Create a company in Cyprus — or move your company from Egypt

Egypt taxes company profit at 22.5% and Cyprus at 15%, so relocating a business from Egypt to Cyprus closes a gap of 7.5 percentage points — not the 10 that older pages still quote, because Cyprus raised its own rate this year. The bigger prize is what a euro-denominated EU company does for an Egyptian founder's currency risk, banking and European customers.

Updated for 2026 Cyprus tax law and regulations.

From Egypt to Cyprus, with one partner carrying the company, the books and every filing

Sumly is the one-stop, fully digitalized way for a founder in Egypt to create a Cyprus company, move the business into it and run it from the first day it exists. The incorporation, the books opened the day you order, every Cyprus return prepared box by box, the tax residency and non-dom application: one partner, one dashboard, four published prices — instead of a corporate services firm for the formation, an accountant for the books, and nobody at all for the join between them.

This is Sumly — and what we actually do for you

Sumly is the fully digital provider for founders moving a company to Cyprus. You do not need to learn Cypriot company law, find a local auditor, or work out which form goes where. You get in touch, and we do the rest.

And we stay with you on both sides of the move. The Cyprus side we own outright. For the side you are leaving, we put you straight in front of an adviser or lawyer from our network who works on exactly your problem — company law, exit taxation, inheritance, employment — and we hold the thread between them and us. One point of contact for the whole move, however many specialisms your case turns out to touch. If your case is simple, we do all of it for a fixed price.

Part 1: What leaving actually costs you

Your home country does not let go the moment the plane does. What still runs after you have left, and in which order it has to be handled.

How much tax does moving a business from Egypt to Cyprus actually save?

Seven and a half percentage points on the company rate, and that is the whole of the headline story. Egypt charges 22.5% of net annual profits, with the base rounded down to the nearest ten pounds, and Cyprus charges 15% from tax year 2026.

Almost every page still calls that a ten-point gap, because almost every page was written when Cyprus was on 12.5%. It is not any more. If a provider quotes you 12.5%, you have learned something useful about how recently they read the law.

Seven and a half points is real money and worth having. It is also, for a founder in Egypt, not the reason to move, and we would rather open by saying so than have you discover it three sections in. The reason to move is that a Cyprus company's balance sheet stops being denominated in a currency whose convertibility has, within living memory, been set by circular — and that a Cyprus company is an EU company, with everything that carries for European customers, European banks and European buyers. The rate is a bonus on top of that argument, not the argument itself.

The distribution side widens the gap a little. When an Egyptian company pays a dividend on unlisted shares the charge is 10% without deduction of any costs, falling to 5% where the securities are listed on the Egyptian Exchange. In Cyprus a non-domiciled shareholder is outside the Special Defence Contribution on dividends for 17 years and meets only the health contribution, at 2.65% on income up to €180,000 a year. Stack the two layers and a fully distributed Egyptian profit meets roughly 30% in total, against roughly 17% through a Cyprus company held by a non-dom.

And there is one place where Cyprus does not narrow the gap but jumps it: income from qualifying intellectual property under the Cyprus IP Box carries an effective rate of 3% from tax year 2026. For a software business with most of its profit in licensed code, that single line is larger than everything else on this page combined.

Did Law 151 of 2026 change Egypt's corporate rate?

No — and the confusion is worth clearing up, because it is the kind of error that gets repeated until it becomes received wisdom.

Law 151 of 2026 repealed Article 49 bis. It did not touch Article 49, whose first paragraph is where the 22.5% lives, and which was last replaced by Law 96 of 2015. Anyone telling you the Egyptian corporate rate moved in July 2026 has read the repealing clause and misidentified which article went. Every income-tax amending instrument the Tax Authority publishes carries its own list of replaced articles, and the 22.5% has survived all of them: Law 26 of 2020, Law 199 of 2020, Law 30 of 2023, Law 175 of 2023, Law 7 of 2024 and Law 151 of 2026 amend other provisions and leave that one standing.

One qualification, and we will state it rather than round it away. Egypt applies materially higher special rates to petroleum exploration and production, the Suez Canal Authority and the Central Bank. Those rates sit in paragraphs of Article 49 that no amending law has ever replaced, so they exist only in the original consolidated text, which the Tax Authority publishes as a scanned image. They are also irrelevant to a founder-owned trading company, which is why this guide names them without printing a figure it cannot verify.

VAT is the other running cost and it is lighter than Cyprus. The Tax Authority's own English text of the VAT Law sets the standard rate at 14% as of the beginning of fiscal year 2017/2018, with machinery and equipment used in production at 5% and exports zero-rated. Cyprus runs 19% on a registration threshold of €15,600. On rate alone Egypt wins that comparison, and what the 19% buys is covered further down: it is not a discount, it is membership.

Egypt operates a mandatory VAT registration threshold of its own. We are not printing a figure for it, because it sits in the registration articles and the Executive Regulations and no Tax Authority page we could read states it — check the current number with the ETA rather than with a blog.

Why does Egyptian personal tax jump so hard above EGP 600,000?

Because Egypt's personal income tax is not a marginal ladder, and this is the single most-misunderstood thing about it. Every calculator we could find on the public web models it as one, and every one of them is wrong above EGP 600,000 of net income.

The schedule in Article 8 as replaced by Law 7 of 2024 is a matrix, not a stack. The columns are total annual net income; each cell says which slice the row's rate applies to. As total income crosses each threshold, the lowest surviving bracket is not merely exhausted — it is deleted, and its slice is absorbed by the band above.

