Why We Stopped Publishing Aqaba's Tax Numbers

When people hear that STEADYWRK is headquartered in Aqaba, Jordan, the first question is always about talent. The second is about infrastructure. The third is always about tax.

This post used to answer the third question with a table of rates and a worked comparison across three cities. We took that out on purpose, and the reason is worth more to you than the table was.

Why the table is gone

We are an operations company. We are not a Jordanian tax adviser, we are not licensed to give tax advice in any jurisdiction, and nothing we publish had been reviewed by anyone who is.

That would be a small sin if the numbers were merely decorative. They were not. Founders were reading a rate off a vendor's blog and using it to decide where to domicile a company — a decision that is expensive to unwind and that turns on details a blog post cannot know: what activity you are licensed for, where your revenue is earned, what your home country does with foreign income, and what the rules say this quarter rather than on the day we wrote it.

There was also a plainer problem. Our own corpus contradicted itself. One page described a nil personal-tax regime; another correctly said that employees pay standard Jordanian income tax on their salaries. Both were live at the same time. If we cannot keep our own pages consistent about a country's tax law, we have no business being your source for it.

Where the answer actually lives

The zone's terms are set and published by the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority. Read them there. Then take them to a Jordanian tax adviser and a Jordanian corporate lawyer, and take the result to your own adviser at home, because your residence country will have a view regardless of what Jordan says.

That is three conversations. It is genuinely more work than reading a number off a website. It is also the only version of this process that survives contact with a tax authority.

The questions worth asking

If you are seriously evaluating the zone, these are the ones that decide it. Put them to an adviser, not to a search engine:

• What is licensed, and does my actual activity fall inside it? Treatment follows the licence, not the postcode.