A large plant near Atyrau is commissioning a new unit, but the process engineer it needs simply isn't in town. The drilling engineer lives in Aktau while the vacancy is open in Uralsk. The project manager was found in Almaty, yet the job sits at a field three flight-hours from home. Every time an industrial company in Kazakhstan fills a scarce position, the same question surfaces: how do you physically get the right person to where they are needed, and keep them there? Workforce mobility on industrial projects has long stopped being exotic and turned into a working tool, without which oil-and-gas, mining and construction projects simply cannot be staffed.
It sounds easy: find the specialist, pay for the ticket, hand over a settling-in allowance. In practice, behind every move sits a fork of three different legal regimes, tax subtleties, costs that are easy to underestimate, and — most treacherous of all — a living person with a family, habits and expectations. At FSSA we see it constantly: a company is ready to pay a market salary but fails the move on domestic details, and six months later loses the expensively hired employee. To avoid that, it is worth understanding in advance how relocation differs from rotational work and a business trip, what the Labour Code requires, and how much all of it actually costs.
Relocation, rotation and a business trip are three different regimes
This is where employers get it wrong most often. The three ways of getting a person to a site look similar, but under the law they are entirely different things, and confusing them costs money.
The rotational method (Article 135 of the Labour Code of Kazakhstan) is when an employee lives at the site and periodically returns home, while their permanent place of residence does not change. As a general rule a rotation does not exceed fifteen calendar days; with the employee's written consent it can be extended to thirty. Working time is calculated on a summarised basis, and the employer must provide housing, meals and transport to the workplace. Rotation works well for fields and remote industrial sites, but it does not solve the problem when a person is needed on site permanently and for years ahead.
A business trip (Article 127) is a temporary posting on the employer's order. The employee keeps their position and salary for the working days that fall within the trip, plus receives a per diem for every calendar day including travel time, along with travel to and from the destination and accommodation costs. The size of the per diem and the limits on tickets and hotels are set by the employer within its budget. A business trip is convenient for short tasks — commissioning, an audit, training a shift — but stretching it out over months to "save" on proper paperwork is risky: the labour inspectorate readily reclassifies such an endless trip.
Relocation itself means transferring an employee to another locality, sometimes together with the employer, with a real change of residence. This is the scenario that closes the need for a permanent specialist who is not available in the region. And it demands the most careful documentation, because it affects not only the employee but the whole family.
The difference is clearest in an example. Say a company needs a chief mechanic at a site near Atyrau. If he comes for two weeks of commissioning, that is a business trip. If he works two weeks and rests two weeks at home in Shymkent, that is rotation. And if he moves his family and settles in Atyrau for the length of the project, that is relocation. One and the same role, three different contracts, three different budgets and three different sets of employer obligations.
What the law requires and which payments are tax-free
If a company relocates to another locality and invites the employee to come along, Article 39 of the Labour Code requires it to give notice at least one month in advance, unless the contract sets a longer period. This is not a formality: the person needs time to sort out the children's school, selling or renting out their home, and moving a spouse.
Then Article 128 kicks in. When an employee is transferred to another locality together with the employer, the company must reimburse the costs of moving the employee and their family members, as well as transporting their belongings. This is the relocation package that people casually call "settling-in money", except that legally it is strictly tied to actual, documented expenses.
Taxes deserve a separate note, and this is where many lose money for no reason. Under subparagraph 5) of Article 366 of the Tax Code, reimbursement of documented costs for travel, transport of belongings and renting housing for a period of no more than thirty calendar days when relocating to another locality together with the employer is not treated as personal income and is not subject to individual income tax. The key words here are "documented" and "no more than thirty days". If a company hands over the relocation sum in cash without receipts and contracts, or pays for an apartment for six months straight, part of those payments turns into taxable income with all the resulting reassessments.
The practice is simple but constantly broken: receipts for tickets and freight, the housing lease, the transfer order and an updated employment contract with the new place of work should be gathered from day one, not reconstructed just before an inspection. Foreign specialists are a separate story: their relocation also requires a permit to hire foreign labour, and those timelines are built into the moving plan in advance, otherwise the person arrives but cannot work legally.
There is also a state track. Kazakhstan runs a programme to increase workforce mobility: through the electronic labour exchange, employers in the receiving region declare their staffing needs, while relocating citizens receive subsidies for the move, reimbursement of housing rent and utilities, plus service housing or places in dormitories. The tool is niche — aimed at voluntary resettlement to specific regions and categories of citizens — but for mass hiring of line staff for a new industrial project it is worth keeping in mind, since part of the cost can be picked up by the budget rather than the employer alone.
