How to Hire International Employees (Nobody Has to Move Anywhere)

A client came to us last year with a request.

He’d found the perfect person. Sharp, experienced, exactly the skill set his company needed. And he wanted us to help him bring her to the United States.

We turned the business down.

Not because we couldn’t have made money on it. Because the first question I asked him changed the whole conversation: “Why do you want to bring her here?”

Silence.

He didn’t have an answer.

He’d just assumed that hiring someone from another country meant moving them to your country. Visa, sponsorship, relocation, the whole production.

It doesn’t.

That single assumption is the most expensive mistake people make when they set out to hire international employees.

I run HireUA, a staffing agency that’s placed over 1,100 people into businesses across 35 countries.

Every single one of those placements has one thing in common: nobody moved anywhere.

The Executive Assistant in Manila stayed in Manila.

The Developer in Kyiv stayed in Kyiv.

The Operations Manager in Bogotá stayed in Bogotá.

And their employers — companies in the US, UK, Canada, Australia — got exactly the talent they were looking for at a fraction of the local cost.

This article covers both roads. The one where you move a human being across an ocean, and the one where you don’t.

This is the part of how to hire international employees that nobody explains.

Spoiler: one of these roads currently has a $100,000 toll booth on it.

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The Two Completely Different Things People Mean by “International Employees”

When someone searches for how to hire international employees, they mean one of two things.

Road 1: Bring the person to you.

Visa sponsorship, immigration attorneys, relocation.

The person physically moves to your country and sits in your office (or at least your time zone).

Road 2: The person stays where they are.

They work for you remotely from their home country.

• No visa
• No immigration process
• No relocation

Both are legitimate ways to hire international employees.

Only one of them is realistic for most companies.

Here’s the thing: most of the people searching this phrase actually want Road 2 — they just don’t know Road 2 exists.

They assume “international hire” means “immigration paperwork” because that’s what it meant for their parents’ generation.

That client I mentioned?

Road 2 solved his problem in under 3 weeks.

The person he wanted stayed in her country, kept her apartment, kept her life — and started working for his company the same way 1,100+ of our placements have.

But let’s be fair to Road 1.

Maybe you have a real reason to bring someone over.

• A physical facility
• A role that requires hands on equipment
• A candidate who desperately wants to immigrate

Fine.

Let’s price that road honestly, because nobody else will.

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What Bringing Someone to the US Actually Costs Right Now

Here’s what it costs to hire international employees the relocation way, priced honestly.

Quick disclaimer before we start:

I’ve never sponsored an H-1B.

What I have done is spend over a decade on the other side of the immigration window — my wife went through the Ukrainian visa process, I’ve watched close friends bring spouses over on green cards, and I’ve done my own residency paperwork in multiple countries.

I know what that folder of documents feels like.

I know what it’s like to wait months for a decision made by someone who will never meet you.

So this section isn’t legal advice.

It’s the publicly documented state of the road, as of July 2026, with sources you can check yourself.

Here’s where things stand.

The $100,000 fee

On September 19, 2025, a presidential proclamation imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions requiring consular processing — meaning petitions for workers who are outside the United States.

It took effect September 21, 2025.

Then it got complicated.

On June 8, 2026, the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled the fee unlawful in State of California v. Mullin.

Judge Leo Sorokin found the $100,000 charge was effectively a tax, and only Congress has the authority to impose one.

Four days later, on June 12, the same court paused its own ruling.

The government filed its appeal, and the fee went back into effect while the First Circuit reviews it.

As of this writing, USCIS is still collecting the fee.

A separate court in Washington had earlier upheld it.

Most immigration attorneys tracking the case expect it to reach the Supreme Court before it’s settled.

Check the current status before you act on any of this.

It has changed three times in ten months.

What This Means in Practice

Translation: the main work visa for bringing talent to the US currently costs $100,000 more than it did last year, and nobody — not the courts, not the attorneys, not the government — can tell you whether that will still be true in six months.

