Business, Latvia, Legislation, Markets and Companies

Lursoft reported that there are 108,160 companies in Latvia, employing less than 50 employees with a turnover in 2019 less than EUR 10 million or with a balance value at the end of last year less than EUR 10 million. According to the European Commission's regulations, these are micro and small companies.

Analyzing the small business in regions, Lursoft concluded that in all territories micro and small companies account by more than 98% of total registered companies. 51.1% of all companies are registered in Riga and 20.1% in Pieriga.

In 2019, Latvia's micro and small companies had employed 63.8% of all employees in Latvia - in total 454,650 people.

According to Lursoft data, this year 5,984 micro and small companies received downtime benefits for their employees due to Covid-19, while the State Revenue Service granted tax holidays to 2,855 companies.

In 2019, small businesses paid EUR 2.95 billion in taxes or 38.9% of all taxes paid into the budget.

Of all small business sector companies, 15.7% are payers of micro enterprise tax that will be affected by the planned changes in tax regime.