Hiring in Argentina 2026: Salary, Taxes & Aguinaldo Guide

Hiring an employee in Argentina on a gross salary of ARS 3,600,000 per month costs an employer roughly ARS 60.5 million per year, or about USD 40,300 at the early-August 2026 wholesale rate of approximately ARS 1,500 to the dollar. That is 1.40x the twelve months of base salary you write into the offer letter, before any recruitment spend.

Argentina offers a deep engineering and business-services talent market, a working day that overlaps with North America, and salary levels well below US and Western European benchmarks, alongside one of the more intricate payroll regimes in Latin America. That regime changed substantially in 2026: Ley 27.802, the Modernización Laboral law, was published on 6 March 2026 and rewrote rules on severance calculation, working time, vacation scheduling, collective bargaining, and payment currency.

This guide sets out what an Argentine hire actually costs: statutory employer contributions, the entitlements you fund directly, the liabilities that crystallise only on termination, and the one-time spend that lands in year one. Every input figure is linked to its source. Model your own numbers with Multiplier’s employee cost calculator.

How much does it cost to hire an employee in Argentina? (Quick benchmark)

The table below models the ongoing annual employer cost for three seniority levels, using gross monthly salary medians from the Sysarmy 2026.1 salary survey analysed by OpenQube. It assumes a services company above the revenue threshold (26.4% statutory rate), an office risk ART policy at 2.0%, and an employee with under five years of service.

The multiplier holds steady across salary bands because Argentine employer contributions are uncapped. There is no ceiling above which employer cost stops accruing, which is the opposite of the position for employees, whose 17% contribution is capped at a monthly base of ARS 4,414,652.38 as of 1 June 2026.

Two variables move the multiplier. A company outside the services and commerce categories, or inside them but below the annual revenue thresholds, pays 24% rather than 26.4%, bringing the multiplier down to roughly 1.37x. A higher-risk ART policy or an applicable collective agreement with employer-side contributions pushes it toward 1.42x.

Where location does and does not change your cost

Argentine statutory employer contributions are set federally and apply identically in Ushuaia and in Palermo. There is no provincial payroll-rate variation of the kind seen in markets with decentralised minimum wages. The national minimum wage is a single figure, set at ARS 376,600 per month for August 2026 under Resolución 9/2025, with an hourly floor of ARS 1,883.

What location does change is the market rate you have to pay, and the depth of the pool you are recruiting from. Formal employment in knowledge-based services is heavily concentrated: according to Argendata’s analysis of Ministry of Labour OEDE data, the City of Buenos Aires accounted for 58.2% of formal knowledge-based services employment in 2022, despite holding about 7% of the national population.

Salaries in CABA sit above the national median for equivalent roles, and hubs including Córdoba, Rosario, and Mendoza generally price below it. Consistent published salary differentials by province are thin, so treat regional discounts as directional and validate them against live offers rather than budgeting a fixed percentage.

What is the total cost of employment in Argentina?

Ongoing employer cost has four components. Three are statutory and predictable. The fourth depends on what you choose to offer.

• Gross salary and the 13th month: The Sueldo Anual Complementario (SAC), universally called the aguinaldo, is an additional month of pay each year, paid in two instalments in June and December under Articles 121 and 122 of the LCT. It equates to 8.33% of annual base salary and attracts full employer contributions, so its true cost is closer to 10.5% once contributions are layered on.
• The vacation premium: Vacation pay in Argentina is calculated on a divisor of 25 rather than 30, under Article 155 of the Ley de Contrato de Trabajo. Each vacation day therefore costs about 20% more than an ordinary working day. On 14 days of leave that adds roughly 0.8% to annual salary cost, rising to about 1.9% for an employee with more than 20 years of service and 35 days of entitlement.
• Employer contributions: Covered in detail below.
• Discretionary benefits: Private health top-ups, transport and connectivity allowances, and training budgets.

The table below shows the full ongoing model for the ARS 3,600,000 per month senior hire used throughout this guide.

Severance and notice pay are deliberately absent from this table. They are conditional liabilities triggered by a specific event, and treating them as a recurring line item overstates your run-rate. They are covered separately below.

Salary benchmarks in Argentina

Two features of the Argentine market matter more than the headline numbers.

First, peso figures move fast. Inflation was 1.9% in June 2026, with a year-on-year rate of 33.5% and around 16.8% accumulated over the first half of the year. Salary benchmarks in pesos have a short shelf life, and any multi-year model needs an indexation assumption rather than a fixed figure.

