A little help
for the paperwork.
Free guides, practical steps, and sources you can check for yourself.
When the money crosses a border
Foreign clients, foreign platforms, foreign currency, and living somewhere else. The four questions that all reduce to: who is my counterparty, and what does that change.
W-8BEN, when your client is in the US
The form an American client emails you before they can pay. What it certifies, and why the 30% everyone panics about was never going to reach you.
The 30% was never in scope. US rules source income from personal services to the place the work is physically done, so work you performed in the Philippines is foreign-source income before any treaty is considered, and the 30% regime only reaches US-source income. W-8BEN documents that status to your payer. The treaty arrives at the same answer by a second route, which matters for other kinds of income and not for ordinary remote work.
Nonresident citizen, and the 183 days that are not a rule
Working from Bali for four months does not change your tax base. Here is what the statute actually tests for, and why the number everybody quotes came from somewhere else.
Neither the definition of a nonresident citizen nor the section that sets the tax base contains a day count anywhere. The 183-day figure comes from a 1979 regulation that glosses one of the four statutory tests, the one about employment requiring physical presence abroad, and its own wording is anchored to a contract worker leaving under a contract of employment. Nothing found extends it to a self-employed freelancer with no foreign employer.
Selling through Paddle, Lemon Squeezy or Gumroad
Your customer paid a platform. The platform paid you, minus its cut. Whose sale was it, and what do you report? This page is mostly about what nobody has answered.
No BIR ruling, circular or regulation naming a merchant-of-record arrangement was found. The zero-rating conclusion is a plain reading of the general export-of-services rule applied by analogy, which is a reasonable thing to do and a different thing from a confirmed position. The reportable amount is genuinely unresolved, because the platform nets its fee before paying out and nothing found says whether your gross receipts are the customer's payment or your payout.
Getting paid in crypto
A client pays in USDT. Nothing in Philippine tax law was written with that in mind. Here is what actually exists, and the widely-repeated number you should ignore.
That 15% is real but it belongs to a different asset. It is the rate on gains from shares of stock in a domestic corporation not traded on the local exchange, recently extended to unlisted foreign-corporation shares. Nothing found extends it to virtual assets. Crypto received as payment for services is income, and the BIR has issued nothing that tells you how to value or report it.
Selling through someone else's platform
What the marketplace takes out before it pays you, and what you can do about it.
Structure, and the agencies that are not the BIR
Outgrowing a sole proprietorship, and the three contributions nobody mentions until you have already missed a year of them.
One Person Corporation, or stay a sole proprietor
A corporation with one stockholder, no bylaws and no board meetings. It is a real option and it is not a free upgrade. What changes, and what it costs you.
The SEC changed the rules in February 2026. The threshold above which an OPC needs audited financial statements went from ₱600,000 to ₱3,000,000, and officer appointments are now due within 20 days of approval with a ₱10,000 penalty attached. Most content on this topic predates that. Separately, an OPC loses access to the 8% option entirely, which is often the single largest number in the comparison.
SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG when you work for yourself
Three agencies, none of them the BIR, all of them expecting something from you. How firmly each one is actually required, and what the two with citable circulars cost.
They differ in a way that matters. SSS registration is a penal offence to refuse. PhilHealth membership is automatic by statute, and the law says non-payment does not forfeit your access to benefits. Pag-IBIG's own statute does not clearly name self-employed people as a mandatory category at all. And a lot of the SSS and PhilHealth tables still circulating predate the 2024 and 2025 circulars that lifted both to their final phase-in levels.
Some of this genuinely has no answer yet.
7 of these 7 pages carry a section of open questions. Merchant-of-record VAT, crypto valuation and parts of the nonresident-citizen question have no BIR issuance on point, and that absence was searched for directly rather than assumed. Those pages say so in the same place they would have put an answer, because inventing one is worse for you than admitting the gap.
Not sure which of these is even your problem?
Answer eight questions about how you earn and the walkthrough works out which forms you file, on what calendar, and which of these edges you are standing near.
Work out what you fileEvery claim on these pages names the statute, regulation or agency issuance it rests on, and says when it rests on secondary reporting instead of a primary text. Practical guidance, not legal or tax advice.