And here’s the number that should stop you cold: by February 15, 2026, only 85 companies nationwide had paid the fee.

Eighty-five.

In the entire United States.

In roughly 5 months.

Do that math against a map.

Fifty states… That’s fewer than 2 companies per state.

Not two per state per month. Two per state, total, since the fee took effect.

That’s not a fee that made it harder to hire international employees.

That’s a fee that quietly ended the visa route for everyone except the largest companies on earth.

The lottery got worse too.

As of February 27, 2026, the H-1B lottery is no longer random.

It’s wage-weighted — higher-paying petitions get priority.

So even if you’re willing to write the check, you’re now competing on salary bands against companies whose comp packages you can’t match.

And even before all of this, the baseline was brutal: a lottery, roughly one-in-three odds in a good year, filing windows that come once annually, attorney fees, and a timeline measured in quarters — sometimes years.

Add it up.

To bring one person to the US, you’re looking at a six-figure fee that may or may not exist next quarter, a lottery you’ll probably lose, a salary competition against Google, and a timeline where your “perfect candidate” starts sometime next fiscal year.

Or… she could start in three weeks from her apartment in Warsaw.

Weigh that against the other way to hire international employees, and the decision makes itself.

Why do you want to bring her here?

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Why TSMC Can Do This and You Can’t

“But the big tech companies sponsor thousands of visas every year!” — They do.

And here’s why that has nothing to do with you.

Take TSMC’s Arizona site.

What started as a $12 billion project has expanded to $165 billion — the largest foreign direct investment in a greenfield project in American history. Six wafer fabs, two advanced packaging facilities, an R&D center, on a campus spanning more than 1,100 acres.

The first 3 fabs alone account for 6,000 direct high-tech jobs.

That company is running a fundamentally different operation than a 15-person agency hiring a Developer.

Their playbook to hire international employees was built for 7,000 desks.

A Visa Strategy Built for Scale

Look at the actual math.

They have in-house immigration counsel.

Not an attorney they call when something comes up — entire legal departments whose full-time job is visa petitions.

Their marginal cost per petition is a rounding error. Yours is a line item you’ll feel.

They enter the lottery at volume.

When you file hundreds of petitions, a one-in-three lottery stops being a coin flip and starts being a predictable rate.

You file one petition.

For you it’s a coin flip that lands on “wait another year” two times out of three.

They have 1,100 acres of physical operations.

Clean rooms.

Lithography equipment that costs more than most companies are worth.

The work happens where the machines are, and the machines aren’t going anywhere.

The physical campus IS the reason the relocation makes sense.

Your Hiring Reality Is Different

Now look at your situation…

• One petition
• Outside counsel at hourly rates
• And a role that is — let’s be real — already remote

Your Developer is going to work from a laptop whether that laptop is in Austin or in Argentina.

Yours needs to work for one hire, not 7,000.

Copying the immigration playbook from a company with 7,000 desks to fill is like copying Amazon’s return policy for your Etsy shop.

The scale isn’t just different. The scale is the whole strategy.

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The Visa Is Part of the Paycheck (And That’s the Problem)

Here’s something nobody says out loud: when a company sponsors a work visa, the visa itself is part of the compensation package.

This is the part of the relocation route that quietly shapes what it costs to hire international employees.

Think about what a sponsored worker is actually receiving.

• A salary, yes
• Immigration status
• A path to residency
• A future in a country they want to live in
• And status is the least portable form of compensation ever invented, because it’s tied to the employer who granted it

Leave the job, lose the status.

That’s leverage. And leverage suppresses wages — sponsored workers routinely accept less than their market rate because part of their “pay” is the visa itself.

This is a structural reality of the system.

Whether you want to call it a feature or a bug is up to you to decide.

Either way, the structure creates the leverage.

The Visa Only Has Value If Moving Is an Upgrade

But here’s what most people miss: the visa only works as compensation if the destination is an obvious upgrade.

• Offer a relocation package to a Developer in Belgrade, Serbia
• Or a Creative Strategist living in Barcelona, Spain
• Or an Executive Assistant living in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Watch them shrug.

