This one is genuinely DIY. The registration itself is a form, a fee measured in thousands of dinars rather than hundreds of euros, and a one-stop-shop that hands you your registration number and your tax number together. If someone is quoting you a package price whose main line item is “company formation”, you are buying typing.

What is not DIY is the decision you make on the form — the tax regime — and the thing you should have settled before you opened the form at all. Do those first. This post is the mechanics.

Checked on 2 September 2026 against APR’s own published fee schedule and registration guidance.

Do these two things before you touch the form

One: decide your tax regime. The registration application contains the paušal election. It is not a step you come back to at leisure; it is a box on the form you are about to submit. The work status decision, priced is the argument.

Two: read the nine criteria of the independence test against your actual client contract. If you are moving one employer-shaped relationship into a Serbian sole trader, this can change what you should register as, and it is much cheaper to know now — the nine criteria.

Neither of these is a formality. Everything below is.

The activity code decides more than you think

You register with a šifra delatnosti — an activity code — and it is the first field with real consequences.

Article 40 of the Zakon o porezu na dohodak građana excludes entire fields from paušal taxation regardless of income: advertising and market research, wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants, financial intermediation, and real-estate activities. If your work sits in one of those, the paušal box on the form is not available to you and the choice is Model B or employment.

The temptation here is obvious and you should refuse it. Registering under a permitted code while actually doing excluded work is not a clever route around article 40. It is a misdescription of your activity, and the people who eventually compare your invoices to your registered code do this for a living. Choose the code that describes the work. Then find out what regime that code allows.

The registration, step by step

1. Get a qualified electronic certificate. APR’s electronic registration runs on a digital signature and access through the national eID.gov.rs portal. This is the step that takes real calendar time for a new arrival, because obtaining a certificate is its own errand with its own counter. Start it first. Paper registration through an APR counter still exists; the electronic route is what the government’s own guidance points you at.

2. Fill in the jedinstvena registraciona prijava. One form covers registration of the business and registration with the tax authority. This is where the one-stop-shop does its work: APR, the Poreska uprava and the Central Registry of Compulsory Social Insurance are joined up, so the founding decision arrives together with your matični broj (registration number) and your PIB (tax identification number). You do not make a separate trip for the PIB.

3. Tick the paušal box on that same form. Since 2016, a preduzetnik seeking lump-sum taxation submits the request through APR with the registration application, choosing on the application itself. This is the box people miss, and missing it means starting on books.

4. Pay the fee. APR’s fee for registering the founding of a preduzetnik is 2,500 RSD. The current schedule was published in Službeni glasnik RS number 94/2025, entered into force on 1 January 2026 and has applied since 3 January 2026. Two other numbers from the same schedule, because you will meet them later: registering a change of data is 1,400 RSD, rising by 700 RSD for each additional change in the same application, and deleting a preduzetnik is 1,400 RSD. For contrast, founding a d.o.o. is 8,000 RSD — the gap between the two is smaller than people assume, and it is not the reason to choose one over the other.

5. File the PPDG-1R return. Having ticked the paušal box at APR, a newly registered preduzetnik who qualifies submits the tax return PPDG-1R electronically within 15 days of entry in the APR register or of commencing activity, through the Poreska uprava’s ePorezi portal. This is a separate action from the APR filing and it has its own clock. Diary it on the day your registration comes through.

6. Wait for the rešenje. The Poreska uprava issues a decision setting your monthly obligation, delivered electronically to your tax mailbox. Until it arrives you do not know your number, and no calculator’s estimate is binding. The Ministry of Economy’s official calculator at informator.preduzetnistvo.gov.rs/kalkulator gives an indicative figure — it says so itself — which is useful for budgeting and useless for arguing.

7. Open the business bank account. Separate from your personal account, and its own errand with its own document list. If you are being paid from abroad, that account is where the next set of surprises lives — the paperwork the bank wants.

8. Start the KPO book. As a paušalac, the knjiga o ostvarenom prometu is the only book you keep: a running record of turnover. It is not optional and it is not difficult. Keep it from invoice one rather than reconstructing it in December.

The part that is different because you are a foreigner

Here the citizen’s version and the foreigner’s version diverge, and this is where I stop writing from what I know about how the offices work and give you what is published, dated.

Identification. APR’s documentation requirements for a foreign founder include a photocopy of the passport or foreign identity card. A foreigner may optionally also register an EBS — evidencioni broj za stranca, the record number assigned to foreigners by the competent Serbian authority — in addition to the passport number.

Residence and work authorisation. This is the genuinely load-bearing one and it is the thing nobody tells you at the point where you are excited about the fee being 2,500 dinars. Guidance on foreigners working in Serbia states that a foreigner has the same rights and obligations as citizens in respect of work, employment and self-employment, and that the conditions for a foreigner to work are an approval for temporary residence — of any length — or permanent residence, together with a work authorisation. Since 2024 those two are obtained through one procedure: the Unified Permit.

So the honest sequencing answer is that registration and residence are not independent errands, and which one comes first depends on your route. Self-employment as a residence basis and self-employment as a tax status are two sides of one file. I am not going to give you a universal order of operations here, because the correct order genuinely varies with the basis you are applying under, and getting it wrong is a category of error this site exists to prevent rather than cause. The legal bases, and which one you qualify for is the place to work out which basis you are on; if two are arguable, that is one of the clearest pay for an hour situations on this site.

Do not infer the foreigner’s requirement from the citizen’s. A Serb reading the same APR page sees a shorter list, because they already have the identity number and no work-authorisation question. The pages are the same; the file is not.

What this actually costs

The registration fee is 2,500 RSD. The electronic certificate has its own cost. After that, your recurring cost is the monthly tax and contributions from your rešenje, and — if you are on paušal and your affairs are simple — very little else. A paušalac with a KPO book and one activity does not need a knjigovođa on retainer in the way a Model B preduzetnik does, and this is one of the few places on this site where the answer is genuinely “you can do this yourself.”

What I would still pay for, once: an hour with a knjigovođa, before registration, with your client contract on the table. Not to fill in the form. To read the nine criteria against your facts and tell you which activity code and which regime your actual work supports. That hour is what a knjigovođa is for, and it is the difference between a decision and a guess.

The bill you get in year three will also be higher than the one you get in year one, for reasons that have nothing to do with your income — the paušal base carries a tenure coefficient that steps up over 36 months. Plan for it now, while the number is small and pleasant.