💼 Doing Business in Andorra

For most of its history, doing business in Andorra meant being Andorran, or at least partnering with someone who was — foreign ownership of local companies was capped by law, and the economy ran on tourism, duty-free retail, and a discreet private-banking sector that mostly served people who already lived here. That changed with the 2012 Foreign Investment Law, which opened most sectors to up to 100% foreign ownership for the first time, and has been extended further by the 2025–2026 "Llei Òmnibus" reforms tightening residency and investment rules around it.

The standard vehicle is the SL (societat limitada, Andorra's equivalent of an LLC), formed through the Govern d'Andorra's company registry with a notary and a minimum share capital of €3,000. In practice, the harder part isn't the paperwork — it's the bank: any new company needs an Andorran business account, and account-opening compliance (proof of fund origins, in-person meetings, background checks) has become considerably stricter since 2015, when the collapse of one of the country's own banks forced a genuine reckoning with Andorra's old reputation for discretion over transparency.

Andorra has no stock exchange — there has never been a meaningful public equity market here, and none of Andorra's major companies are listed anywhere. The economy instead runs through three domestic banking groups, all regulated by the Andorran Financial Authority (AFA, established 1989): Andbank (est. 1930, the most internationally expansive, with operations from Miami to Israel), Creand (formerly Crèdit Andorrà, est. 1949, the largest by assets), and MoraBanc (est. 1958, strongest in private banking). Combined, the sector holds roughly €44 billion in assets — extraordinary scale for a country of 89,000 people.

The honest complication: Andorran banking's reputation took a serious hit in March 2015, when Banca Privada d'Andorra (BPA) — then one of the country's biggest banks — was shut down after US authorities accused it of laundering money for organized crime networks. The fallout was severe enough to trigger a genuine overhaul: Andorra introduced its first personal income tax later that same year, adopted OECD-standard information-sharing agreements, and rebuilt its financial-crime oversight essentially from scratch. The system that exists today — tighter compliance, FATCA and CRS reporting, a functioning resolution authority — is a direct legacy of that crisis, not something the country arrived at voluntarily.

Banking aside, Andorra's real economy runs on three legs: tourism and duty-free retail (the country's single largest employer, driven by the low 4.5% IGI tax that undercuts both France and Spain on everything from electronics to alcohol), ski infrastructure (Grandvalira and Vallnord together represent hundreds of millions of euros in lift, hotel, and real-estate investment), and a small but growing tech and remote-work sector, as the government has actively courted digital nomads and startups with residency incentives since the mid-2020s, hoping to diversify an economy still heavily dependent on people physically crossing the border to shop or ski.