How to Hire in Belize: Salaries, Labor Laws, and Time Zone Overlap for US Companies

Hire in Belize and you get English-speaking talent in Central America, working US Central and Mountain hours year-round, at well below US pay. It fits customer-facing work best (customer support, virtual and executive assistance, and sales development) where sounding native and working your hours decide the hire.

If you’ve run a customer-facing role out of a distant offshore country, you know why that matters. The person was capable, but they worked overnight against your business day, so answers landed the next morning, escalations sat, and customers felt it before your team saw the queue build.

This guide covers what professionals in Belize are good at, what those roles pay, and which parts of Belizean employment law catch US employers off guard, drawing on what Hire With Near’s nearshore staffing and recruiting team sees across Latin America.

Why Are US Companies Hiring in Belize?

US companies hire in Belize for three reasons that stack: English is the official language, the country aligns closely with the US Central and Mountain time bands year-round, and pay for the roles it does well runs a fraction of the US equivalent.

Together, they solve the specific problem that sends companies looking outside the US in the first place: a support, sales, or assistant role that needs to sound native, work your hours, and come in well under domestic salary rates.

English is the official language

Belize was British Honduras until 1973, and the Government of Belize states plainly that English is the official language and that Belize is the only English-speaking country in Central America. 

For a support, sales, or assistant role where the job is largely talking and writing to your customers, that removes a variable you’d otherwise screen hard for.

It closely aligns with the US Central Time band

Belize runs on UTC-6 and never changes its clocks, so it matches US Central Time exactly during the winter. Once the US shifts to Daylight Saving, Belize falls an hour behind Central and lines up with Mountain Time instead. 

You can see how the time zone alignment works in the table below:

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Hire With Near’s research on why US companies hire in Latin America, drawn from more than 2,000 conversations, found that 30% were moving away from distant offshore teams to get their people into US working hours, second only to budget at 41%. That’s a Latin America-wide figure rather than a Belize one, but it describes exactly the reader this guide is for. 

An operations manager at a digital marketing agency, who had run two virtual assistants through an offshore agency for close to a year, described what that gap does to output:

It started really strong, but over the last few months, I don’t know that they’re where we need them to be to go to the next level. They’re working EST hours, but for them, it’s the end of the day, it’s basically overnight. I’d like someone on our working hours naturally, since that would probably help with some of the performance issues we’re seeing.

Deep cultural familiarity and proximity

Beyond shared hours, Belizeans consume predominantly US media, sports, and pop culture, while also maintaining close economic ties to the US. This high level of cultural overlap means less onboarding friction when it comes to understanding US idioms, customer expectations, workplace norms, and tone.

Because the cultural gap is minimal, customer-facing hires in Belize can build instant rapport with US clients without requiring extensive training on conversational nuance.

In the video below, Hire With Near’s COO, Franco Pereyra, shares insights on the traits that make Latin American talent a strong match for what US businesses look for in employees.

Significant, predictable cost savings

While talent quality and time-zone alignment often close the deal, savings are usually what start the conversation. Across Hire With Near’s placement data in Latin America, US companies routinely save 30% to 70% on compensation compared to equivalent domestic hires, which comes out to $35,000 to $64,000 in annual savings per hire.

These figures reflect regional trends rather than Belize specifically, but they set the right expectation: fluent, customer-facing talent at well below US market rates.

How Can a US Company Hire in Belize?

US companies have three options to hire employees in Belize: establish a legal entity, use an employer of record, or work with a specialist staffing and recruiting company. 

For most businesses, the third is the fastest path to a good hire. Here they are, from most to least complex: 

Option 1: Establish a legal entity

Registering a subsidiary means incorporating a company in Belize, registering it with the tax authority and social security board, opening a local bank account, and setting up compliant payroll. Once that’s in place, you employ people directly under your own company name, with full control over contracts, compensation structure, and benefits. No third party sits between you and the hire.

That level of control comes at a cost. Registration typically takes several months, and you’ll need ongoing local legal and accounting support to stay compliant as rules change. It’s the right call for dozens of employees and a permanent in-country presence, but for a company hiring two or five people, it’s a lot of infrastructure to build before you’ve even made your first hire. 