Read the last column and you will see why the arithmetic surprises people. A founder with EGP 1,250,000 of net income has no 0% band, no 10%, no 15%, no 20% and no 22.5% band. They pay 25% from the first pound to 1,200,000 and 27.5% on the rest — an effective rate of about 25.05%, where a naive marginal calculation would produce something in the high teens. Amounts are figured after rounding total annual net income down to the nearest ten pounds, and the personal exemption is EGP 20,000.

That exemption is worth one further sentence, because it says something about the decade. It was EGP 9,000 in 2020, EGP 15,000 in 2023 and EGP 20,000 from 2024 — roughly doubled in four years, over a period in which the pound roughly halved against the dollar. Compare Cyprus, where the personal bands run 0% to €22,000 rising to 35% above €72,000 and every band below the one you reach is preserved, in the ordinary way.

What did July 2026 change for capital gains on Egyptian shares?

More than any other event in this guide, and almost nothing published anywhere reflects it yet. Three laws — 150, 151 and 153 of 2026 — appeared in the same issue of the Official Gazette, No. 30 bis (A) of 28 July 2026, and took effect the day after publication.

Gains on listed shares are now exempt. Law 151 of 2026 added a new item to the article governing individuals' commercial profits and replaced the matching exemption item for legal persons, in identical terms, to exempt capital gains realised from the disposal of securities listed on the Egyptian Exchange. The 10% charge that had applied to listed-securities gains since 2023 was repealed outright in the same law.

Two riders are easy to miss and both bite. Losses on listed disposals are dead: the exemption is one-directional, so a loss is neither deductible nor carried forward. And a disposal that causes the company's shares to be delisted is expressly outside the exemption — which is precisely the transaction a founder taking their company private is most likely to be in.

Three years of unpaid listed-share tax were waived. The same law provides that unpaid capital gains tax on disposals of EGX-listed shares during the period from 16 June 2023 until this Law comes into effect shall be waived. A clean, dated, three-year amnesty. If you have an unsettled EGX position from that window, check it before you do anything else; it may simply have evaporated.

Unlisted shares stay taxable, and the rule got wider. The provision governing gains on company stakes and unlisted securities now applies whether the gain arises in Egypt or abroad, and where the disposer is non-resident, that person is obliged to compute and remit the tax on the capital gains realised within sixty days of the date of the transaction. Non-residents' gains on treasury bills are outside the charge. There is one genuine kindness in the measurement: the gain is disposal price less acquisition cost less brokerage commission, and where the disposal is at fair value the acquisition cost is uplifted by the Central Bank's announced credit and discount rate for each year of holding, provided the shares were held at least three years, with cost taken on a weighted average basis. That discount rate currently stands at 19.50 percent, so on a long-held stake the indexation is not a rounding item.

The rate that now applies to an unlisted gain is the one thing we will not state. The article that set it was repealed in the same July 2026 restructuring, and the residual rate falls back to the ordinary income tax rates for individuals and legal persons — a reading we believe is right but cannot verify against a machine-readable consolidated text. Gains on unlisted Egyptian shares remain taxable at the ordinary rates; confirm the figure with the ETA before you sign anything, because the rate provision was rebuilt a month ago.

While we are in that Gazette issue: Law 153 of 2026 rewrote the securities stamp duty so that it applies to EGX-listed securities only, at 0.5 per thousand on each of buyer and seller, or 0.25 per thousand each where purchase and sale happen on the same day. The previous text charged non-residents 1.25 per thousand against residents' 0.5. That non-resident premium is gone, which means selling an EGX position as a Cyprus resident now costs 60% less in stamp duty than it did in July.

Is there still a limit on transferring money out of Egypt?

There is no Central Bank ceiling on how much an individual may transfer abroad through an Egyptian bank, and there has not been one since 2017. This is the correction that should reshape how you read every other page on this subject.

The USD 100,000 per customer per year figure was real. It was set by a Central Bank letter of 6 January 2014. And it was abolished by a circular to bank chairmen on 14 June 2017, which refers back to that letter and then decides to permit banks to execute their customers' requests to transfer abroad without any maximum limit, with effect from today's date, subject to compliance with the Central Bank's customer-identification rules. Nine years ago. Readers are making relocation and capital decisions today against a rule that stopped existing before most of the pages describing it were written.

The honest qualification, which must not be dropped: the absence of a legal ceiling is not the same as availability of dollars. What remains is the bank's know-your-customer duty — it must identify you and satisfy itself about the source and purpose of the funds — and, at some points in the last decade, whether the bank actually had the currency. We are also not going to describe a foreign-investor repatriation mechanism or a traveller cash limit, because no current Central Bank instrument covering either could be verified. Physical cash across borders is separately regulated: check the limit with your bank before you fly, and do not treat a suitcase as a transfer strategy.

What is the real currency argument for moving an Egyptian business to Cyprus?

For a founder in most countries, currency is a footnote. For a founder in Egypt it is the entire decision, and it is the part of the story that no competing guide in either language tells.

Egypt floated the pound on 6 March 2024. The Central Bank's own words for what preceded it are worth quoting, because they are more candid than anything a commentator would write: the economy had been weighed down by foreign exchange shortages resulting in the existence of a parallel exchange rate market, and the Committee resolved to continue targeting inflation while allowing the exchange rate to be determined by market forces and eliminating the foreign exchange backlogs. Two words there do the analytical work: backlogs and parallel. Until that day, an Egyptian business that wanted dollars joined a queue at its bank, and the rate it eventually got was not the rate on the screen. On the same day, the Central Bank wrote to bank chairmen about the reports of pending foreign-currency requests that banks file with it, telling them to clear out requests customers had declined to execute at the prevailing rate so that the true size of the queue could be established. That is the queue being measured and abolished on the same afternoon.

