Read the nine criteria before you sign the contract, not before you file the tax return. By the time this matters you cannot change the facts, only explain them, and explaining them is the expensive version.

The test samostalnosti is the single highest-stakes thing on this site for a foreigner working remotely from Belgrade, because the arrangement that brought most people here — one client abroad, formerly or effectively an employer, now paying invoices — is the exact arrangement the test was written to find.

Checked on 2 September 2026. The test lives in article 85 of the Zakon o porezu na dohodak građana and has been in force since 1 March 2020.

What the test does

It does not ask whether you are a real business in some general sense. It runs a checklist against your relationship with one specific nalogodavac — one client, or a party related to that client under tax law.

If five or more of nine criteria are met in that relationship, the money that client pays you stops being business income and becomes “other income” in the eyes of the tax authority. Under article 85 the reclassified amount is taxed at 20%, with no standardised-cost deduction, and pension contributions apply on top.

Three things about that sentence do damage:

  • It is per client, not per person. You can be entirely independent across your business and still fail the test against one client who happens to be 80% of your revenue.
  • It looks at substance, not labels. Your APR registration, your invoices, and the word “contractor” in the contract are not the subject of the test. The nine facts are.
  • The tax is on gross, without the deduction that normally softens “other income”. That is why the number lands harder than people expect when they first hear “20%” and compare it to a paušal bill.

The nine criteria, as the law lists them

These are the nine, in the law’s own order. I have given the Serbian for each, because this is one of the places where you will eventually be reading a Serbian document with a knjigovođa and it helps to recognise the phrasing.

1. The client sets your working hours, or your leave depends on their decision. Nalogodavac ili povezano lice s nalogodavcem određuje radno vreme preduzetniku ili su odmor i odsustva zavisni od odluke nalogodavca.

2. You normally use premises the client provides, or work in a place the client determines. Preduzetnik uobičajno koristi prostorije koje obezbedi ili obavlja poslove u mestu koje odredi nalogodavac.

3. The client provides or organises your professional training or development. Nalogodavac vrši ili organizuje stručno osposobljavanje ili usavršavanje preduzetnika.

4. The client engaged you after advertising in the media that it needed to engage individuals. Nalogodavac je angažovao preduzetnika nakon oglašavanja u sredstvima informisanja potrebe za angažovanjem fizičkih lica.

5. The client supplies the basic tools, equipment or other basic material means for your regular work. Nalogodavac obezbeđuje sopstveni osnovni alat, opremu ili druga osnovna materijalna sredstva potrebna za redovan rad preduzetnika.

6. At least 70% of your total income over a 12-month period comes from one client. Najmanje 70% od ukupno ostvarenih prihoda preduzetnika u periodu od 12 meseci je ostvareno od jednog nalogodavca.

7. You perform work from the client’s own line of business, and the contract has no clause putting the usual business risk on you. Preduzetnik obavlja poslove iz delatnosti nalogodavca, a ugovor ne sadrži klauzulu po kojoj preduzetnik snosi uobičajeni poslovni rizik.

8. The contract partly or wholly forbids you from providing services to other clients. Ugovor sadrži delimičnu ili potpunu zabranu preduzetniku da pruža usluge sa drugim nalogodavcima.

9. You perform activities for the same client for 130 or more working days in a 12-month period. Preduzetnik obavlja aktivnosti za istog nalogodavca 130 ili više radnih dana u periodu od 12 meseci.

The ones that catch foreigners, specifically

Not all nine are equally likely. In the shape of arrangement that brings people to Belgrade, four of them arrive almost by default — and four plus one is five.

Criterion 6 — the 70% rule — is usually already met on the day you register. If you moved here to keep working for the company you already worked for, they are 100% of your income. There is no argument to have about this one; it is arithmetic.

Criterion 9 — 130 working days — is met by anyone working roughly full time. A standard year is somewhere around 250 working days. Continuous engagement with one client clears 130 by early summer. Again: arithmetic, not judgement.

Criterion 5 — the client’s equipment — catches the company laptop. This is the one people are most surprised by, and the most fixable. If your former employer shipped you the machine you work on, that is their basic material means, not yours. Buy your own laptop, from your own business, and this criterion stops applying. It is the cheapest single fix on this list by a wide margin.

