs certifying, for which the law names a Latvian sworn notary. Settle who signs how before anything else is drafted.

Can a non-resident be the only board member of a Latvian SIA?

Yes. Section 221 of the Commercial Law sets no residence condition for a board member. The practical detail is the address for official contact: if the Population Register holds no declared residence and no foreign address for that person, the application has to give an address where he or she can be reached (Section 9, Paragraph four).

How long does it take a new company with foreign owners to get a bank account?

No one can promise a figure: the bank sets its own pace. What the law does settle is the proof: if the capital paid in money is no more than EUR 50,000, the founders confirm in the application that the account is open and the capital paid; above EUR 50,000, a statement from the payment service provider or another document of payment is attached (Commercial Law, Section 149, Paragraph four).

Is a Latvian company automatically tax resident in Latvia?

Yes, for Latvian tax purposes. The test in Section 14, Paragraph four of the Law on Taxes and Duties is formation and registration under Latvian law, so where the owners or the board live does not enter into it. How the country where you live treats the same company is a question for that country's own rules.

Can my UK company be the founder of a Latvian SIA?

Yes, a legal person can be a founder, with no condition on where it is registered. Two limits follow from that choice. A company cannot found a small-capital SIA, whose founders must all be natural persons. And the individuals who, through your UK company, directly or indirectly hold more than 25 per cent of the Latvian SIA or control it are named in the application as its beneficial owners.