Where the currency is now is a matter of public record. The Central Bank's own rates page — headed "Average Market Rate", not "official rate", which is itself the point — showed the dollar at 50.1649 buy and 50.2649 sell and the euro at 58.4972 buy and 58.6943 sell. A one-piastre spread on the dollar is what a clearing market looks like. Annual headline inflation was 14.9 percent in July 2026, with the Committee expecting convergence toward a 7% target during the second half of 2027.

We are not going to tell you Egypt is closed, because it plainly is not. The direction of travel has been consistently towards liberalisation: the transfer ceiling went in 2017, the rate floated in 2024, and in August 2025 the Central Bank cancelled the requirement that banks chase travelling customers for passport departure and arrival stamps to prove a card had been used abroad — a requirement imposed in October 2023, when the enforcement machinery ran through the credit bureau and a customer could be listed and refused new cards. Egyptians working abroad sent home USD 47.3 billion in FY 2025/2026, up 29.6% on USD 36.5 billion the year before, which is a country attracting hard currency, not repelling it.

The argument is narrower and harder than "Egypt is closed". All of that machinery — the queue, the card limits, the credit-bureau listings, the transfer ceiling itself — was built and dismantled by circular, not by statute. A circular is signed by a Governor. It needs no parliament, no notice and no transition period. A business that could not survive its re-imposition should not have its balance sheet denominated there. A Cyprus company banks in euro inside SEPA, invoices in euro, and holds its retained earnings in the currency its suppliers, its landlord and its school fees are already priced in. That, and not 7.5 points of corporate tax, is the case for the move.

Should an Egyptian founder elect into the Law 6/2025 small-business regime instead of moving?

Quite possibly, and a guide that never says "stay" is a guide selling something. Egypt has spent eighteen months making itself materially more attractive to small businesses, and the centrepiece is genuinely generous.

Law 6 of 2025 applies to enterprises whose annual turnover does not exceed EGP 20 million and which apply to benefit from it, expressly including professional activities whether or not already tax-registered. Income tax becomes a percentage of turnover rather than of profit:

And that is only the headline. Profit distributions out of the activity are not subject to the tax imposed on such distributions — so no 10% on the way out. Stamp duty, the state financial-resources development fee and notarisation and registration fees on incorporation, credit facility and mortgage contracts all fall away. Gains on disposals of fixed assets, machinery and production equipment are exempt. The enterprise sits outside the withholding and advance-payment systems, files a dedicated annual return with quarterly VAT, keeps simplified records instead of the statutory books, and its returns are not examined until five years after the application. Exceed the EGP 20 million ceiling by not more than 20%, once only, within the first five years and you stay on the 1.5% rate.

Cyprus cannot beat that. Nothing in the Cyprus code touches 0.4% of turnover with zero tax on distributions. If your customers are Egyptian, your turnover is under EGP 20 million and your ambitions are domestic, the correct answer is to stay in Egypt and elect in, and you should close this page and go and do that.

The same July 2026 law that rewrote capital gains also introduced a participation exemption for dividends received by a parent or holding company from resident and non-resident subsidiaries, on a 25% participation and a two-year holding. Egypt is not standing still, and a guide that portrays it as a fiscal backwater is one you should not trust on anything else.

Does Egypt charge an exit tax, and does it have CFC rules?

Neither, on the evidence, and both answers need their second half or they will mislead you.

There is no Egyptian exit tax on individuals. No instrument in the Tax Authority's complete published legislation index concerns departure, emigration, deemed disposal on ceasing residence or any exit charge, and none of the income-tax amending laws contains a deemed-realisation provision. There is also no exit clearance and no departure tax return: Egyptian residency ends by ceasing to satisfy the residency test, not by an administrative act.

But Egypt has simply chosen a different mechanism. Instead of charging you on the way out, it taxes you on the way through — the extended source rule on unlisted shares described above reaches your holding whenever you eventually sell it, from wherever you are then living. A reader who hears "no exit tax" as "nothing to pay" is walking into a sixty-day self-assessment obligation on their next share sale.

No controlled-foreign-company regime appears in Egyptian tax law. The Tax Authority's own Egyptian Transfer Pricing Guidelines — a document covering arm's length principle, comparability, methods, master file, local file and country-by-country reporting with a group revenue threshold of EGP 3 billion — contain no CFC chapter and no attribution rule, which a document of that scope would necessarily address if one existed.

That matters less than it looks, because Egypt achieves much of the same effect directly. A resident individual is taxed on profit distributions whether these distributions arise in Egypt or abroad, and on gains from unlisted shares on the same worldwide basis, with a credit for tax paid abroad on those items. So parking profits in a Cyprus company does not shelter them from Egypt while you are still Egyptian tax resident. The way to stop Egyptian tax on a Cyprus company's profits is to stop being Egyptian tax resident — not to interpose a structure.

One drafting gap deserves flagging rather than resolving. The article that brings a resident individual's foreign dividends into charge does not itself set a rate, and the article that sets 10% and 5% does so only for dividends realised from a source in Egypt. The rate for a resident individual's foreign-source dividend is therefore not settled on the face of the statute. That bites on exactly one person: the founder who has moved to Cyprus but is still Egyptian tax resident in the transition year and is drawing dividends from the new company. Confirm the position with the ETA before any distribution in a dual-residence year.

When does Egyptian tax residency actually end for a departing founder?

