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Serbian tech is moving from billing hours to building products, and that changes how foreign companies should hire. Ambacia Consulting, your Employer of Record in Serbia, breaks down the 2026 ICT numbers, the push into AI, the question of IP ownership and the true monthly cost of a senior engineer, so you can plan your team with real figures.
What €4.5 billion in ICT exports, a national AI strategy and slow pay growth mean for foreign companies building tech teams in Serbia, explained by Ambacia Consulting in Belgrade.
The questions foreign tech companies bring to Ambacia Consulting have changed. A few years ago, the first one was how quickly we could put developers on a project. Today it is more often who will own what those developers build, and whether a team in Belgrade or Novi Sad can become a real R&D function rather than extra capacity on demand.
The numbers explain why, and they also show where the risks sit.
In 2025, Serbia exported €4.552 billion of ICT services, 10% more than in 2024, with a surplus of €3.529 billion, according to the government's Office for IT and eGovernment. Official statistics counted roughly 116,000 people working in ICT in the third quarter of 2025, up 3.3% on a year earlier.
2026 started more quietly. ICT exports in January and February came to €713 million, almost exactly the level of a year earlier, and the business press counted more than 600 tech layoffs in the first months of the year. The National Bank of Serbia called them individual cases and warned against reading a trend into two months of data. Fair enough. But in our view a cooler market is good news for hiring: companies with a clear product story now have a better chance with senior people.
Pay is the other half of the picture. Net pay in the information and communications sector rose 5.8% in the first eleven months of 2025, and in computer programming only 3.9%, barely above inflation of 3.8%, while ICT exports grew 12% over ten months. The official average net salary in computer programming was RSD 287,477 (about €2,450) in November 2025. Serbia is still competitive on cost, but programmers' real pay has hardly moved, and that is exactly when good engineers start listening to other offers.
Serbia adopted its Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence for 2025 to 2030 in January 2025, with a national AI platform, research funding through the Science Fund and the Innovation Fund, and AI skills programmes. The State Data Center in Kragujevac installed its first supercomputer in 2022, a second was scheduled to go live there in April 2026, and the government plans to grow state data centre capacity to about 200 MW by 2030, with new sites in Niš and Novi Sad.
For a foreign company, this does not mean training your models on Serbian state hardware. It shows where the country is steering universities, research money and its tech ecosystem: towards building products, not just billing hours. We looked at the Serbian language model project in a separate article.
When the work in Serbia moves from tickets to product, three things change.
Senior people expect employment. A principal engineer or ML specialist building your core product wants paid leave, a pension record, a payslip the bank will accept and a career path. A monthly invoice offers none of that, and the people you most want to keep are the ones with the most offers.
IP becomes a due diligence item. Under Article 98 of Serbia's Law on Copyright and Related Rights, software an employee writes on the job belongs permanently to the employer, unless the contract says otherwise. A contractor's code moves only through a written contract, and Serbian law reads unclear transfers narrowly. We cover the contractor side in Freelance vs EOR in Serbia.
Cost has to be calculated, not assumed. The salary a senior engineer asks for is a net figure. Your budget is not.
Senior AI and architecture roles pay well above the sector average. Say you agree a take-home salary of €4,000 a month:
| Line | Monthly amount |
|---|---|
| Net salary (take-home) | about RSD 470,000 (€4,000) |
| Gross salary | about RSD 665,600 |
| Employee contributions (19.9%) and income tax (10% above the RSD 34,221 allowance) | about RSD 195,600, deducted from gross |
| Employer contributions (15.15%) | about RSD 100,800 |
| Total employer cost | about RSD 766,400 (roughly €6,520), before the EOR fee |
Euro figures at the National Bank of Serbia middle rate of RSD 117.49 per euro, 2 October 2026.
In short, budget about 1.6 times the net salary. It is the number foreign founders most often underestimate on a first call. For the full 2026 breakdown, see our cost guide for EU companies.
You manage the work, we handle the employment, and you do not need a local d.o.o. If your team grows to the point where your own entity makes more sense, we will say so. We compare the two options in EOR or your own d.o.o. in Serbia.
Serbia exported €4.552 billion of ICT services in 2025, up 10% on 2024, and around 116,000 people worked in ICT in the third quarter of 2025. Exports in the first two months of 2026 were flat year on year at €713 million.
Budget about 1.6 times the net salary. A take-home salary of €4,000 a month means a gross salary of about RSD 665,600 and a total employer cost of about RSD 766,400 (roughly €6,520) in 2026, before any EOR fee.
Yes. Through an Employer of Record such as Ambacia Consulting, specialists are employed under Serbian law by our Belgrade entity, while you direct their work and receive the economic rights to what they create under our service agreement.
Building or scaling an engineering or AI team in Serbia? Book a call and we will walk you through the structure and the real numbers for your roles.
Ambacia Consulting d.o.o., Svetogorska 7L, 11000 Belgrade | info.rs@ambacia.eu | Book a call
General information based on Serbian legislation and official data available in October 2026, not legal or tax advice for a specific case.
