Register a company in Palau, the digital-ID islands.

A genuine government-issued digital ID - useful for online identity verification and accepted by many platforms - plus a physical card. What it is not: a tax residency, a citizenship, a visa, or a shield from your home country's rules. Some exchanges embrace it, others have grown sceptical. We tell you which before you build anything on it.

Yes - the FIB application, incorporation and tax registrations run by power of attorney. The bank prefers meeting a signatory and the islands reward showing up, so most operating clients visit once. We sequence everything so the trip is short.

The Foreign Investment Board - the gate every foreign business passes. Real tourism, maritime, service and Compact-adjacent projects with credible plans get approved routinely; paper constructions and attempts at reserved sectors do not. Our file answers what the board actually asks: who you are, what you'll do, who benefits.

A short list of small-business lanes - small-scale retail, certain tour-guiding and similar - reserved for Palauans by law. Everything substantial in tourism, hospitality, fisheries and services is open with approval. We check your exact model against the list before anything is filed.

No - foreign freehold is constitutionally barred, full stop. The route is long leases, typically decades, structured with renewal and transfer terms drafted properly. Every resort on the islands runs this way; done right it is bankable, done casually it is a dispute.

Since the 2023 reform: 12% on business profits, a 10% PGST on goods and services, progressive wage withholding - replacing the old gross-revenue system. It is one of the region's cleanest codes, young enough that transitional questions arise; we handle them as routine.

Thin and functional: a small set of US-linked banks, genuine KYC, no interest in shell games. Accounts open in two to four weeks with a defended file, in dollars. For operating businesses it suffices; for anything exotic, we say plainly that Palau is the wrong venue.

Eighteen thousand residents - plus, in good years, many multiples of that in visitors, plus the Compact's funded projects. Nobody enters Palau for domestic scale; they enter for the reef economy, the EEZ, the US-funded pipeline, or the flag's niche brand. We price your model against the real market.

The Compact of Free Association with the United States - renewed with funding through 2044: defence, budget support, postal and institutional links, and the dollar as currency. It is the stability floor under everything else, and the reason this micro-state banks and contracts like a US-adjacent territory.

From $2,900 for the company, from $4,900 with a bank account. The FIB takes two to four weeks, the Registrar days, the bank two to four weeks more - realistic zero-to-operating is four to eight weeks. Lease structuring from $2,500 where land is involved. Renewal from $1,200/year.