💼 Business

🚫 The Sanctions Reality, Stated Plainly

Unlike some other countries on this site where sanctions are easing, Iran's are not — 2026 has brought an active, ongoing US Treasury campaign (publicly branded "Economic Fury") issuing new OFAC designations against Iranian banks, exchange houses, and shipping networks on a near-weekly basis throughout the year. For American businesses and individuals, the legal position is close to absolute: comprehensive US sanctions have applied continuously since 1979, Iranian banks remain disconnected from SWIFT, and US persons are prohibited from any transaction with Iranian entities without a specific OFAC license, which are granted only for narrow categories like humanitarian trade. There is no meaningful "how to get started" path for a US company or individual here — this page exists to explain the landscape honestly, not to suggest a workaround.

📈 The Domestic Economy — Walled Off, But Real

Inside its own borders, Iran runs a genuine, sizeable domestic capital market that most of the world simply cannot access. The Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE), founded in 1967, lists around 388 companies spanning automotive, telecommunications, petrochemicals, and banking, with a rial-denominated market capitalization frequently reported in the trillions of dollars — a figure that reflects domestic inflation and currency dynamics as much as underlying value, and should be read with real caution. The benchmark TEDPIX index is a genuinely active, actively-traded market for Iranians, complete with retail speculation, IPOs, and periodic sharp corrections, just like any other frontier exchange — it is simply almost entirely closed to American and most international investors by law, not by choice.

Company registration inside Iran is technically possible for foreign investors under general company law — typically as a Private Joint Stock Company (PJSC) or Limited Liability Company (LLC) — but every serious guide to the process leads with the same caveat: banking, payroll, tax, and shareholder reporting all run through a financial system foreign counterparties cannot legally connect to from most jurisdictions, and non-US companies attempting it still carry real secondary-sanctions exposure if they touch US dollars, US persons, or US-connected financial institutions anywhere in the chain.

✍️ The Kaufmann Bottom Line

For an American reader, the honest answer to "how do I do business in Iran" is: you almost certainly don't, not legally, not without a specific OFAC license for a narrow humanitarian or informational purpose. For readers from other countries, the picture is less absolute but still genuinely constrained by secondary-sanctions risk that follows any transaction touching the US financial system, which in practice means most of the world's banking. Iran's domestic economy is real, complex, and larger than most outsiders assume — but as an investment or business destination, it remains, for now, a market observed from outside rather than entered.

Sanctions regimes change; this reflects the position as of August 2026. Verify current requirements directly with the US Treasury's OFAC (treasury.gov/ofac) before any transaction, however small, involving Iran.