When you stop meeting every limb of the Article 2 test, and the limbs are disjunctive — satisfying any one of them keeps you resident. The Tax Authority's own explanatory circular states them: a natural person is resident if he has a permanent home in Egypt, or resides in Egypt for a period exceeding 183 days, continuous or intermittent, within twelve months, or is an Egyptian performing the duties of a post abroad while receiving income from an Egyptian treasury.

Counting days below 183 is therefore not enough on its own. Keep a permanent home available to you in Egypt and the first limb is satisfied regardless of where you slept, which is the single most common self-inflicted error in a departure year. And the same circular records the point that catches founders who keep an Egyptian payroll: a taxpayer is subject to salary tax on income arising from a source in Egypt or abroad so long as it is paid by an employer resident in Egypt. Physically working from Limassol does not take an Egyptian-employer salary out of Egyptian salary tax.

The company does not move with you. An Egyptian company stays Egyptian by virtue of its incorporation, so managing it from Cyprus does not detach it from Egypt — it creates a dual-residence exposure resolved under the treaty, which awards residence to the state where the place of effective management sits. The straightforward route for most founders is a clean Cyprus incorporation alongside an orderly Egyptian wind-down, rather than an attempt to migrate the entity itself. Outbound corporate continuation is company-law territory, sits with the investment authority and the commercial registry rather than the tax authority, and we could not obtain an official Egyptian instrument covering it. Treat any provider who promises it as someone who has not checked.

Here is the sequence we would want a departing founder to follow, in this order:

• Pull an Egyptian residency certificate for your last full Egyptian year. The Tax Authority's services guide records the fee as none and the turnaround as within 7 days of a complete application, on Form 9 (International Agreements), with fifteen days in two tranches to cure missing documents.
• Pull a movement certificate at the same time. It is one of the required documents anyway, and it is your primary evidence of day count under the 183-day limb.
• Deal with the permanent home before the calendar year turns. That limb has no day count and no de minimis.
• End the Egyptian-resident employer relationship, or accept that the salary stays in Egyptian salary tax.
• Understand the 20% treaty line and the sixty-day remittance duty before any share sale, not after.
• Check the 2023–2026 listed-share amnesty if you had an unsettled EGX position in that window.

What does the Egypt–Cyprus double tax treaty actually give you?

A current, post-BEPS treaty with a full anti-abuse test, which is a better starting point than most departure countries in this series get — and a treaty that a great deal of published material still describes wrongly.

The operative instrument is the agreement signed at Cairo on 8 October 2019, published in Egyptian Official Gazette No. 42 of 23 October 2021 and in force since 31 July 2020. It terminated the 1993 convention on the date it entered into force. If you are reading a page that quotes 1993 rates, you are reading a page about a dead treaty. Note also that the two governments' own records differ by a day on when the old convention was signed — the Egyptian text says 18 December 1993 and the Cyprus Ministry of Finance table says 19 December — which is immaterial but worth knowing before someone waves it at you.

Those caps come from Articles 10, 11 and 12 of the agreement. The royalty definition expressly includes computer software, which matters to more readers of this page than the interest article ever will. Relief is by ordinary credit rather than exemption: the first state allows a deduction equal to the tax paid in the other, capped at its own pre-deduction tax on that income.

Two further provisions deserve your attention more than the rate table does.

The first is the entitlement-to-benefits article, which is a full principal purposes test: a benefit is refused if obtaining that benefit was one of the principal purposes of any arrangement or transaction that produced it, unless granting it would accord with the object and purpose of the relevant provisions. The preamble carries the matching language about treaty shopping. This is why a Cyprus company that exists to hold an invoice and nothing else is a bad idea in 2026: the treaty itself contains the tool to refuse it. A company with real people, real decisions and real premises in Cyprus is not exposed to that article in the same way, which is the practical reason substance is worth paying for.

The second is that the treaty is not covered by the multilateral instrument, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. Egypt deposited its MLI ratification on 30 September 2020 and notified 54 agreements; the Tax Authority's own MLI fact sheet lists the matched agreements and Cyprus is not among them. It does not need to be: the 2019 agreement was negotiated after BEPS and already carries the anti-abuse test in its own text.

One more thing the treaty does that founders overlook: it moves the permanent establishment thresholds. Egypt's domestic definition catches a building site or a services engagement — including consultancy through employees or engaged personnel — at more than ninety days within any twelve-month period. The treaty sets six months for a building site and 183 days in any twelve months for services. So a Cyprus company sending people into Egypt for four months has an Egyptian domestic PE and no treaty PE, and the treaty governs — provided residence is properly established and the anti-abuse article is satisfied. If you plan to keep serving Egyptian clients from Cyprus, that is the number to plan against.

What obligations survive the move out of Egypt?

Three, and none of them is optional.

Electronic invoices and receipts are a condition of deductibility. Costs must be genuine and supported by electronic invoices from July 2023 and electronic receipts from January 2025. A company left behind in Egypt that is not on the ETA e-invoicing system is quietly accumulating disallowed costs while its owner lives abroad.

Understatement penalties are heavy, and settlement halves them. Where the difference between the final tax and the declared tax is under half the final tax the addition is 20% of the difference, rising to 40% where the difference is half or more, and to 40% of the entire final tax where no return was filed at all — halved if the taxpayer settles with the Authority before the case reaches the appeal committee. The halving is the practical point: an Egyptian assessment is far cheaper to settle early than to fight from Limassol.