This guide to hiring remote foreign employees covers what employing someone abroad involves in practice.

Option 2: Use an employer of record (EOR)

Employer of record services work through a third party that becomes the legal employer of your hire on paper while you manage the work day to day, handling contracts, payroll, tax withholding, benefits, and local compliance on your behalf.

One Belize-specific detail matters here: Under Section 50 of the Belize Labour Act, an employment contract must be in writing for any engagement of three months or more. The same applies to any contract made in Belize that’s performed wholly or partly outside it, which covers most remote hires by a US company.

Popular EOR companies include Deel, Globalization Partners, Remote, and Oyster.

An EOR only handles employment logistics: you still source, screen, and select every candidate yourself, whether through LinkedIn, referrals, or a job board for hiring in Latin America.

In a market the size of Belize, sourcing is the hard part.

Option 3: Work with a specialist staffing and recruiting company

This is the simplest option for most US companies. You work with one of the specialist staffing firms for LatAm hiring, like Hire With Near, that handles both talent acquisition and employment logistics in one relationship.

The process starts with a call to define the role: what the person will do day to day, what English level and skills the position requires, and your budget. From there, the firm sources and screens candidates against that brief and sends you a shortlist of pre-vetted people, usually within a matter of days. You interview whoever you want from that shortlist and choose who to hire.

Once you’ve made your choice, the mechanics of employment become the firm’s responsibility rather than yours. Through Hire With Near, that means running payroll, benefits, compliance, and local employment requirements as standard practice, not an add-on you negotiate separately. You manage the person’s day-to-day work; the firm manages everything that keeps that employment legal and compliant on the Belize side.

If you’ve been using Upwork or Toptal for work you now want a permanent person on, specialist staffing gives you fundamentally different results for full-time remote hires. Someone committed to your business behaves differently from someone splitting attention across four clients.

What Can US Companies Expect from Belizean Professionals?

Belizean professionals are strongest in communication-heavy work: customer support, virtual and executive assistance, sales development, and admin and operations support. English is the official language, and the honest limitation is pool size, not skill.

In the conversations Hire With Near’s recruiters have about support and assistant hires across Latin America, the filter they keep returning to is how someone sounds and reads on a live call, plus hands-on fluency with the tools the job runs on. What surprises US clients most is how much experience with US companies these candidates already have.

English proficiency, without overstating it

The Statistical Institute of Belize’s 2022 census found 75.5% of the population can speak English, alongside 54.0% Spanish and 49.0% Belizean Creole. 

An official-language fact describes the country, not any individual candidate, so English is assessed on every placement, in every country, rather than assumed from a passport.

Where the roles concentrate

If you hire customer support talent in Belize, you’re mostly hiring customer support reps and success managers. 

If you hire virtual assistants and admin support, you’re hiring virtual assistants, executive assistants, and operations analysts. 

That’s a Latin America-wide pattern from Hire With Near’s own placement data, and it lines up closely with Belize’s own economy: business process outsourcing has grown into one of the country’s largest employment sectors, with tens of thousands of Belizeans now working in customer support, sales, and back-office roles for US clients.

Where the talent is: Belize City, Belmopan, and beyond

Belize’s professional workforce concentrates in a small number of hubs, each with a slightly different character.

• Belize City is the country’s largest city and its commercial and educational center, and it’s where Belize’s BPO industry took root and remains most established. It has the deepest bench of experienced customer support, sales, and back-office talent, and the most developed business infrastructure in the country.
• Belmopan, the capital, is a newer but growing hub. The government has actively promoted BPO investment there, and several contact center operators have opened offices in Belmopan specifically to diversify away from Belize City.
• San Ignacio, in the Cayo district, has emerged as a third option, with a lower cost of living than Belize City and a smaller but growing pool of support talent.

The University of Belize is the country’s main public university and the primary source of graduates for professional roles, with additional talent trained through the BPO sector itself, since many operators run their own onboarding and skills programs.

The honest limitation: pool size

Belize has roughly the population of a mid-sized US city, around 429,000 people. That’s rarely a problem for a single customer-facing or admin hire, but a real constraint if you need to scale a large team or need a deep engineering pool specifically. 

