How to start a business in Iraq as a foreigner (2026)

Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' Al-Sudani issued a binding directive mandating automation of company registration processes, simplification of SME procedures, and bank account-opening facilitation for SMEs, to be implemented within six months. The initiative also inaugurated a Digital Transformation and Automation Centre that digitally archived over 103,000 documents and 18 million company records, enabling online transaction tracking.

The inaugural World Bank Business Ready (B-READY) report, the successor to Doing Business, gave Iraq its highest pillar score in Business Entry, crediting removal of minimum capital requirements for SMEs and the digitalisation of registration; overall regulatory framework scored 49.39/100, placing Iraq in the bottom quintile due to persistent weaknesses in taxation, insolvency, and market competition.

The Ministry of Trade's Companies Registrar required every registered Iraqi company to obtain an Iraqi top-level-domain (.iq) website and a local Post Office Box within a 60-day grace period from 16 January 2024, failing which the company's corporate file would be suspended. The measure added a new digital-identity compliance burden on top of ongoing registration obligations.

The Ministry of Trade, with support from UNCTAD and the US Government, launched business.mot.gov.iq, a fully contactless portal that collapsed dozens of in-person registration steps into a single digital workflow. Within one year more than 2,981 companies had registered through the platform, a fivefold increase in monthly registrations over the first month of operation.

Published in Official Gazette No. 4554 on 9 September 2019, Amendment No. 17 reversed the post-2004 open-ownership regime by requiring at least 51% of shares in any LLC or joint-stock company to be held by Iraqi nationals or Iraqi-owned entities. The same law introduced holding companies as a recognised legal structure and gave Iraqi-participatory firms priority in government contracts.

The World Bank's Doing Business 2018 report identified Iraq as having eased business start-up by merging multiple registration procedures, eliminating the mandatory separate tax-authority registration step, and deploying additional resources at the registry, marking Iraq's first notable recognition in an international benchmark for registration reform.

Iraq's National Investment Law established the National Investment Commission (NIC) as an independent one-stop-shop to issue licences, grant a 10-year tax and customs exemption from commercial commencement, guarantee profit repatriation, and allow investors to own or lease land, creating the principal incentive framework still operative today.

The Coalition Provisional Authority's Order No. 64 amended Companies Law No. 21/1997 to abolish the requirement that Iraqi-registered companies be wholly owned by Iraqis or Arab nationals, permitting 100% foreign ownership of LLCs and joint-stock companies, the foundational liberalisation underpinning post-2003 foreign direct investment, later partially reversed by the 2019 amendment.