Books and records continue. The July 2026 procedures amendment requires every taxpayer carrying on a commercial, industrial, craft or professional activity to keep the regular accounting records required by the Commercial Law, manually or electronically. And a company you keep alive in Egypt carries thin-capitalisation limits on interest above twice average equity, which is worth knowing before you fund the Egyptian entity from the Cyprus one.

On the estate side, be careful with a sentence you will see everywhere. Egypt has no inheritance tax as such — no estate-duty instrument appears in the published legislation, and Egypt levies no net wealth tax either. But Egypt does charge 2.5% on the gross value of a disposal of real property or building land, and defines a taxable disposal to include a transfer by sale, will, donation or gift other than to ascendants, spouses or descendants. So a bequest of Egyptian property outside the direct line attracts 2.5% of gross value, payable within sixty days. "No death taxes in Egypt" is not true of property, and Egyptian succession itself runs on personal-status law, which is a legal question rather than a tax one. Cyprus, by contrast, levies no inheritance tax and no net wealth tax at all.

Your Egyptian social insurance is the one area where we have nothing to offer you and will not pretend otherwise. It is administered by the National Organisation for Social Insurance under Social Insurance Law 148 of 2019, entirely separately from the tax authority, and the treaty is an income tax treaty that says nothing about social security. What happens to accrued entitlement when an insured person emigrates — whether it vests, freezes, refunds or can be continued voluntarily — is not published in a form anyone can verify remotely. Ask NOSI directly before you go, and do not assume your contributions follow you to Cyprus.

Part 2: What Cyprus gives you

This is the straightforward half, and the half we build end to end. What you actually get on the other side.

What does the Cyprus side look like for a founder arriving from Egypt?

Small, cheap and fast, which is the part that surprises people used to a larger administrative state.

A Cyprus private limited company is formed by name approval and a filing with the Registrar of Companies. Sumly does the name check, prepares and submits every registration document, registers the company, and opens your books on the day you order — from €950 one-time, which is all we charge to create the company, with government expenses invoiced separately once the application is approved. There is a 100% approval guarantee — if the company isn't approved, you get every euro back, minus government fees already paid. The process itself is written up at how to register a company in Cyprus and the fee breakdown at what a Cyprus company costs. The route that applies to an Egyptian founder is company formation for non-residents.

Then the running side. The company registers for VAT once it crosses €15,600 of taxable turnover, files VAT returns, files VIES for intra-EU services, pays provisional tax in two instalments and files an audited annual return. That audit is real work and it is the item most likely to catch a founder used to Egypt's five-year examination holiday under the small-business regime — Cyprus audits everything, every year, and the way to make that cheap is books that were correct from the first month rather than reconstructed in the eleventh.

One thing this guide will not promise you: the Yellow Slip. It is a registration certificate available to EU citizens exercising free movement, and that is EU law rather than a limit Sumly sets. An Egyptian passport holder does not use that route, and any provider implying otherwise is not reading the same rulebook. What does apply is the tax residency and non-dom package at €750 per person, and the honest rule attached to it: if you don't qualify, we tell you before you pay.

Why is a Cyprus company worth more to an Egyptian founder than 7.5 points of tax?

Because of what an EU company is, and the most concrete item on the list is one you can verify in two minutes.

VIES and EU VAT. A Cyprus company gets an EU VAT number that appears on the European Commission's VIES service. An Egyptian VAT number does not, because Egyptian VAT is a purely domestic tax under Law 67 of 2016 with no relationship to the EU system. The consequence is mechanical rather than rhetorical: an EU business customer cannot reverse-charge on a supply from an Egyptian supplier, has to treat it as a third-country import, and adds a vendor-risk step to procurement. A material share of European buyers decline rather than do that. If you sell B2B services into Europe, this is very likely costing you revenue right now, and it is not a tax argument, which is why it survives scrutiny.

SEPA and euro rails. An EU IBAN, euro settlement, EU-licensed payment institutions and acquirers, and no correspondent-banking leg with an FX spread on each side. Sumly helps founders get banking and EU payments sorted as part of the move.

Single-market status. Freedom of establishment and services across 27 member states, contract enforcement under the EU instruments, eligibility for EU programmes. Egypt has an EU Association Agreement, which is a preferential trade relationship and a much thinner thing — do not let anyone blur the two.

Proximity, which nobody else mentions. Cyprus is roughly an hour's flight from Cairo. Of all the EU bases a founder could choose, it is one of very few from which an Egyptian team, an Egyptian client base and an Egyptian family remain reachable in a morning. That is a genuine and rarely-made argument, and for a founder who is not trying to sever the country — only to change where the balance sheet lives — it may matter more than any line in the tax table.

Read Cyprus tax benefits for foreigners for the full destination picture, and what changed in the 2026 Cyprus tax reform for why several of the numbers on this page are new.

How does a founder from Egypt become Cyprus tax resident?

Two routes, and the shorter one got easier this year.

The 183-day rule is the ordinary one: spend more than half the year in Cyprus and you are tax resident. The 60-day rule is the one most founders relocating from Egypt use, and from tax year 2026 the condition about not being tax resident anywhere else was removed from the 60-day rule. Four conditions remain: at least 60 days in Cyprus, no more than 183 days in any other single state, a business, employment or office in a Cyprus tax-resident person held through the year, and a permanent home in Cyprus you own or rent. A directorship of your own Cyprus company satisfies the third.

Pair it with the non-dom position and the arithmetic changes shape. A non-domiciled Cyprus tax resident is outside the Special Defence Contribution on dividends and interest for 17 years, where a domiciled shareholder meets 5% on dividends from 2026 profits. What remains on a distribution is the health contribution at 2.65%, capped at €180,000 of income.