For the region’s other native-English market with more scale, our guide to hiring remote talent in Jamaica covers a larger pool with the same core advantage.

What Are the Salary Ranges for Belize Hires?

Hiring the roles Belize does well typically costs 30% to 70% less than hiring the same role in the US. According to Hire With Near’s 2026 State of LatAm Hiring Report, which analyzed more than 2,000 placements across Latin America, companies save an average of $35,000 to $64,000 a year per hire compared with the US equivalent.

We don’t publish country-by-country pay bands for Belize, so the figures below are our Latin America-wide benchmarks for the roles US companies hire most in this part of the region, compared against equivalent US salaries:

For the most up-to-date figures, see Hire With Near’s US vs Latin America Salary Guide.

Read those ranges as what these roles cost, not as a discount: a professional paid at the top of a band is well compensated locally, which is what keeps them in the role. 

The gap is due to a different cost of living, as you can see in the table below comparing Belize City to Mobile, Alabama, a US city with a similar profile:

Source: Numbeo.com 

What Do US Companies Need to Know Before Hiring in Belize?

Two things reliably catch US companies off guard in Belize, and they pull in opposite directions. There’s no mandatory 13th-month salary, which is unusual in Latin America and good news for your budget. And there’s a heavy back-half-of-the-year holiday load: six of the country’s 14 public and bank holidays fall between September 10 and December 26. 

Paid time off and statutory leave

Every worker is entitled to an annual holiday of at least two working weeks at the end of each year of employment, under Section 127, with no tenure escalation. Some competitor pages say leave rises to three weeks after five years. It doesn’t: that five-year step is real, but it sits in Section 183, which governs severance pay. A three-week entitlement can exist in a contract or collective agreement, just not as the statutory baseline.

Paid sick leave is 16 working days in any twelve months under Section 131, for a worker who has been with the same employer at least 60 days in aggregate over the preceding twelve months. 

Maternity leave is 14 weeks at full pay under Section 177, of which at least two weeks must be taken before the expected date and at least seven after. There’s no statutory paternity or parental leave.

Public holidays

Belize observes 14 public and bank holidays, with the most recent addition being Emancipation Day in 2021, according to the Government of Belize Press Office:

• New Year’s Day: January 1
• George Price Day: January 15
• National Heroes and Benefactors Day: March 9
• Easter Weekend (Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Monday): March/April
• Labour Day: May 1
• Emancipation Day: August 1
• St. George’s Caye Day: September 10
• Independence Day: September 21
• Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance Day: October 12
• Garifuna Settlement Day: November 19
• Christmas Day: December 25
• Boxing Day: December 26

If you’re staffing support coverage through peak seasons or holding Q4 delivery dates, build these into your operational planning early.

Two key operational rules help refine your planning:

• Public holidays during annual leave: If an official public holiday falls within an employee’s period of statutory annual vacation, that day isn’t counted as leave, extending their total time off by one day.
• Weekend shifts: When fixed-date holidays fall on weekends, official weekday observance may vary based on annual government declarations (governed by the Holidays Act), which can adjust actual non-working weekdays in a given calendar year.

13th-month salary

There’s no statutory 13th- or 14th-month payment, which puts it in a small minority in Latin America, where an Aguinaldo or its equivalent is a legal obligation in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica, among others. 

Year-end bonuses happen by contract or as market practice.

Belize statutory benefits and other employer obligations

These obligations apply to a formal employment relationship, whether through your own entity or an employer of record. Candidates factor them into their pay expectations, so budget for them from the start.