Second, part-dollarised pay is now common at senior levels. Sysarmy found that medians for semi-senior and senior profiles vary by as much as 44% depending on whether pay is entirely in pesos or partly dollar-linked. Ley 27.802 explicitly permits salary payment in foreign currency as well as pesos, which gives employers a legitimate route to stabilise a compensation package that would otherwise need repricing every quarter.

Mandatory employer costs when hiring in Argentina

Sector collective agreements can add further employer-side contributions on top of the above, so the applicable agreement is worth checking for any specific role.

PwC confirms the 26.4% and 24% split: the higher rate applies to companies mainly engaged in services or trade whose annual sales exceed thresholds updated each year, currently ARS 26,655,990,000 for services and ARS 84,070,280,000 for trade. Every other private employer pays 24%.

Two smaller mechanics are worth knowing. Employers deduct a fixed detracción of ARS 7,003.68 per employee per month from the contribution base under Article 22 of Ley 27.541. At senior salary levels this is immaterial, worth about ARS 22,000 a year, but for lower-paid roles it is a meaningful reduction. And the SCVO premium is pegged at 5.5 times the minimum wage, giving an insured sum of ARS 2,071,300 and a premium of ARS 424.62 per employee per month from 1 March 2026.

Employees separately contribute 17% of gross pay, split 11% to the pension fund, 3% to health, and 3% to social services, subject to the monthly cap noted above. That 17% is withheld from the employee’s gross salary and is not an employer cost. It is a common modelling error to add it to the employer side.

The Fondo de Asistencia Laboral, effective 1 November 2026

Ley 27.802 created the Fondo de Asistencia Laboral (FAL), a pre-funded mechanism for severance payments held in individual accounts supervised by the securities regulator. Decreto 408/2026, published on 1 June 2026, set the start date at 1 November 2026.

The contribution is 1% of the SIPA base for large companies and 2.5% for micro, small, and medium enterprises, with scope for the executive to raise those to 1.5% and 3%. The point that most commentary gets wrong: the FAL contribution is deductible from the employer social security contributions you already pay. PwC states plainly that it will not increase employer social security contributions but will be deducted from those currently paid. Budget it as a reallocation of existing cost, not an increase.

Statutory leave obligations

Sick leave is the entitlement that catches foreign employers out. Argentina requires the employer, not a state insurer, to fund up to six months of full salary for non-work-related illness, and up to twelve months where the employee has dependants. A proposal to reduce this to 75% of salary was included in early drafts of the reform and removed during the legislative process, so the full-pay obligation stands.

Maternity leave runs the other way. The 90-day entitlement is funded by ANSES as a family allowance, so it does not hit your payroll, although you continue to hold the role open.

Ley 27.802 did loosen vacation scheduling. Leave can now be split into blocks of no fewer than seven days by agreement, the vacation window runs from 1 October to 30 April, and employees must be able to take a summer break once every three years.

Employee benefits and optional employer costs

The connectivity point has a real cash value. Because those payments sit outside the remuneration base, they attract neither the 26.4% employer contribution nor the 17% employee withholding, which makes them a more efficient way to deliver value than an equivalent salary increase.

External and hidden hiring costs

Recruitment

Recruitment agencies in Argentina work on success fees of 15% to 25% of the candidate’s first-year gross salary, in line with the regional norm. On the ARS 43.2 million annual base used here, a 20% fee is ARS 8.64 million, roughly USD 5,760. Local job boards including Bumeran, Computrabajo, and ZonaJobs cost far less per posting but require more internal screening time.

Onboarding and equipment

Hardware prices above US levels because of import duties. For planning, budget USD 1,500 to USD 2,500 for a laptop, monitor, and peripherals, plus annual software seats. These are modelling estimates rather than published figures, so validate them with local suppliers before committing a number to a board pack.

Year one versus steady state

Separating these two figures matters. A 1.68x number quoted as the cost of employment will make Argentina look considerably more expensive than it is, because recruitment and equipment do not recur.

Termination liabilities

Severance in Argentina is a conditional liability, and Ley 27.802 changed how it is calculated.

The probation period is six months under Ley 27.742, extendable by collective agreement to eight months in companies of 6 to 100 employees and twelve months in companies of up to five. Dismissal during probation does not trigger seniority-based severance.

After probation, notice is one month for employees with under five years of service and two months for employees with five years or more. Severance under Article 245 of the LCT remains one month’s pay per year of service or fraction exceeding three months.

Ley 27.802 rewrote how the calculation base is determined in three ways that matter to a cost model.

