The number of registered self-employed people in Russia has reached 10 million. The Federal Tax Service (FTS) announced this on Monday, April 8.
“During the experiment, self-employed people registered 3.6 trillion rubles in income, generated more than 1.9 billion checks and paid taxes for 141 billion rubles. The average check today is 1,904 rubles. Since 2019, it has grown by 70%,” says a press release from the Federal Tax Service.
The self-employed include people who work for themselves, receive money for their services from individuals and legal entities, do not have an employer and do not attract additional workers to their activities. The annual income of citizens with this status should not exceed 2.4 million rubles.
Self-employed people pay professional income tax (PIT). When working with individuals, the rate is 4%, and when paying with individual entrepreneurs and organizations - 6%. In addition, program participants are exempt from paying insurance premiums and the need to maintain reports.
“The self-employed mode is in great demand among the population. The main reasons are a comfortable tax rate and the absence of the need to submit an income tax return. All that is required is to record your cash receipts in a special application, and on the required date you will be charged the tax that must be paid. The mechanism is quite convenient and reasonable in terms of tax rates, which attracts more and more people to join the program,” Anna Gondusova, director of client relations at Alfa Capital Management Company, told RT.
You can obtain self-employed status using the “My Tax” mobile application, on the Federal Tax Service website, through a bank or a government services portal. At the same time, registered participants in the program are automatically provided with a tax deduction in the amount of 10 thousand rubles.
“In addition, self-employed people can receive 30 thousand rubles for professional retraining or advanced training. Also, if you have a well-thought-out business plan, you can apply for financial assistance in the amount of up to 350 thousand rubles to open your own business. If the funds received are not enough, you can apply to the Entrepreneurship Support Fund for a soft loan in the amount of up to 500 thousand rubles, the rates for which are on average 3-5%,” Olga Lebedinskaya, associate professor of the Department of Statistics of the Plekhanov Russian Economic University, noted in an interview with RT.
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Over the past year, the number of self-employed people in Russia has increased almost one and a half times. The confident growth of the indicator is associated with the desire of an increasing number of citizens to “come out of the shadows and obtain legal status,” says Pavel Sigal, first vice-president of the all-Russian public organization of small and medium-sized businesses “Support of Russia”.
“This can be done very quickly. Today, tax administration is quite well established in Russia, and people who become entrepreneurs understand that it is better to work in white and to work honestly. Another advantage is that in this way you create a financial history for yourself, due to which it will later be easier to get a loan from a bank,” added Segal.
To help business
According to the Federal Tax Service, the most popular activities of the self-employed are taxi and beauty services, cargo transportation, repairs, marketing, tutoring, renting out apartments and selling products of their own production. In addition, a number of NAP payers work in the IT sector and the advertising industry.
“Many employers are interested in cooperation with the self-employed. The fact is that the company must pay taxes on its own for all its full-time employees, as well as pay for vacations. When working with the self-employed, there is no such obligation, and such workers pay tax on professional income for themselves,” noted Olga Lebedinskaya.
As of the end of autumn 2023, approximately half of the representatives of small and medium-sized businesses used the services of the self-employed with varying regularity. Most often, entrepreneurs and companies from the fields of IT, tourism, housing and communal services, consulting, transportation and catering resorted to this form of cooperation, according to the results of a survey by Support of Russia.
“In more than half of the cases, self-employed people are involved in temporary projects, one-time work, or individual tasks are outsourced to them. They are less likely to be hired for remote work (33.4%) or seasonal work (17.1%),” the study says.
Coming out of the shadows
It is noteworthy that more than half of the self-employed registered today did not declare their income at all. At the same time, the number of NAP payers continues to grow steadily: according to the Federal Tax Service, over 8.5 thousand people join the program every day.
“The project continues its development based on the synthesis of the wishes of citizens and the implementation of the goals and objectives of the state. Its introduction gave an additional impetus to the development of entrepreneurship and led to the receipt of additional revenues into the budget. This tool made it possible to effectively whitewash the shadow market,” the department emphasized.
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It is assumed that the experiment will operate until 2028 inclusive. As noted by the Federal Tax Service, tax rates for the self-employed will not change during this entire period. At the same time, given the growing popularity of the initiative, the authorities do not exclude the possibility of its extension in the future.
“This is the most serious legalization. People believed it, people felt comfortable. And of course, in this sense, we need to continue to look at the results... Together we will sum up the results. Let the experiment pass for a period of time, and then we’ll decide together. Of course, we will extend it, but the conditions will need to be discussed,” said Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.
Let us recall that from January 1, 2019, Russians began paying NAP in Moscow, the Moscow and Kaluga regions, as well as in the Republic of Tatarstan. In 2020, a special tax regime for the self-employed began working in all other regions, and from 2023, the initiative began to operate in the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, as well as in the city of Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
Moreover, not only Russians, but also citizens of other countries can join the project. In particular, we are talking about the member countries of the Eurasian Economic Union (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), as well as Ukraine.
By the beginning of March of this year, the most self-employed people were registered in Moscow (1.61 million people), Moscow region (681 thousand) and St. Petersburg (638 thousand). In addition, the program is popular in the Krasnodar Territory (477 thousand people), Tatarstan (317 thousand), Rostov (284 thousand) and Sverdlovsk (279 thousand) regions, as well as in Dagestan (272 thousand).