• Social security: Contributions are split between employer and employee and always total 10% of banded weekly insurable earnings, per the Social Security Board’s contribution schedule. The employer share runs from 8.13% at the lowest earnings bands down to 5.50% at the top, with the employee share moving the other way, 1.88% to 4.50%. Insurable earnings are capped at BZD 520 a week, so the employer contribution tops out at BZD 28.60 per employee per week regardless of salary. That cap is the number for your model.
• Income tax: Employed individuals pay a flat 25% of chargeable income under the Income and Business Tax Act, Chapter 55. Under the current law, as amended by the Income and Business Tax (Amendment) Act 2024 with effect from January 1, 2025, an employed resident whose total annual income is under BZD 29,000 isn’t chargeable to tax at all. Above that, a basic deduction of BZD 20,000 applies, with a tapering credit between BZD 29,000 and BZD 32,000. It’s withheld through PAYE, and candidates negotiate on take-home pay.
• Working hours and overtime: Section 116 caps actual work at nine hours a day and 45 a week, across no more than six days. Overtime is paid at no less than one and a half times the ordinary rate, rising to double time on Christmas Day, Good Friday, and Easter Monday.
• Notice periods: Section 37(2) ties notice to continuous service: one week for more than two weeks up to six months, two weeks up to two years, four weeks up to five years, and eight weeks beyond five years.
• Severance: A statutory entitlement exists once someone has enough continuous service, escalating at the five-year and ten-year marks under Section 183. The exact multipliers are a conversation for your payroll or staffing partner.

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What can go wrong?

The first failure mode is the 13th-month assumption, in both directions. Some companies budget for one in Belize that isn’t owed. Others run a multi-country search, get comfortable with Belize’s rules, then get caught by a mandatory aguinaldo when the strongest candidate turns out to be in Mexico or Costa Rica.

The second is the Q4 cluster. Six holidays in the last fifteen weeks of the year is a real constraint on support coverage and delivery dates.

The third is vetting effort pointed at the wrong risk. Teams arrive braced to run the same intensive English screen they’d run elsewhere in the region, when the harder question is depth: whether the pool holds enough people at the seniority you need. 

From the editorial work I do interviewing our recruiters, that’s the reframe they push hardest on a smaller market, and it’s why they set expectations on both sides, yours and the candidate’s, before an offer goes out.

How Does Hire With Near Help US Companies Hire in Belize?

Hire With Near helps US companies hire full-time remote employees across Latin America, including Belize: we find the people, vet them, and handle payroll, benefits, and compliance once you hire. 

The process starts with a kickoff call where your dedicated recruiter learns the role, the team, and what a strong hire would be doing before anyone is shortlisted. From there, you get a shortlist of pre-vetted candidates with video introductions, so you’re watching people talk rather than reading resumes, and we assess English on every placement regardless of country. 

Our placements stay an average of three years, 80% are still in the role after two, and every placement carries a 180-day replacement guarantee.

How a fast-growing diagnostics company solved its screening bottleneck

Snap Diagnostics, a sleep apnea diagnostics company in Illinois growing more than 30% a year, shows the volume version. Their customer service postings pulled hundreds of resumes with roughly 1% worth interviewing, and one HR manager was doing all the screening. 

They hired 16 people through Hire With Near across customer support, sleep scoring, and finance, at a 19-day average time to hire and $587,000 in annual savings, with about 12 hours of HR time saved per position. Their HR Manager put it this way:

Working with Hire With Near has been very helpful. It’s difficult when you’re one person doing all the initial screenings and sourcing. Hire With Near took a lot of that ’workout’ for me and provided great candidates quickly.

— Susan Simmermon, HR Manager, Snap Diagnostics

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For the longer version of what works and what doesn’t, 9 lessons learned from hiring in Latin America draws on those 3,500+ placements. For director-level or leadership roles, Hire With Near also handles executive search in Latin America across all departments.

Final Thoughts

Belize deserves a place on your shortlist for an important reason: it’s the only country in Central America where English is the official language. For customer support, virtual and executive assistance, sales development, and operations work, that language factor and the time zone alignment are a hard combination to beat at this cost.

Plan around the two real constraints, a talent pool the size of a mid-sized US city and six public holidays between September 10 and December 26, and the rest is a normal hire.

If you’re ready to explore hiring in Belize, book a free consultation to talk through your requirements with our team. We’ll walk you through salary benchmarks and what the process looks like. You can also check our How to Hire Developers in Belize guide, if your focus is on that area.

If you’re still weighing your options, check some of our country guides: Hiring in Honduras covers a market strong in sales talent at some of the region’s fastest time-to-hire rates, How to Hire in Costa Rica covers a deep bilingual and shared-services talent pool built on decades of multinational investment, and Hiring in Nicaragua covers another fast-growing, English-adjacent market with some of the region’s quickest placement timelines.

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