Hire Nile Guide: Egypt's Labour Law No. 14 of 2025 for Employers Hiring in Egypt

On 1 September 2025 Egypt replaced the labour code that had governed the country since 2003. Labour Law No. 14 of 2025 was enacted on 3 May 2025, took effect after a transition period on 1 September, and its dispute-resolution machinery came online on 1 October 2025 with the opening of specialised labour courts. It is now roughly a year old, which is the point at which a new statute stops being a press release and starts being the thing your Egyptian colleague's contract is actually written against.

Most of the coverage written about it was aimed at Egyptian companies and Egyptian HR teams. Very little of it was written for the person this guide is for: a founder in Berlin, an engineering director in Dubai, or a support leader in Austin who is about to add someone in Cairo to the team and wants to understand what they are stepping into. That gap matters, because the law changes several things that directly affect a foreign buyer's budget, notice planning, and delivery calendar, and it changes one thing about termination that will surprise almost every manager coming from an at-will jurisdiction.

This guide walks through the provisions that a hiring company outside Egypt actually needs, with article references where the sources give them and dates on every number.

How to read this, and what it is not

This is a plain-language explanation of published sources, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for Egyptian counsel on your specific arrangement. Employment law is fact-dependent, the implementing regulations for a new statute continue to develop in its first years, and the correct answer for a particular contract depends on details this page cannot know. Where the published summaries disagree with one another, this guide says so rather than picking whichever reading sounds cleanest, and there is a section near the end that lists exactly where they diverge. Before you sign anything, have an Egyptian employment lawyer look at the document.

The second framing point is more useful than it sounds. A great deal of what follows may never bind your company directly, because in most cross-border arrangements the legal employer is an Egyptian entity rather than the foreign buyer. That does not make the law irrelevant to you. It sets the floor that any compliant Egyptian employment arrangement has to clear, which means it sets your true cost, your true notice exposure, and the questions you should be asking whoever is acting as the employer. Read it as the specification your partner has to meet.

The first question: who is the employer?

Before any provision below applies to you, work out which of four arrangements you are actually in, because they land in very different places.

You hire a contractor directly. A genuine independent contractor relationship sits outside the employment code. The risk is that the relationship is not genuine. If you set the hours, supply the tools, direct the work day to day, and the person works only for you, an Egyptian tribunal looking at the substance rather than the label can find an employment relationship regardless of what the agreement says. That is not an Egypt-specific quirk, it is how most jurisdictions test classification, and Law 14 of 2025 did nothing to make informal arrangements safer. Our contractor versus employee calculator models the cost difference, and our guide to paying remote employees and contractors in Egypt covers the payment mechanics.

You set up an Egyptian entity. Then you are the employer, every provision below is yours, and you also own the registration, the Arabic contracts, the social insurance filings, the annual records submission, and the labour court exposure. This is the right answer at a certain scale and a poor one for a first hire.

You use an employer of record. A local entity becomes the legal employer and invoices you for salary, statutory costs, and a per-employee service fee. You do not carry the filings, but you do carry the commercial consequence of every statutory rule below, because the employer of record prices them in.

You work with a placement or managed staffing partner. This is what Hire Nile does. With direct placement you take on the relationship yourself and we find and vet the person. With managed staffing the employment and administrative burden sits with us. The provisions below still determine what the arrangement costs and how much notice is realistic, which is exactly why they are worth understanding even when someone else is filing the paperwork.

The contract itself

Employment contracts must be in writing and in Arabic. For non-nationals the contract may carry a second language alongside the Arabic text, but Arabic is the operative version. The practical consequence for a foreign buyer is simple and often missed: the English document you negotiated and the Arabic document that governs need to say the same thing, and somebody who reads Arabic should confirm that before signature.

The default form of contract is now clearly indefinite. According to the ICLG briefing on the new law, a contract is treated as unlimited-term where it rests on a verbal agreement, where no term is stipulated, or where the parties keep performing after a fixed term expires without signing a new written contract. That last trigger is the one that catches people. A twelve-month agreement that both sides simply carry on with in month thirteen becomes an indefinite contract, and the previous carve-out that exempted foreign employees from this conversion has been removed. If you intend a fixed term, you have to actively re-paper it.

Probation is now capped and non-repeatable. The maximum probationary period is three months, and it may be used only once for a given employee with a given employer. The old practice of running consecutive probation periods, or restarting probation when someone changed role internally, is prohibited. During probation either party can end the contract without notice. Plan your evaluation accordingly: three months is what you get, once, and after that the notice regime below applies.