• They have healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them
• Walkable cities
• 4 to 6 weeks of paid leave
• Family within driving distance

To them, the US is not self-evidently a better life — it’s a different life, with tradeoffs they’ve read plenty about.

I posted about this recently and it hit a nerve — 770,000+ views and a comment section full of Europeans confirming exactly this.

Poland gets 40-45 days off a year between vacation, holidays, and sick leave.

America gets 10 to 20. Total.

That’s 5-6 extra working weeks every single year — and the wealth gap between the 2 countries is downstream of exactly that math.

Some people look at that trade and choose the money.

Plenty look at it and choose August off.

America Is No Longer the Automatic Dream

But here’s what most people miss: something bigger has shifted, and I’ve watched it happen in real time.

I moved abroad 12 years ago.

Back then, when I told someone I was from California, the reaction was immediate. Eyes lit up. “Wow.”

California meant something… America meant something.

It was the place people had posters of on their wall.

Now?

Nobody gives a shit. I mean that literally.

I say I’m American and I get a nod.

Sometimes a polite question about whether I miss it. That’s it.

The aura is gone, and it didn’t happen overnight — it eroded over a decade. Part of that is politics, and I’ll leave that alone.

But a bigger part is that the rest of the world can now SEE America, in high definition, every day, on the same phone you’re reading this on.

• They see the homelessness in cities that used to be shorthand for the good life
• They see the protests and the marches
• They see the food and the health outcomes that come with it
• They see the medical bills people post online after an ambulance ride

Twenty years ago, the image of America came from movies.

Curated, lit, scored.

Now it comes from a stranger’s phone camera, unedited, and it goes out to the whole planet in a day.

None of that means America is a bad place to live.

I’m American.

I’ll defend plenty about it, and I’ve written about American abundance in ways that got me yelled at by half of Europe.

But the mythology? The mythology is a decade out of date.

The Best Candidate May Not Want to Move

Which means when you dangle a US visa in front of a candidate in Central Europe or Latin America, you’re not offering the golden ticket you think you are.

You’re offering paperwork, an 18-month wait, and a lifestyle they’ve already watched on their phone and decided against.

The candidate you actually wanted?

She never wanted to move…

She wanted a great salary, interesting work, and to keep living in the city where her mom watches the kids on Fridays.

You can give her all 3. Today. Without a single immigration form.

You didn’t need her here.

You needed her good — and that’s the whole case for learning how to hire international employees remotely.

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The Person Stays Put. Now What?

This is the road most people are actually looking for when they search how to hire international employees.

So you’ve picked Road 2.

The person stays in their country and works for you remotely.

Now everyone’s favorite panic question: “Wait…is that legal? Do I need to set up a company in their country?”

No, you don’t need to open a foreign entity. And thank God, because I’ve actually owned 2 of them.

I had a company in Poland and a company in Canada.

Different continents, same nightmare…

• Three government ID numbers just to buy a Red Bull under the company
• Accountants who charge per receipt
• Annual filings even in years the company made $10
• A million forms in Canada, split across federal and provincial requirements, half of which nobody tells you about until you’ve already missed them

I’ve also researched entity formation at a serious level in Ukraine, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.

Different flags, same story every time.

Opening an entity in every country where you have one team member is not a strategy. It’s a hostage situation.

The Simple Structure Most Countries Already Have

Here’s how this actually works in practice, across the 1,100+ placements we’ve made.

Almost every country on earth has a simple, government-recognized structure for individuals who work independently — a sole proprietorship.

In Ukraine it’s called a FOP.

In Poland, jednoosobowa działalność gospodarcza.

Colombia, the Philippines, Serbia, Argentina — they all have a version.

The professional registers in their own country, in their own language, with their own accountant.

• They get a tax ID
• They invoice you monthly as a business
• They handle their own taxes and compliance where they live — and they get real benefits from it, like writing off their laptop, internet, and home office

You’re a client. They’re a business.

