TL;DR
- The minimum share capital is one dirham. Capital was never the barrier you were told about.
- Corporate income tax is 20% under 100m MAD of taxable income, over a 0.25% floor on turnover that is waived for your first 36 months.
- Employer social charges come to roughly 21% of gross salary. That line costs more than the tax line, and most spreadsheets miss it.
- The bill nobody quotes at the start: 800 to 2,500 MAD a month to keep the filings correct, for as long as the company exists.
Short version: registering is cheap and takes about three weeks. Running it is the part that costs, and the part everyone budgets last.
Most foreign owners arrive with the wrong number in their head. Either they have read somewhere that Morocco demands a large paid-up capital, or they have been quoted a single incorporation fee and assumed that was the whole bill. Neither survives contact with the actual filing calendar.
The interesting costs in a Moroccan SARL are not the ones you pay once. They are the ones that repeat every month for as long as the company exists.
The capital requirement is not the obstacle
The minimum share capital for a SARL, the Moroccan limited liability company, is one dirham. That is not a rounding of a larger figure. The floor was removed, and what remains is a formality.
There is one threshold worth knowing. If you set the capital above 100,000 dirhams, a quarter of it has to be blocked in a bank account at incorporation. Below that line, nothing is blocked. A great many owners set capital at 10,000 or 100,000 dirhams for exactly this reason, and because a one dirham company reads badly to a bank or a supplier looking at your registration certificate.
A SARL takes between one and fifty partners. A single owner uses the SARL AU variant, which behaves the same way for tax and filing purposes.
Registration, and how long it really takes
The sequence is fixed: a negative certificate reserving the company name, articles of association, capital deposit if you crossed the threshold, registration with the Trade Registry, a tax identification number, CNSS affiliation for social security, then the legal announcements.
Done cleanly, the formalities themselves run under two weeks. In practice most local firms quote 15 to 25 days end to end, and the gap between those two figures is almost always the same thing: waiting on a document from somewhere else. Budget for the longer number and treat the shorter one as luck.
Two corporate tax rates and a floor underneath them
Morocco has spent several years converging a messy schedule of corporate income tax rates into something simpler. Where it landed:
| Taxable income | Corporate income tax |
|---|---|
| Under 100 million MAD | 20% |
| 100 million MAD and above | 35% |
| Credit institutions, insurers, Bank Al-Maghrib, CDG | 40% |
Almost every company reading this sits in the first row.
Underneath both rates sits the cotisation minimale, a floor of 0.25% of turnover that applies whether or not the company made a profit. It is not charged during the first 36 months of operation, which matters more than it sounds: a business that spends two years building before it earns anything is not paying a percentage of nothing.
VAT works on three tiers. The standard rate is 20%. A reduced 10% covers urban and passenger transport, insurance, water and sewerage, renewable electricity and a short list of goods. Exports and pharmaceuticals are zero rated.
Payroll is where the percentage actually bites
Corporate tax gets the attention. Social contributions cost more.
CNSS contributions on gross salary run to roughly 21% on the employer side once family allocation, social allocation, professional tax and mandatory medical care are added together. The employee side is around 6.7%. The social allocation component is capped at a monthly salary of 6,000 dirhams, so on higher salaries the effective rate falls, but the medical care and family allocation components are not capped.
If you are modelling a Moroccan operation against a European one, this is the line where the comparison gets interesting, and it is the line most spreadsheets get wrong.
The recurring cost most plans leave out
Every one of the obligations above produces a filing. Bookkeeping to the CGNC national chart of accounts, periodic VAT declarations, corporate tax returns, monthly CNSS and AMO payroll declarations, annual accounts. None of it is optional and none of it is occasional.
Ask for a monthly retainer rather than an hourly rate, because the work is monthly. A Tangier practice advertising under the local search term Comptable Tanger quotes between 800 and 2,500 dirhams excluding tax per month for an active SARL, with the position in that range set by transaction volume and headcount rather than by the size of your balance sheet. Firms at that level normally fold incorporation, domiciliation and trademark registration with OMPIC into the same relationship, which is worth asking about before you appoint anyone, since paying three providers for one company’s paperwork is how small operations end up with expensive administration.
A company that trades, employs and imports will sit near the top of that range. A holding company that files and does little else will sit near the bottom.
Why so many of these companies register in Tangier
Location choice inside Morocco is not neutral, and the northern corridor has pulled ahead for reasons that show up in port statistics rather than in brochures.
Tanger Med handled over 11 million containers in 2025, against a nominal capacity of 9 million TEU across four terminals, on 3,600 metres of quay at 18 metres depth. The vehicle terminals process up to a million cars a year with direct links to 24 countries. A port running above its stated container capacity is a port with real demand behind it.
Add the trade agreements. The United States and Morocco have had a free trade agreement since 2006, and by 2016 it had eliminated tariffs on 95% of consumer and industrial goods. Around 150 American firms now operate in the country. For a manufacturer or a logistics business, the combination of the port, the free zones around it and the tariff position is the entire argument.
For a services business with no physical goods, none of that applies, and you should choose your city on staff availability instead.
A rough first year
| Item | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Share capital | 1 MAD minimum; 25% blocked above 100,000 MAD |
| Incorporation formalities | Quoted as a package; 15 to 25 days |
| Monthly accounting | 800 to 2,500 MAD excluding tax |
| Corporate income tax | 20% under 100m MAD taxable income |
| Minimum contribution | 0.25% of turnover, waived for 36 months |
| Employer social charges | Around 21% of gross salary |
The pattern is consistent. Setting the company up is cheap and quick. Running it correctly is neither expensive nor difficult, but it is relentless, and it is the part that gets outsourced.
Three things to settle before you register
Decide your capital figure with your bank rather than your lawyer, because the bank is who will judge it.
Decide whether you are hiring in Morocco in year one, because the answer changes your cost model far more than your tax rate does.
Decide who is doing the monthly file before the first declaration falls due, not after. Late filings in a new company are almost always the result of nobody having been appointed, rather than anybody having failed.