Working hours and overtime

The standard working week remains eight hours per day and 48 hours per week, exclusive of rest breaks, with a break of at least 30 minutes in any six consecutive hours of work. Overtime is capped at two additional hours per day and is permitted only in defined circumstances. Employers are expected to give advance notice to the worker and to notify the Ministry of Labour of extended working periods, with the new law converting what used to be a prior-approval requirement into a notification requirement of seven days.

Overtime pay is set as a premium on the normal hourly wage: reported at 35 percent for daytime overtime and 70 percent for night work. Where overtime falls on a rest day or public holiday, the new law gives the employee a choice between the overtime premium and a compensatory day off, and if a compensatory day is taken it must be requested in writing and documented.

For most buyers reading this, the overtime rules matter less as a payroll line than as a design constraint. A support rota or an on-call schedule that quietly assumes evening coverage is an overtime arrangement with a statutory premium attached, and it should be priced and papered as one from the start rather than discovered in month six. Our Egypt time zone overlap planner shows the genuine shared hours between Egypt and your location, which is the honest input to that design.

Leave, and what it does to your delivery calendar

The leave provisions changed in ways that cut both directions, and the first-year change is the one that surprises people who expect a new law to be uniformly more generous.

• Annual leave. 15 working days during the first year of service, 21 days from the second year, and 30 days once the employee has completed ten years. Employees with disabilities and persons with dwarfism are entitled to 45 days from the start of employment. The first-year figure is a reduction from the previous 21-day entitlement.
• Casual leave. Seven days per year, up from six, capped at two days per incident. Casual leave is deducted from the annual leave balance rather than being additional to it.
• Maternity leave. Extended from three months to four months paid, and usable up to three times during employment rather than twice. A pregnant employee's daily hours must be reduced by at least one hour from the sixth month of pregnancy, and overtime is prohibited during pregnancy and for six months after the birth.
• Paternity leave. One paid day on the birth of a child, up to three times during service, and it does not reduce the annual leave balance.
• Childcare leave. Up to two years unpaid, in establishments with 50 or more employees, after one year of service, up to three times.
• Sick leave. A staged entitlement, with the industrial-worker schedule running three months at full wages within a three-year cycle, followed by six months at 85 percent and three months at 75 percent. Separately, workers may receive up to three months of medical leave for infectious diseases on the order of the competent medical authority.

The planning consequence is worth stating in concrete terms. A second-year employee has 21 working days of annual leave, which is roughly four working weeks, and that sits on top of Egypt's official public holiday schedule, which combines national, Islamic, and Coptic observances with Islamic dates that move each year against the Gregorian calendar. Any delivery plan built on the assumption of 52 uninterrupted working weeks is wrong by a material margin, and the error is larger in years where a moving holiday lands inside a release window. Our Egypt public holidays tool carries the observed dates from the Presidency's published schedule with a working-days calculator, and the hiring timeline planner puts the same realism into the ramp-up period before someone is productive.

What it costs: wages, the mandatory raise, and social insurance

Three separate mechanisms set the statutory floor on compensation, and they interact in a way that is genuinely useful to understand.

Minimum wage. The private sector minimum wage is EGP 7,000 per month, set by the National Council for Wages and effective from 1 March 2025. For the professional roles most readers of this page are hiring, this floor is far below the market rate and is not a practical constraint. It matters mainly as a reference point, because the annual raise mechanism below is anchored to insured wage rather than to it.

The mandatory annual raise. Private sector employers must grant a periodic annual increase of at least 3 percent of the employee's social insurance wage, with a reported floor of EGP 250 per month, as set by the National Council for Wages. Read that carefully, because the base is the insured wage and not the actual salary. Since the insurable wage is capped, the statutory raise for a well-paid engineer is a small number in absolute terms. At the 2026 ceiling it works out to about EGP 501 per month.

Social insurance. Under the framework summarised by PwC's Worldwide Tax Summaries, the employer contributes 18.75 percent and the employee 11 percent of the social insurance salary, and that salary is bounded by minimum and maximum limits that rise 15 percent each January under a seven-year schedule that began on 1 January 2021. For 2026 the insurable range is EGP 2,700 to EGP 16,700. For 2027 it becomes EGP 3,200 to EGP 19,300.

The cap is the part worth pausing on, because it produces a result that runs against most people's intuition about employer-side costs. Employer social insurance in 2026 is 18.75 percent of at most EGP 16,700, which is about EGP 3,131 per month. Once an employee's pay clears the ceiling, the employer's statutory social insurance contribution stops growing entirely. In a country where senior engineering salaries sit well above the insurable maximum, the marginal statutory on-cost of paying someone more is effectively flat, and the total employer contribution on a senior hire is a small percentage of total compensation rather than the 20 to 30 percent loading that many European buyers assume by default. Our team cost calculator and Egypt net salary calculator work through the gross-to-net and budget arithmetic.