Contract, invoice, done.

It’s the standard structure almost everywhere, and it’s how most companies hire international employees today.

This Is the Default, Not a Workaround

Here’s the thing: this is the same path small businesses in the States take all the time.

Somebody picks up a client or 2 on the side.

They file a DBA, because that’s the cheapest, simplest way to operate as a business.

The work grows. Eventually it makes sense to graduate to an LLC, and later maybe an S-Corp.

Nobody incorporates a full corporation with a board of directors to do freelance design work for 2 clients.

You start at the bottom rung and climb when the business justifies it.

That’s exactly what a FOP in Ukraine or a jednoosobowa in Poland is.

The bottom rung. The starter entity.

Millions of independent professionals worldwide operate this way, and their own governments built the structure specifically for them.

It’s not a workaround. It’s the default.

Talk to your CPA about your side of it (there’s usually a simple tax form involved for US companies), and make sure your contract reflects reality: you’re buying results, not renting hours in a cubicle.

That’s the entire setup.

And it’s a fraction of the drama the internet promised you.

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Who Are You Asking, and What Are They Selling?

Now let’s talk about the companies that want you to believe this is much, much harder than it is.

Imagine you move to Florida and you’re not sure whether you need hurricane insurance.

So you call a hurricane insurance salesman and ask him.

What’s he going to say?

• He’s going to tell you about the storm surge
• He’s going to tell you about the neighbor who didn’t have coverage
• He’s going to be sincere, well-informed, and factually correct about every single thing he says

And he’d still tell you the exact same thing if you lived in Nebraska.

That’s the situation you’re in when you search how to hire international employees.

The category is called Employer of Record — EOR for short.

For roughly $300-$700 per person per month, these companies become the legal employer of your hire in their country and handle payroll, benefits, and local compliance.

Now, pay attention: every single result you’re about to read is one of them.

The ads at the top.

The organic results underneath.

The “helpful guides” ranking on page one.

Even a fair chunk of the forum threads where a regular person seems to be sharing their experience — read the profile, they work there.

The Advice Is Coming From the People Selling the Answer

None of which means an EOR is wrong.

It means the advice on how to hire international employees is coming almost entirely from people who sell one specific answer.

And here’s the tell that nobody points out.

There are more than a dozen of these companies.

• All claiming deep legal expertise across 150, 180, 200 countries
• All at roughly the same price
• All with roughly the same feature list

If two-hundred-country legal mastery were actually the product, you could not have a dozen near-identical companies selling it, with another one launching next quarter.

Real expertise is scarce.

Scarce things have 2 or 3 providers.

Think about your own accountant for a second.

There are thousands of pages of tax code in ONE country, in their native language, and knowing it is their entire job — and they’d still tell you they know the parts that apply to you and make judgment calls on the rest.

Now multiply that by 200 countries. 200 languages. 200 legal systems that change whenever a government feels like it.

What these companies actually built is a solid payments platform and a good library of contract templates.

That has real value.

It is not the same thing as a lawyer in every country on earth who knows your situation.

When the EOR Math Stops Working

Now, here’s where most articles tell you an EOR makes sense, and where I think most articles are wrong.

The standard advice goes: if you want to hire a full-time employee in Germany, France, or Spain, use an EOR to handle the strict labor law.

Run the numbers on that.

Those countries have strict labor law because they have expensive statutory benefits.

• Mandatory employer contributions
• Long notice periods
• Severance obligations
• Extended paid leave
• Thirteenth-month payments in some markets

Stack all of that on top of a Western European salary, then add the EOR’s monthly fee on top of THAT.

You don’t come out ahead.

You’ve built a US-cost hire with more paperwork.

Here’s the deal: if a role has to be a full employee in Western Europe, you probably have a business reason that has nothing to do with talent — a physical office, a local market you’re selling into, a regulatory requirement.

Fine.

That’s a real reason.

But if you’re hiring in Germany because you want a great person and you heard the talent is good there?