• It narrowed what counts: The SAC and bonuses that are not paid monthly are expressly excluded from the base. A concept now counts as habitual if it was earned in at least six months of the last calendar year, and variable pay is averaged over the last six months or the last year, whichever favours the employee.
• The ceiling on the base is three times the collective agreement average: The base cannot exceed three times the average of the remuneration set in the applicable collective agreement, a limit that has long existed in Article 245. Under the reform the figure is set by the parties to the agreement.
• The 67% figure is a floor, not a ceiling: Ley 27.802 wrote the Supreme Court’s 2004 Vizzoti doctrine into the statute: where the collective agreement ceiling would cut the base by more than a third, the base cannot fall below 67% of the employee’s actual best monthly remuneration. This protects the employee, and it raises employer exposure relative to applying the ceiling alone. It bites hardest for senior staff paid well above their collective agreement average, which describes most of the technology and management roles a foreign employer is likely to hire. A separate floor applies regardless: severance is never less than one month’s pay.

On the judgment side, Deloitte’s summary of the reform notes that labour credits are updated by the INDEC consumer price index plus 3% a year. That mechanism governs amounts claimed and awarded through the labour courts, so it is relevant to disputed terminations rather than to a settlement paid on time.

The law also states that payment of the severance indemnity constitutes the sole remedy, closing off further claims once it has been paid and received.

For a two-year employee at ARS 3,600,000 per month, indicative exposure is around ARS 7.2 million in seniority severance plus one month of notice, before accrued vacation and proportional SAC. From November 2026, the FAL will pre-fund part of this.

The reform is in force, and it is being challenged

Ley 27.802 is fully operative, but it has had a contested first six months and the constitutional question is still open. A labour court suspended more than 80 of its articles on 30 March 2026 at the request of the CGT trade union confederation. The Cámara Nacional de Apelaciones del Trabajo gave the state’s appeal suspensive effect on 23 April, and on 8 May a federal administrative judge set the injunction aside entirely, restoring the suspended articles. The underlying claim that parts of the law are unconstitutional has not yet been decided.

For budgeting purposes, this changes nothing today: the current rules are the ones set out above. For contracting purposes, it is worth knowing that the severance provisions in particular sit under an unresolved challenge, and that a first-instance judge has already found them arguably regressive. Long-term commitments priced on the post-reform severance base carry some risk of repricing.

Use the employee cost calculator

Statutory rates, minimum wage, and the FX rate move on different cycles in Argentina, which makes a static spreadsheet unreliable within a quarter. Multiplier’s employee cost calculator produces a current employer-cost breakdown for any country, covering contributions, benefits, and compliance costs.

Calculate your hiring costs →

How to reduce hiring costs in Argentina

Compare EOR against entity setup honestly: Incorporating means registrations with the IGJ and ARCA, notarial steps, and ongoing local accounting, payroll, and legal support. For a first hire or a team under roughly ten people, an employer of record in Argentina removes the setup cost and the fixed local overhead. New to the model? Start with what is an EOR.

Consolidate payroll and compliance: Argentina requires monthly F.931 filings to ARCA, ANSES contribution management, ART policy maintenance, and aguinaldo timing in June and December. Handling these through one provider removes the reconciliation work that produces most costly errors. The Argentina payroll guide sets out the filing calendar in detail.

Get the 24% versus 26.4% classification right: The difference is roughly 2.4 percentage points of every peso of payroll. Verify your classification and revenue position against the current thresholds rather than assuming the higher rate.

Benchmark to the local market: Anchoring an Argentine offer to a US band inflates cost with no recruitment benefit. Benchmark against Sysarmy and Randstad data for the specific role and city.

Use non-remunerative benefits where they exist: Work-related connectivity and equipment payments sit outside the contribution base, delivering employee value without the 26.4% uplift.

Why companies use Multiplier for hiring in Argentina

Hiring in Argentina means operating inside the LCT as amended by Ley 27.802, meeting monthly ARCA and ANSES obligations, maintaining ART cover, and preparing for the FAL in November 2026. Multiplier acts as employer of record in Argentina through its own local entity rather than routing the relationship through a third-party partner, which means one organisation holds statutory liability for the employment.

• Owned entity, direct liability. Multiplier operates through 160+ owned entities and is the legal employer of record in the markets it serves, with in-house legal and compliance teams in market.
• Transparent pricing: Multiplier offers transparent pricing with no hidden fees, ensuring that all applicable costs are disclosed upfront before the contract is signed.
• Dedicated support: One named Customer Success Manager (CSM) across all markets, backed by 24/7 human chat support.
• HRIS integration. Real-time sync with Workday, BambooHR, HiBob, Personio, and UKG.
• Contractor management where it fits. Where a genuine contractor relationship is appropriate, engaging contractors in Argentina through a Contractor of Record keeps classification defensible under the LCT’s subordination test.

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