Bermuda
Found someone great in Bermuda and want to bring them onto the team? It’s a good thing you’re here. On this page, you’ll learn exactly what you need to know before making hires in Bermuda: Legal obligations, risks, and the easiest path to hiring great talent overseas.
Country snapshot
CURRENCY
Bermudian Dollar (BMD)
EMPLOYER TAXES
PAYROLL FREQUENCY
Monthly
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
English
It’s the fastest way to hire globally
Hiring employees takes months, at the minimum. When you hire with Thera's locally-generated contracts, it’s a matter of days or weeks. This means you can hire the best talent, fast, without losing them to a hellish procession of paperwork.
It’s a lot cheaper
It costs just $0 to sign up for Thera, then $25 per month to hire your contractors with Thera. If you hired employees manually (or did contracting on your own), you’d likely be on the hook for thousands of dollars each month. Setting up an entity alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
It’s more flexible for you & your team
Can be less risky than hiring employees
Hiring employees is a bigger commitment, and can open you up to increased liabilities and regulations. When you hire contractors overseas, your biggest risk is misclassification—but laws surrounding contractor classification are often significantly more straightforward.
Some people want to be employees
The contractor life isn’t for everyone—some people want the security that being an employee often appears to provide. Though it’s rare, this does happen, and it’s one disadvantage of manage an all-contractor team.
You might not have as much control over your talent
Most countries’ contractor-employer relationship laws stipulate that the employer can’t set fixed working hours, among other things. These laws give contractors more freedom over how and when they do their work than an employee would have. In reality, however, most contractors are willing & able to work on the company’s schedule—it’s a matter of setting expectations beforehand.
Bermuda is gorgeous, and more importantly for you, it’s home to plenty of great remote talent. What you might not know, however, is that hiring in Bermuda involves different labor laws and procedures than hiring in your home country. You have two options: Hiring talent as employees and hiring talent as contractors. Here are the differences between both:
Hire talent as contractors
Hire talent as employees
If you’ve read up until this point, you’ll know that it’s easier, cheaper, and more flexible to hire contractors in Bermuda than employees. Still, there are valid reasons why you might want to hire employees instead. The content below is for you—we’ll cover employer taxes and obligations in Bermuda.
Employer tax
Contributory Pension Fund (CPF)
Paid Time Off (PTO)
Employees may take up to 5 days of paid vacation leave after 6 months' continuous employment.
Previously, under the EA 2000, an employee could only take 10 days paid vacation leave per year after completing 1 year of continuous employment.
The employees are entitled to another day off with pay if the public holiday coincides with their rest day. If an employee works on a public holiday, the same terms as that of overtime are applicable.
In Bermuda, an employee also gets paid for a ‘Rest Day’, which the employer must provide every week and comprises one(1) whole day (24 hours).
Public Holidays
There are 10 public holidays in Bermuda.
Sick Days
In Bermuda employment law, employers must provide employees who have worked at least one year of continuous employment with eight days of paid sick leave per year.
Maternity Leave
The Employment (Maternity Leave Extension and Paternity Leave) Amendment Act became effective on 1 January 2020. This Act has extended the paid maternity leave from the initial eight weeks to thirteen weeks
Paternity Leave
In Bermuda, five days of paid paternity leave have also been added.
Parental Leave
No Info.
Other Leave
No Info.
Marriage Leave
No Info.
Bereavement Leave
An employee is granted bereavement leave for three consecutive days on the demise of an immediate family member and five days to attend funerals of family members overseas (Section 17 of the Employment Act deals).
As per the employment act, immediate family members are:
- Employees spouse, parents, grandparents, great grandparents, children, grand or great-grandchildren or
- Any other person with whom they are sharing a household (except the landowner/tenant).
Employers are not obliged to pay for the Bereavement Leave of an employee.
Termination Process
An employer must send a notice in writing before termination. Except in cases where the duration or fixed period has expired. Upon the service of minimum notice, employees can be terminated.
Notice Period
The notice period in Bermuda:
- Paid every week - 1 week
- Paid after every two weeks - 2 weeks
- In all other cases - 1 month
Severance Pay
The amount depends on the length of service, the statutory minimum being two weeks' wages for each year of completed service up to 10 years, and three weeks' wages for each year of completed service thereafter, subject to a maximum of 26 weeks' wages.
Probation Period
Probation period is 6 months.
Working Hours
The standard working hours is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m from Monday through Friday, including an hour's break for lunch.
Overtime
Generally, employees who work overtime for more than 40 hours per week must be given overtime pay.
The rate is one-and-a-half times more than the usual hourly wage.
The workers must be given the usual hourly rate for the overtime hours that they work. Moreover, they must be given the same number of hours off from work the next day.
Depending on the company that the employee works for, contracts include double pay for overtime work done on a Sunday and on public holidays.
%5B1%5D.avif)
Run your global workforce on autopilot with Thera
Book a demo to get started.