You’re paying a massive premium for a passport.

The Real Cost Follows Geography, Not Nationality

And there’s a structural piece most people miss.

The United States is one of only 2 countries in the world that taxes its citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they live — the other is Eritrea.

More than 190 countries tax based on residence, not citizenship. Which means a professional’s tax exposure follows where they LIVE.

Not the flag on their passport, and not where your company is registered.

So the expensive-country problem isn’t really about the person.

It’s about the geography they’re sitting in.

The expensive-country problem was never about who you hire international employees from — it’s about where they sit.

Hire someone living in Southeast Asia, Latin America, or Eastern Europe and none of the Western European statutory machinery enters the picture at all — because it was never about who they are, it was about where they are.

Nobody selling you a $500-a-month compliance subscription is going to lead with that.

And to be clear, because it needs saying: none of this is legal or tax advice.

I’m a staffing guy, not an attorney and not a CPA.

Everything in this article is what I’ve observed across 1,100+ placements and a decade of living and operating abroad.

Your situation has details I don’t know about.

Talk to a qualified professional about your specific setup before you make decisions — just make sure the professional you ask isn’t also the one selling you the policy.

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Which Country, For Which Role, At What Price

This is the section that should exist on every page covering this topic and somehow exists on none of them.

Everyone explains how to pay an international hire.

Almost nobody maps where to hire international employees worth paying.

After 1,100+ placements across 35 countries, here’s the honest map.

The Philippines

The strongest talent pool in the world for Executive Assistants, Virtual Assistants, Customer Support, and back-office operations.

Exceptional English, deep familiarity with US business culture, and a professional class that’s been working with Western companies for 2 decades.

Market rates: roughly $800-$1,800/month full-time depending on role and seniority.

A skilled Executive Assistant with years of experience supporting US executives lands in the middle of that range.

Eastern Europe

Ukraine, Poland, Serbia, Romania.

The highest technical floor of any offshore region.

This is where you find the Developer with a computer science degree, the Bookkeeper who’s a former CFO, the Project Manager who’s run distributed teams for a decade.

It’s also the most expensive offshore region — and worth every dollar for roles where quality compounds.

Market rates: $2,000-$5,000/month for Developers depending on stack and seniority.

Still 50-70% below the same seniority in the US.

Latin America

Colombia, Argentina, Mexico.

Full overlap with US business hours, which makes this the region for Client Success Managers, Sales roles, and anything where the person needs to be online when your customers are.

Communication warmth that US clients consistently comment on.

Market rates: between the Philippines and Eastern Europe, generally $1,200-$3,000/month depending on role.

South Africa

Native English, a strong professional services culture, and time zone overlap with both Europe and the US East Coast.

Underrated for client-facing roles, customer support, and finance work, largely because most US companies have never thought to look there.

Less competition for the talent means better people at better rates.

Market rates: generally in the same band as Latin America, $1,200-$3,000/month depending on role.

The Middle East and North Africa

The region most US companies skip entirely, which is exactly why there’s value in it.

Turkey has real talent, but the inflation over the past several years has made compensation a moving target.

What was a strong salary when you signed the contract can be worth substantially less by the time you’re 12 months in.

If you hire there, plan for regular reviews rather than an annual one.

Lebanon has low salary expectations and capable professionals, but the instability is real and it affects everything downstream — banking, power, internet, whether someone can reliably show up on a Tuesday.

Go in with your eyes open.

Egypt is where we’ve found genuine hidden gems.

Strong English in the professional class, large university-educated talent pool, rates that compete with Southeast Asia, and a time zone that overlaps well with Europe and reaches into the US morning.

Most companies have never looked here, which means you’re not bidding against 30 other employers for the same person.

South Asia

There’s talent in India and Pakistan.

There’s also the highest variance of any region — the widest gap between the resume and the reality.

If you hire here, your vetting process is doing all the work.

If you don’t have one, this is where you’ll learn why you needed one.

One more thing about all of these numbers: the salary is only half of the compensation conversation.