Criterion 1 — hours and leave — catches the standup. A mandatory daily call at a fixed time, a holiday calendar you request against, an approval workflow for time off: these are the facts, whatever the contract calls them. A genuinely independent supplier delivers work; they do not book annual leave with the buyer.

Criterion 7 — no business-risk clause — catches most contracts written by a foreign HR department. An employment contract converted into a services contract by find-and-replace does not usually acquire a risk allocation on the way. The absence of that clause is itself a criterion.

Criterion 2 — the client’s premises — is the one that most often does not apply to a remote worker in Belgrade, and it is worth noticing that this cuts in your favour. Your flat is not premises your client provided. But if you sit in an office your client rents or pays for here, it applies, and a coworking desk your client pays for directly is worth a conversation with your knjigovođa rather than an assumption.

Count your own. Four of these are common and none of them requires anyone to have behaved badly.

What it costs when it lands

The reclassification is not a fine. It is a different tax treatment applied to the same money, and the difference between the two treatments is the bill — plus the ordinary consequences of a tax liability discovered late.

I am not going to model that as a number for you, because the amount depends entirely on your income and your existing paušal base, and a worked example from a blog gets remembered as a benchmark. What I will tell you is the shape: the reclassified treatment is materially worse than the paušal treatment for a normal remote salary, or the test would have no purpose. That is why it exists.

The consequence also does not stop at money. The practical effect of failing against a client is that the relationship has to change form — the client engages you under an employment contract or another lawful arrangement, or the arrangement ends. Which means an outcome that started as a tax question can become a residence question, because your permit's basis is usually your work status. What reclassification actually costs works through the sequence when it has already happened.

The window is rolling, which changes when you should look

Two of the nine criteria are measured over a 12-month period — the 70% income share and the 130 working days. That period is not your tax year and it is not your registration anniversary. It is a window that moves.

The practical consequence is that your position changes without anything happening. A second client who was 40% of your income last year and 15% this year moves you across criterion 6 without either of you doing anything unusual. A long engagement that was seasonal becomes continuous and crosses 130 days. Nobody sends you a notification.

So the review is annual, and it is your job to run it:

  • What share of my last twelve months came from the largest single client? If it is climbing toward 70%, that is the number to act on, and acting takes months.
  • How many working days did I put into that client? If it is a full-time engagement, assume you are over 130 and stop counting.
  • Has the contract changed? A renewal is a new document, and clauses get added. Criteria 7 and 8 live in the text.
  • Whose equipment am I using now? Kit gets replaced, and replacement kit arrives from wherever it arrives from.

Put it in the calendar next to whatever else you do annually. The people who get caught by this are almost never people who read the criteria and decided to risk it. They are people who read them once, at registration, when the answer was different.

What you can actually do about it

In descending order of how much good it does.

Get a second client, genuinely. Criterion 6 is the load-bearing one and it is the only one whose fix also makes your business more robust. Below 70% from any single client, the arithmetic stops working against you automatically. This is slow, and it is the real answer.

Buy your own equipment. Cheap, immediate, and removes criterion 5.

Have the contract read against the nine criteria before you sign. Criteria 7 and 8 are contract terms. A non-compete clause that forbids other clients is a criterion sitting in writing, and it is often there for no reason anyone remembers. Ask for it out.

Do not manufacture facts to fail the test less. Backdating a contract, inventing an invoice to a second client, or describing an arrangement in a way that does not match how you actually work is a different and much worse category of problem. The test is applied to reality by someone who can look at your bank inflows.

Pay a knjigovođa for one hour, with the contract in front of them. This is the recommendation the rest of this site would call “worth paying for”, and it is the clearest one on the whole site. An hour before you sign is the cheapest hour you will spend on your Serbian tax position.

The sentence I will not write

I cannot tell you whether you pass, and neither can anyone else who has not read your contract, your invoices and your client relationship. Anybody who tells you confidently that “remote workers are fine” or that “the test isn’t really enforced” is guessing with your money.

What is true, and what the incumbents selling registration packages do not lead with: the test is the reason the paušal decision is not simply a matter of picking the cheapest regime. You can register perfectly, pay a low fixed bill, and still be sitting on a reclassification because of nine facts nobody asked you about at the counter.

Find out where you stand before you register — the APR steps come after this, not before.