The Institute for Reducing the Shadow Economy, Improving Tax and Customs Administration, and Fiscal Analysis under the Ministry of Economy and Finance has proposed introducing a unified approach to paying social tax for individual entrepreneurs and self-employed individuals. The initiative was presented on July 30 during a fiscal dialogue.
Currently, both categories use the same base — one times the basic calculation value (412,000 soums, increasing to 440,000 soums from September 1), but payments are made with different frequencies. According to Part 1 of Article 408 of the Tax Code, individual entrepreneurs are required to pay at least 1 BCV per month, i.e., 5.28 million soums per year.
Under Part 2 of the same article, self-employed individuals may voluntarily pay social tax in the amount of 1 BCV per year to have that period counted toward their work experience. After the BCV increase, their annual payment will be 440,000 soums, approximately 36,700 soums per month. Thus, as noted in the presentation, the burden on individual entrepreneurs is 12 times higher than on the self-employed.
For reference: unlike the self-employed, individual entrepreneurs can hire up to five employees and engage in retail trade. Therefore, the difference in mandatory social payments between these categories is partly explained by the broader opportunities and scale of activity of individual entrepreneurs.
The Institute recommended abandoning two parallel regimes with a large difference in payment amounts and moving to a single category of self-employed. International practice is cited as a benchmark, where contributions are usually tied to declared income or the minimum wage.
It is proposed to calculate the minimum social tax not from the BCV, but from the minimum wage (MW). The payment could be 12% of the MW, as provided for the base rate of social tax in Article 405 of the Tax Code. With the MW at 1.36 million soums, this would amount to 163,200 soums per month or about 1.96 million soums per year.
This is approximately 4.45 times more than the current voluntary payment for the self-employed (about 36,700 soums per month). At the same time, the proposed amount is 2.7 times less than the minimum payment that individual entrepreneurs will make after the BCV increase.
The Institute proposes not to introduce this targeted payment all at once. At the first stage, the monthly contribution could be about 50,000 soums. Then it is proposed to gradually increase it to 163,200 soums according to a set schedule.
The presented initiative is an analytical proposal of the Institute and does not have the status of an adopted decision or draft law. As of July 1, 2026, there were 375,100 individual entrepreneurs operating in the country. The number of self-employed, according to various data, ranges from 2.8 million to 5.5 million.
According to economist Otabek Bakirov, when revising the social tax, the principle of fairness should be applied not only to individual entrepreneurs and the self-employed, but also to enterprises using benefits or a reduced rate of 1%. He proposed considering the introduction of a minimum mandatory payment for such entities, similar to the procedure for paying land tax and property tax.
“Power becomes justice only when it is applied equally to the weak and the small, and to the strong and the large. Then trust in this justice is created,” the economist said.
In mid-July, it became known that the government plans to make pension contributions for the self-employed mandatory as well. Currently, 2.8 million self-employed individuals are registered in Uzbekistan, but only about 800,000 of them, or 30%, voluntarily pay the relevant contributions. Under the current procedure, a self-employed person can pay 1 BCV — 412,000 soums — and receive one year of work experience for pension assignment.
Source: www.gazeta.uz