How you structure the pay — base versus performance, raises tied to what, benchmarked against which market — is what determines whether your hire is still with you in year three or fielding LinkedIn offers in month 6.

We’ve built comp structures for hundreds of these placements, and the ones that retain people follow patterns most first-time employers get backwards.

Region is only half of what determines whether your plan to hire international employees actually holds.

That’s a conversation, not a paragraph.

Book a call and we’ll walk you through what works for the specific role and region you’re hiring in.

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The Part Nobody Talks About: How Do You Know They’re Real?

Here’s the genuinely hard part of learning how to hire international employees.

It’s not the paperwork.

It’s this: you’re evaluating a person you will never meet, in a country you’ve never visited, whose references you can’t verify, whose degree you can’t check, competing against candidates using AI to write their applications, their cover letters, and in some cases their interview answers.

The flood is real.

A remote job posting pulls 2-3x the applications of a local one.

The resumes look identical because the same tools wrote them. And the failure modes are ones you’ve never had to screen for domestically.

1. The candidate whose English was flawless in the (scripted) interview and disappears in the (unscripted) 1 week.
2. The “senior” hire who is actually 3 years into their career with a padded resume nobody could check.
3. The star performer who quietly has 4 other full-time jobs.
4. The contractor who exits gracefully on paper — polite, professional, proper notice — and leaves behind absolutely nothing real.

International Hiring Removes the Usual Guardrails

Domestic hiring has guardrails you never think about.

• Shared context
• Verifiable employers
• Mutual connections on LinkedIn

Cross a border and every one of those guardrails disappears — and the screening process has to replace all of them.

Ours does.

Every candidate we present has gone through a 100-point rubric across 7 categories — a scoring system built over 10,000+ interviews, designed specifically for the failure modes above.

Score below 75, and the client never sees them.

Zero in any single category, and they’re out entirely, no matter how impressive the rest of the file looks.

If you want to see what that actually looks like in practice, book a call and we’ll walk you through it.

Here’s the thing: every hour of screening you skip before the hire becomes ten hours of cleanup after.

This is what actually separates companies that successfully hire international employees from the ones that try twice and quit.

The country doesn’t determine whether an international hire works out. The vetting does.

How Pablo Milandu Saved $60k by Hiring an Executive Assistant & Changed His Life in 3 Days

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One More Thing — Go Meet Them

If your business can afford it, get on a plane.

We’ve run multiple in-person meetups for the HireUA team over the years.

People who’d worked together for years over Slack and Zoom, sitting down at the same table for the first time.

Two days.

That’s all it takes. And what comes out of those 2 days is something you cannot manufacture on a video call.

Inside jokes. Shared meals.

The thing where someone tells a story about their kid and suddenly they’re not a Slack avatar anymore.

The loyalty that comes out of that is real, and it shows up months later in ways you can measure.

People who’ve broken bread with you don’t ghost you.

They don’t quietly take the competing offer without at least giving you a chance to match it.

They stay.

Most companies won’t do this.

It costs money and it takes a weekend and there’s no line item on the P&L that says “loyalty.”

Do it anyway.

It’s the single highest-return thing I’ve ever spent money on with a remote team.

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Is It Even Ethical to Hire Overseas?

Let’s address the elephant, because some of you are carrying it quietly.

“Aren’t you taking jobs away from Americans?”

It’s the question people carry quietly into every decision to hire international employees.

Here’s my answer.

The politicians who wag their finger at you for hiring two Developers overseas are the same ones who voted for trade policies that shipped entire industries abroad — hundreds of thousands of jobs at a time.

You, the small business owner hiring an Executive Assistant from the Philippines, are not the villain of that story.

You’re not even in that story.

And look at what actually happens with these hires.

Your hire earns 2-3x their local market rate.

A $1,500/month salary is an upper-middle-class life in Manila.

A $4,000/month Developer salary in Ukraine supports an entire extended family.

You’re not exploiting anyone — you’re one of the best employers that person has ever had.