What workforce mobility actually costs
Direct costs — tickets, moving belongings, a rental for the first while — are easy to count. It is far harder to gauge what makes a move genuinely expensive or, on the contrary, worthwhile.
The global context is harsh. The Global Energy Talent Index 2026 records an ageing workforce in traditional energy, a shrinking inflow of young people and — crucial for our topic — declining global mobility of specialists. People are ever less willing to uproot themselves. In Kazakhstan this layers onto a domestic shortage: according to the industry association KazService, the number of unfilled technical vacancies grew by 37% between 2022 and 2024. Aktau, a city of roughly 190,000 people, anchors an oilfield-services market worth about 680 million dollars — and specialists have to be brought in from everywhere.
Hence the price tag. To fill one senior position, a Kazakhstani specialist was relocated from Schlumberger's Baku office with a 35% relocation premium on top of salary plus a housing allowance. That is not generosity but sober arithmetic: a relocation premium and a paid apartment come cheaper than a unit idle for half a year. At the same time the market is looking for more flexible formats. Baker Hughes built a remote-hybrid arrangement in which the hire lives in Almaty and flies to Aktau weekly with flights covered — a non-standard solution for a field role that used to demand permanent relocation. Sometimes the right move is not a permanent move at all, but a smart compromise between rotation, a business trip and a full family relocation.
It is worth knowing in advance what a relocation package is even made of, because it does not stop at "settling-in money". A typical set includes paying for the move of the employee and family, transporting belongings (often a whole container, not a couple of suitcases), renting housing or a service apartment for the adjustment period, a one-off settling-in payment, and — for valuable specialists — help finding work for the spouse, a school or kindergarten place for the children, and covered flights home for the first while. It is precisely these "human" items that most often decide whether a person stays, and precisely these that are first struck from the budget when someone tries to save.
Payback is better measured not by the cost of the move but by the cost of the unfilled position. If a day of downtime or a missed handover deadline costs millions, then a relocation premium, paid housing and even help placing a spouse are not an expense but an investment with a fast return. It also matters whom it makes sense to relocate at all: moving line workers across half the country is expensive and pointless, whereas relocating scarce engineers and technical managers who simply do not exist on the local market almost always pays off. A sound staffing strategy is usually mixed: relocate the core, hire the line locally or by rotation.
And this is where the real pitfalls begin. The first is the family. A specialist may agree to move, but if the spouse has nowhere to work and the children nowhere to go to school, they will return within months and the whole investment burns. The second is understated timelines: settling into a new place takes not two weeks but several months, and productivity will be lower at first. The third is tax paperwork: money saved on an accountant easily becomes a reassessment. The fourth, and most galling, is the gap between what the person was promised at interview and what they got on arrival. It is that gap, not money, that most often triggers early turnover.
The benchmarks for 2026 are simple: the minimum wage is 85,000 tenge and the monthly calculation index is 4,325 tenge, and these are handy starting points when planning allowances. But the main takeaway is not in the numbers. Workforce mobility works not when a company has paid for a ticket, but when it treats the move as a project with its own budget, timeline and owner — and works out not only the specialist's logistics but the life of the family in the new place. It is not a CV that relocates but a person, and in the end what keeps them is not the premium but the sense that someone thought about them in advance.
Frequently asked questions
Is relocation better than rotation?
Neither is better — they are simply different tools for different tasks. Rotation is irreplaceable at remote fields where permanent living is impossible or pointless. Relocation is needed when a specialist is required on site for years and it is cheaper and safer to move them with the family than to shuttle them back and forth. Companies often combine the two: relocate the critical core of the team and hire line and shift staff by rotation.
Do you pay tax on relocation reimbursement?
When transferring to another locality together with the employer, reimbursement of documented costs for travel, moving belongings and renting housing for up to thirty calendar days is not subject to individual income tax (subparagraph 5, Article 366 of the Tax Code). But anything handed over without supporting documents, or beyond the thirty-day housing limit, risks becoming taxable income. So receipts, leases and transfer orders should be collected from day one.
How do you keep an employee after the move?
Look after not just the specialist but the family. Help finding housing and a school, a clear adjustment plan for the first months, honest expectations about workload and daily life, a mentor at the new location — all of it costs less than hiring and relocating all over again. Early turnover after a move almost always rises not because of money but because of domestic unsettledness and the gap between promises and reality.
What if the specialist doesn't want to move for good?
Don't push — look for a hybrid format. Remote-hybrid schemes with weekly flights, an extended business trip for a pilot period, a rotational regime during commissioning — all of these let you get the person you need without forcing them to move the family straight away. A soft entry into the project sometimes turns into voluntary relocation a year later, once the person has settled in and wants to stay.