There is also a small training fund contribution reported at 0.25 percent of the minimum social insured salary per employee, subject to a minimum of EGP 10 and a maximum of EGP 30, which is a rounding error on any professional salary but is real and should appear on a compliant payslip.

One strategic note that follows directly from the arithmetic. The statutory 3 percent raise anchored to a capped insured wage is not a retention mechanism for skilled staff, and it was never designed as one. Egyptian salaries are negotiated in pounds while your budget sits in dollars, and the gap between a statutory minimum increase and a real market adjustment is where attrition happens. Run a deliberate review on a calendar date rather than waiting for a resignation, and model it with the Egypt salary raise planner.

Ending the relationship, and the part that surprises people

This is the section where managers from at-will jurisdictions should slow down, because Egypt draws a hard line that many comparable systems do not.

Egyptian law under the new statute separates two different things. Termination of an indefinite contract for a legitimate cause, with notice and compensation, is something the employer can do. Dismissal as a disciplinary sanction is not. Under Article 148 as summarised in the ICLG employment and labour guide for Egypt, dismissal as a disciplinary penalty may be ordered only by the competent labour court. An employer may impose lesser disciplinary measures on its own authority, but it cannot fire someone for misconduct by decision alone. The grounds on which a lawful dismissal can rest are enumerated, covering gross misconduct such as fraud, serious safety violations, and disclosure of trade secrets, along with death, total incapacity, reaching the age of 60, exhausted sick leave, and conviction of a crime involving integrity, at Articles 148 and 169 to 174.

Notice for indefinite contracts is three months' written notice, under Article 156, and it runs in both directions. Fixed-term contracts simply expire at their end date without notice, under Article 154.

Compensation is where the numbers get serious. For an unlawfully terminated indefinite contract, the floor is two months' wages for each year of service, under Article 165. Where a fixed-term contract is ended early, the employee is entitled to one month's wage per year of service, under Article 154. Put those together with the three-month notice period and a wrongful termination of a long-tenured employee is not a cheap mistake.

Resignations changed too, and in a direction that protects the employee. A resignation must be in writing, signed, and authenticated by the Labour Office, and it requires the employer's acceptance to take effect, with the employer expected to respond within ten days. The practice of collecting pre-signed undated resignation forms, known in Egypt as Form No. 6, is abolished. If anyone proposes that arrangement to you as a convenience, that is a clear signal about how the rest of their compliance is run.

The law also sets out when unjustified absence can support termination: broadly, more than 20 non-consecutive days in a year or more than 10 consecutive days, with a written warning by registered letter required after 10 non-consecutive or 5 consecutive days. The procedural step is not optional decoration. Skipping the warning is how an otherwise defensible termination becomes an unlawful one.

For a foreign buyer the practical translation is this. Build the evaluation into the three-month probation, where exit is genuinely straightforward, because after that the process is formal and slow by design. Document performance contemporaneously rather than reconstructing a case later. And if you are working through a partner or an employer of record, ask them directly what their process is for ending an engagement, how long it takes, and what it costs, before you need the answer.

Disputes now have a clock on them

One of the more consequential reforms is procedural. The new law creates pre-litigation reconciliation committees with representatives from the Ministry of Labour, the trade unions, and employers. A dispute that is not settled there within 21 days, under Article 149, escalates to the courts under Article 150. Specialised labour courts sit within the primary court jurisdictions, began operating on 1 October 2025, and are tasked with resolving labour disputes within 90 days. Appeals run through dedicated circuits, with further appeal to the Court of Cassation restricted.

Those courts can also issue urgent orders, including suspending a dismissal or enforcing partial wage payment while a case is pending. On the penalties side, Andersen's summary notes that criminal penalties for labour violations were replaced with proportional financial fines, while other summaries note that the fines themselves are substantially higher than under the previous law.

The old Egyptian system had a reputation for labour disputes that ran for years. A 21-day conciliation window and a 90-day judicial target is a different regime, and it cuts both ways: faster resolution for a legitimate employer position, and much less room to let a weak position drift.

Remote work is finally named in the statute

For this audience it is worth flagging that Law 14 of 2025 explicitly recognises remote work, part-time work, flexible work with variable hours or shifts, and job sharing as employment arrangements, all subject to the standard employment provisions with adjustments for their particular nature. Egyptian law had previously been written around an assumed physical workplace, which left remote arrangements resting on general principles.