Your business survives.

The alternative to the $2,000/month hire usually isn’t a $70,000 American hire.

It’s no hire.

The role goes unfilled, the founder keeps drowning, and the business stays small — creating zero jobs anywhere.

And the American jobs that matter get created anyway.

Every business we’ve helped scale with international talent has ended up hiring MORE domestically as it grew — senior roles, client-facing roles, leadership.

The overseas hire didn’t replace an American.

It funded the growth that created the American roles.

The guilt was manufactured by people who don’t live by it.

Drop it and go build your company.

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How to Hire International Employees in 5 Days

Here’s how it works with us.

Book a call.

Tell us what you need — not the job title, the actual work.

• What does Tuesday look like?
• What tools do you live in?
• What went wrong with the last person?

We present candidates within 5 business days.

Sourced from 35 countries, matched to your role, your budget, and your time zone.

Every one scored on the 100-point rubric.

Below 75, you never see them.

You interview. You choose.

Your call, your decision.

We handle the contract structure, the comp benchmarking, and the onboarding support.

One-year replacement guarantee.

If the placement doesn’t work out within the first 12 months — for any reason — we replace them.

Not 90 days.

Not 6 months.

A year.

Double the industry standard, because our screening means we almost never have to pay it out.

• No visa
• No lottery
• No $100,000 toll booth

That’s how to hire international employees without a single immigration form.

Just the person you actually needed, working for you by the end of the month, from the city where she already wanted to live.

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FAQ

Do I need a visa to hire an international employee?

Only if the person is physically relocating to your country.

If they’re working remotely from their own country — which is how the overwhelming majority of international hiring works today — no visa is involved.

Immigration law applies to where a person lives, not who pays them.

How much does it cost to sponsor an H-1B visa in 2026?

As of July 2026, new H-1B petitions for workers outside the US carry a $100,000 fee under a 2025 presidential proclamation — currently in litigation, currently being collected.

That’s on top of standard filing fees, attorney costs, and the lottery itself, which is now wage-weighted to favor the highest-paying petitions.

By February 2026, only 85 companies nationwide had paid the fee.

Check the current status before acting on any of this — it’s changing by the month.

Is it legal to hire international workers as contractors?

Millions of businesses work with international professionals who are registered as sole proprietors in their own countries — it’s the standard structure for independent work in most of the world.

The professional handles their own taxes and compliance where they live.

Your side is a contract, an invoice, and a conversation with your CPA about your specific situation.

The cleaner the relationship looks on paper AND in practice — deliverables, invoices, real independence — the cleaner everything stays.

Do I need an Employer of Record (EOR)?

Sometimes.

If you need a full-time employee with statutory benefits in a country with strict labor law — Germany, France, Spain — and you have no local entity, an EOR is the practical route, and it’s still far cheaper than a comparable US hire.

For contractors in regions like Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, most businesses we work with don’t use one.

What’s the best country to hire international employees from?

Depends entirely on the role.

There is no best country to hire international employees from — only a best country for your specific role, budget, and time zone.

• The Philippines for admin, support, and operations.
• Eastern Europe for technical and senior roles.
• Latin America for timezone-critical and client-facing roles.

How much should I pay an international employee?

Enough that you’re a great employer in their market, benchmarked against their alternatives — not against what the role costs in Ohio.

Underpay against their local market and you’ll lose them to the next LinkedIn message.

The structure of the comp matters as much as the number, and it’s one of the main things we build with clients on a call.

Is it ethical to hire internationally instead of locally?

You’re paying someone 2-3x their local market rate for work they’re excellent at, filling a role that likely would have gone unfilled otherwise, and funding growth that creates more jobs on both sides of the ocean.

Hire the best person for the role and sleep fine.

How long does it take to hire an international employee?

Through us: candidates in 5 business days, most placements operational within 2-3 weeks.

On your own through job boards: 4-8 weeks of sorting through AI-written applications, if it works at all.

Through the visa route: multiple quarters to multiple years, plus a lottery.