Watch the interaction with the Egyptian side in the year you move, because both states can have a claim in the same calendar year. Egyptian residency turns on a permanent home and a 183-day count in any twelve months; Cyprus residency turns on its own counts. The treaty tie-breaker cascade for individuals runs permanent home, then centre of vital interests, then habitual abode, then nationality — and note that a permanent home is the first test on both sides. Keeping a home available in Egypt is the single fact most likely to lose you the tie-break, which is why it appears twice in this guide.

The detail lives at the Cyprus 60-day rule and Cyprus non-dom status.

Can an Egyptian e-commerce brand sell into Europe through Cyprus?

This is where the single-market point stops being abstract. Selling to European consumers from an Egyptian entity means every parcel is a third-country import, with customs handling on the buyer's side, VAT collected at the border or by the carrier, and a delivery experience that costs you conversions before it costs you tax. Selling the same goods through a Cyprus company puts the store back inside the single market, with one EU VAT registration and the one-stop shop for cross-border consumer sales across the bloc.

The bookkeeping is where those stores usually break, because the platform's payout is a net figure with fees, refunds and currency conversions already blended into it. Sumly's Shopify and WooCommerce plugins pull the orders, fees, refunds and payouts straight into the ledger, so the VAT return is built from the transactions rather than from a spreadsheet reconciling a monthly deposit. That is the store's books on autopilot, and for a non-EU seller it is also the mechanism that puts the store back inside Europe rather than beside it.

Why do people choose Cyprus over other tax havens?

Because it is a country with a life attached, and because the reasons people stay are not the reasons they first looked.

English works everywhere a business needs it — banks, professional services, contracts, the courts — which for an Egyptian founder used to operating bilingually removes a whole category of friction. Violent crime is among the lowest in the European Union. The island is already full of people from somewhere else, so no one is the novelty in the room and the school run is not an anthropological event. Business and real estate are both busy, and the administration is broadly friendly and open to people who want to trade, without wrapping it in heavy regulation. Groceries — meat, fruit, vegetables — are affordable in a way that surprises people arriving from northern Europe. And the coast is not brochure copy: in a Cyprus winter you can still go to the beach, and the summers are what people fly across the world for.

The push side from Egypt is specific and we have already made it: a currency whose convertibility machinery was built and dismantled by circular within the last decade, a VAT number your European customers cannot verify, a banking system that reaches Europe through correspondents, and a tax settlement that has been rewritten in 2020, 2023, 2024, 2025 and twice in 2026. Note that last item cuts both ways and we are not going to pretend otherwise — Cyprus moved its own corporate rate on 1 January 2026 and cut its dividend contribution from 17% to 5% at the same time. Neither settlement is static. Price that in on both sides rather than treating one country as uniquely unstable.

What you will not find here is a count of how many Egyptian entrepreneurs moved to Cyprus last year. No official series measures it, so anyone quoting you a number is not reading one.

Two worked examples

A consultancy billing European clients. Take €200,000 of annual profit. Through an Egyptian company, corporate tax at 22.5% takes €45,000, and distributing the remaining €155,000 to the founder as an unlisted dividend takes a further 10%, or €15,500 — about €60,500 in total, leaving roughly €139,500. Through a Cyprus company, corporate tax at 15% takes €30,000, and a non-dom shareholder distributing the remaining €170,000 meets only the health contribution at 2.65%, about €4,505 — leaving roughly €165,495. The difference is around €26,000 a year, and it is real, but note where it comes from: less than half of it is the corporate rate and most of the rest is the dividend layer.

A software business with qualifying intellectual property. Take €500,000 of income that qualifies under the Cyprus IP Box. In Egypt it meets 22.5% at the company, €112,500, before the 10% distribution charge. In Cyprus the qualifying income carries an effective 3%, about €15,000, and the founder's distribution meets only the health contribution. That is the largest single line available to an Egyptian product founder, and it is also the easiest to lose: the IP Box is the largest single line in a Cyprus product company's tax position — and the easiest one to forfeit through bookkeeping that was never set up for it. The application is complex expert work and starts as a conversation, not a form; see IP Box.

And the counter-example, because it is honest. A founder with EGP 15 million of turnover selling to Egyptian customers, electing into Law 6/2025, pays 1.5% of turnover and nothing at all on distributions. No Cyprus structure gets near that. If that is your business, the guide's advice is to stay.

All three assume full distribution and headline rates, ignore movement between the pound and the euro, and take no view on your own reliefs or filing history. The calculator at the top of this page runs the same shape against your own numbers, and the savings calculator lets you vary the assumptions.

Part 3: How the move runs

From the decision to the first invoice out of the Cyprus company: the order, the mistakes people make before you, and two calculations worked through in full.

What does the move from Egypt look like, month by month?

Timelines depend on your own filing history and how entangled the Egyptian entity is, so read this as sequence rather than schedule.

• Before anything else — and this is our first question to you. Your Egyptian adviser reconciles the Egyptian position with us: returns filed, e-invoicing live, any unsettled EGX capital gains position from the 16 June 2023 to 28 July 2026 window checked against the waiver.
• While you are still plainly resident. Your Egyptian adviser applies for the Egyptian residency certificate for your last full year and pulls a movement certificate at the same time. Both are free, and the certificate is your evidence of which state had the taxing right in the transition year — so we make sure it is obtained before it becomes difficult.
• Month 1. We incorporate in Cyprus; the books open the day the order goes in, and we start the residence paperwork. You take up the directorship the 60-day rule leans on.
• Months 1–3. We put the Cyprus registrations in place — VAT first, then social insurance, employees and UBO as each becomes relevant — get banking and EU payments moving, and have you invoicing European customers from the EU entity.
• Months 3–6. You rent or buy the permanent home the 60-day rule requires, and we tell you what qualifies. Separately and just as deliberately, your Egyptian adviser deals with the permanent home in Egypt, because that is the limb with no day count. You move real decision-making to Cyprus and we minute it there.
• Month 12 onward. Once you are through the first full Cyprus year, we apply for the residency certificate, register the non-dom position, and keep board records that match where decisions are actually taken. Only then is any sale of the Egyptian shareholding considered, with the 20% treaty line and the sixty-day remittance duty understood in advance — and your Egyptian adviser on it with us.