Do not overread it. Recognition means these arrangements sit inside the ordinary employment framework rather than outside it, so a remote employee gets the same leave, notice, and protection as an on-site one. What it removes is ambiguity, and ambiguity in an employment relationship almost always resolves against the employer. This is a quietly good development for anyone building a distributed team in Egypt.

The statute also introduces an explicit and general prohibition on harassment, bullying, and violence, whether verbal, physical, or psychological, with a corresponding employer obligation to maintain a safe and non-hostile working environment. Record-keeping obligations were extended as well: employee files must now be retained for five years after the end of employment rather than one, electronic files are permitted, and employers submit workforce data annually in January.

A note on foreign nationals working in Egypt

Most readers of this guide are hiring Egyptians to work in Egypt, in which case the work permit regime is not their problem. If you are considering placing a non-Egyptian in an Egyptian role, two constraints apply. Foreign nationals cannot apply for a work permit themselves and must be sponsored by an employer in Egypt, and Decree No. 279 limits foreign workers to 10 percent of a company's total workforce. Work permit fees are reported in a wide range, from EGP 5,000 to EGP 150,000 depending on category. Under the new law, the previous exception that stopped foreign employees' fixed-term contracts converting to indefinite has been removed, so the conversion rule applies to them as well.

Where the published summaries disagree

Honesty about the state of the evidence is more useful than false precision, and there are two places where reputable public summaries of this law do not line up. If either point is load-bearing for your decision, get it confirmed by counsel rather than trusting any secondary source, including this one.

Notice periods. The law firm summaries converge on a single three-month notice period for indefinite contracts regardless of length of service, with ICLG citing Article 156 and describing it as a unification of the previous tiered rule. Some non-legal summaries, including a widely read guide published by WUZZUF, describe a tiered structure instead, at two months for service under ten years and three months above it, which is closer to the old law. This guide follows the article-referenced legal sources, but the disagreement is real and you should verify it against the Arabic text for your own contracts.

First-year annual leave. Several summaries state a flat 21-day annual entitlement, while the article-level sources describe the 15, 21, and 30-day tiers set out above, with the first year reduced from the previous 21. The tiered reading is the better supported one, and it is also the less flattering one, which is usually a sign that it is not marketing copy.

A more general caution: a lot of the English-language material about Law 14 of 2025 was published in mid-2025, before the law was in force, and describes what was expected rather than what implementing practice has settled into. Check the date on anything you read about this statute, including this guide, which reflects sources available in August 2026.

What to actually do with this

If you are evaluating an Egyptian hire right now, the useful takeaways are short.

• Decide the engagement model deliberately rather than by default, because it determines who carries every obligation above.
• Treat the three-month probation as your real evaluation window, and use it.
• Budget the employer social insurance contribution against the capped insurable wage rather than against full salary, which for senior roles makes Egypt's statutory on-costs lower than most buyers assume.
• Plan the delivery calendar against 21 days of annual leave plus the official holiday schedule, not against an uninterrupted year.
• Set a real pay review date in the agreement, because the statutory 3 percent minimum is not a retention strategy.
• Make sure the Arabic contract and the English one say the same thing.
• Ask whoever is acting as employer what their termination process is, how long it takes, and what it costs, before you need to know.

None of this is a reason to hesitate about hiring in Egypt. It is a well-defined statutory framework with clearer rules and faster dispute resolution than the code it replaced, and the compliance burden is entirely manageable when someone competent is carrying it. What it is not is a system you can improvise your way through, and the improvisation usually shows up at the end of a relationship rather than the beginning.

If you would rather not carry any of it yourself, that is the job. Tell us what you are hiring for and we will introduce you to vetted Egyptian candidates, with the employment and administrative side handled. If you want to work through the model choice first, including which of the four arrangements above fits your situation, book a meeting and bring the specifics.

Sources

• EY, Egypt enacts new labor law with changes affecting employers beginning 1 September 2025
• ICLG, Key changes under Egypt's new Labor Law No. 14 of 2025
• ICLG, Employment and Labour Laws and Regulations, Egypt 2026
• Shand and Partners, New Labour Law No. 14 of 2025
• Andersen Egypt, Egypt's New Labour Law No. 14 of 2025
• Lockton, Egypt adopts comprehensive new labor law
• PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, Egypt, other taxes and social insurance
• Egypt State Information Service, Egypt raises minimum wage for private sector to EGP 7,000
• Global Payroll Association, Egypt minimum wage and minimum annual increase set for private sector
• Safeguard Global, Egypt sets 10 percent cap on foreign workers under Decree No. 279