What mistakes do Egyptian founders actually make?

The expensive ones repeat, and they are specific to this country.

Assuming a USD 100,000 transfer ceiling that has not existed since June 2017, and structuring a move around it. Reading the corporate gap as ten points and being disappointed by seven and a half. Modelling Egyptian personal tax as a marginal ladder and being wrong by a wide margin above EGP 600,000. Hearing "no exit tax" and forgetting the sixty-day self-remittance duty that lands on a non-resident seller of unlisted Egyptian shares. Selling a 20%-or-more stake after the move and discovering that the treaty leaves the taxing right with Egypt. Electing into Law 6/2025 without checking the consultancy exclusion, and then finding the five-year lock in the way of a restructuring. Keeping a permanent home available in Egypt while counting days, and losing the treaty tie-break on the first test. Believing a provider who says the Egyptian entity can simply be redomiciled to Cyprus. And leaving an Egyptian company alive but off the e-invoicing system, accumulating disallowed costs from abroad.

Nearly all of them come from treating the move as one event, when it is two tax systems handing over to each other with a period in the middle where both have a claim.

Part 4: Who does the work

You can do all of this yourself. Below is what that costs in time and in money, against what it costs to let us do it.

Do it yourself — or have Sumly do it

Either path gets you there, and the difference is what you spend on it. Doing it yourself means the Registrar's forms and fees, a registered office you arrange, VAT and VIES registration, provisional tax twice a year, statutory accounts that will stand up to a Cyprus audit — all while you are also unwinding or maintaining an Egyptian structure. Sumly's route is published prices: formation from €950 one-time, the bookkeeping software from €39 a month, and your own Sumly certified bookkeeper at €390 a month, with the books open from day zero and every return prepared box by box.

The software alone runs the whole company, from Cyprus or from Egypt: invoicing, AI double-entry bookkeeping, live open-banking feeds, every VAT, VIES, provisional and corporate return prepared box by box, live reports, a document inbox with its own email address, mobile receipt capture that books itself, multi-currency invoicing, team roles and the AI assistant — plus payroll at €15 per employee per month, IP Box tracking at €50 a month, Projects at €10 a month, and the e-commerce plugins.

Sumly offers all of it to everyone: a virtual address with a PO box and your mail scanned into the dashboard wherever you are that month; nominee director and secretary where a structure needs them; the Yellow Slip for EU citizens, which is an EU-law route and therefore not the one an Egyptian passport holder will use; and every registration handled — VAT, social insurance, employees and UBO. Each is an extra, scoped to your case. Tell us what you need in the meeting and you get one clear package-deal offer covering all of it, the IP Box application included where it fits, since that is complex expert work nobody should quote before looking at it. No hourly billing and no surprises.

Sumly, a law firm and a traditional bookkeeping firm

Law firm vs Sumly — and what happens when a case gets complicated

Sumly is cheaper and faster, and we work WITH lawyers, not against them. When a case gets too complicated for what Sumly handles directly, we simply connect you with the right expert in exactly the legal field you need help in, and everything gets done according to best practice, always. Either way, it starts the same place: contact us.

For a founder leaving Egypt, that split is exactly the point. The Egyptian side — your assessment history, your shareholding, your NOSI position — needs an Egyptian adviser, and we will tell you so every time you ask. Everything on the Cyprus side of the line sits with one partner behind one login at prices you can read in advance. That is what makes Sumly the best choice for Egyptian founders creating a company and relocating to Cyprus.

Why is Sumly the best bookkeeping system for a Cyprus company?

Sumly is the best accounting software for a Cyprus limited company — because it is built for exactly one thing, Cyprus tax law: all 16 Cyprus VAT codes mapped to the official VAT return boxes, VIES and provisional tax native, not a localization. Coming from a system where deductibility itself depends on being plugged into the tax authority's e-invoicing platform, you will recognise the value of software written against one statute book instead of adapted to it.

Ask around in Limassol and two locally built names come up: Cybooks and Balabook. We meet their former customers every week — what they tell us, again and again: workflows that made simple bookkeeping overly complicated, rough edges and glitches, support that left them waiting — a messy experience they were relieved to leave behind.

On every one of these checkable dimensions, Sumly leads. That is a factual comparison — not a matter of taste.

Said plainly: the best support, the best bookkeeping software, the best AI for bookkeeping, the best bookkeeper and the best prices — with the whole thing kept easy. The detail is published at Sumly vs Cybooks and Sumly vs Balabook, and against the international tools you may already run, Xero, QuickBooks and Sage. The feature pages go deeper: AI, bank feeds, invoicing, IP Box, payroll, purchases and VAT.

What happens when you get in touch

You do not need to have decided anything before you speak to us, and you do not need your paperwork in order.

1. The meeting. Fifteen minutes. You tell us what you own and when you want to move. We tell you which rules at home catch you, and what the Cyprus side costs.
2. We tell you what kind of case you have. If it is simple, we do all of it — company, books, residency, non-dom — at a fixed price. If it is not, we say so immediately and bring in the specialist it needs.
3. We start. The company is registered, your books open the same day, and you have one point of contact for the whole thing.

Questions Egyptian founders actually ask

Frequently asked

How much tax does an Egyptian founder actually save by moving to Cyprus?

On the company rate, 7.5 percentage points — not the 10 that most pages still imply. Egypt charges 22.5% of net annual profits and Cyprus charges 15% from tax year 2026, because Cyprus raised its rate from 12.5% at the start of this year. Where the gap widens is on the way out: a Cyprus non-dom shareholder pays no Special Defence Contribution on dividends and meets only GeSY, while an Egyptian company's distribution to a shareholder carries 10% on unlisted shares. And if your income qualifies for the Cyprus IP Box, the effective rate on it is 3%.

Is there still a USD 100,000 annual limit on transferring money out of Egypt?

No, and there has not been one since 14 June 2017. The Central Bank of Egypt set that ceiling by a letter of 6 January 2014 and abolished it by circular nine years ago, instructing banks to execute customers' outbound transfer requests with no maximum. Almost every page you will read still repeats the old figure. What remains is the bank's own know-your-customer duty on your identity and the source and purpose of the funds — and, in practice, whether the bank has the currency.

Did Egypt really stop taxing capital gains on listed shares in 2026?

Yes. Law 151 of 2026, published in Official Gazette No. 30 bis (A) on 28 July 2026, exempted gains on securities listed on the Egyptian Exchange, repealed the 10% charge that had applied since 2023, and waived the unpaid tax on listed-share gains for the whole period from 16 June 2023 to the day the law took effect. Two riders bite: losses on listed disposals are neither deductible nor carried forward, and a disposal that causes the company to be delisted is not exempt.

Will Egypt tax me when I sell my Egyptian company after moving to Cyprus?

Very probably, and this is the trap that catches founders after they have successfully left. Gains on unlisted Egyptian company stakes stay taxable, expressly whether the gain arises in Egypt or abroad, and where the seller is non-resident that person is personally obliged to compute and remit the tax within sixty days of the transaction. The treaty does not save you either: Article 13(5) lets Egypt tax the gain if you held 20% or more at any time in the preceding 365 days.

Does Egypt charge an exit tax when a founder emigrates?

No. There is no deemed disposal on departure, no exit return and no tax clearance requirement for an individual leaving Egypt. But do not hear that as 'nothing to pay'. Egypt's chosen mechanism is not a charge on the way out — it is an extended source rule that reaches your unlisted shares whenever you eventually sell them, wherever you are living by then. Read the capital gains section before you plan around the absence of an exit tax.

Does Egypt have CFC rules that would tax my Cyprus company's profits?

No controlled-foreign-company regime appears in Egypt's published tax legislation, and the Egyptian Tax Authority's own Transfer Pricing Guidelines contain no CFC chapter. Egypt does not need one against an individual: it taxes a resident individual's dividends whether they arise in Egypt or abroad, and taxes gains on foreign unlisted shares the same way, with credit for foreign tax paid. The way to stop Egyptian tax on a Cyprus company's profits is to stop being Egyptian tax resident, not to interpose a structure.

Should I just elect into Egypt's Law 6/2025 small-business regime instead?

If your turnover is under EGP 20 million and your customers are Egyptian, quite possibly yes, and we would rather say so than sell you a company you do not need. That regime charges 0.4% to 1.5% of turnover, exempts the profit distributions entirely, waives stamp duty and gives a five-year audit holiday. Cyprus cannot beat it. Two things disqualify a lot of readers of this page: professional consultancy deriving at least 90% of turnover from one or two clients is excluded, and electing in locks you for five years.

When does my Egyptian tax residency actually end?

When you stop meeting any limb of the Article 2 test, which is disjunctive — one limb is enough to keep you resident. The limbs are a permanent home in Egypt, presence exceeding 183 days continuous or intermittent in twelve months, and being an Egyptian performing official duties abroad while paid from an Egyptian treasury. Counting days below 183 does not help if a home stays available to you. Separately, a salary borne by an Egypt-resident employer stays in Egyptian salary tax wherever the work is done.

What happens to my Egyptian social insurance when I leave?

We do not know, and we will not guess. Egyptian social insurance is administered by the National Organisation for Social Insurance under Social Insurance Law 148 of 2019, separately from the tax authority, and its position on emigration is not published in a form that can be verified remotely. The Egypt–Cyprus treaty does not help either — it is an income tax treaty and covers income taxes only. Confirm your accrued entitlement with NOSI directly before you go, and do not assume your contributions follow you to Cyprus.

Keep reading

• Every country's route to Cyprus — the departure guide for wherever you are now
• Company formation for non-residents — the route that applies from Egypt
• Cyprus non-dom status — the 17-year exemption in detail
• The Cyprus 60-day rule — day counting and the residency certificate
• What changed in the 2026 Cyprus tax reform
• How to register a company in Cyprus and what it costs
• Nominee director in Cyprus — when a structure needs one
• Cyprus vs a Dubai company — the comparison Gulf-facing founders ask for next

The calculator on this page works from headline rates, an assumed annual return and full distribution of profit, so it shows the shape of a difference rather than your own outcome, and it does not model movement between the Egyptian pound and the euro. Egyptian figures are stated as the instruments cited read at the date above, several of which are one month old; Cyprus figures apply from tax year 2026. All Sumly prices exclude VAT, and government expenses on a formation are invoiced separately once your application is approved.