Employer of Record in India

An Employer of Record is a company that legally employs people on your behalf in a country where you have no legal presence. The employment contract is between the worker and us. The work is for you.

In practice that split is cleaner than it sounds. Your team member is hired under an Indian employment contract with Aether Blue Associates, is enrolled in Provident Fund and ESI where applicable, has tax deducted at source from their salary, and receives payslips and a Form 16 like any other employee in India. Day to day, they work under your direction, on your projects and using your tools — exactly as they would if you had hired them yourself.

You need no Indian entity, no Indian bank account and no Indian registrations. That is the point of the model: the legal, payroll and compliance layer is ours, and the working relationship is yours.

Setting up an Indian subsidiary means company incorporation, tax registrations, labour-law compliance and payroll infrastructure — all of it before your first employee can start. Realistically that is six months before your first hire begins work, and the filings never stop afterwards. Mistakes carry penalties.

Through an EOR, the sequence is different because none of that infrastructure has to be built. It already exists. We are a registered Indian private limited company with EPF, ESI, TDS, GST and Professional Tax registrations in place, so a new hire joins an employer that is already filing. The first employee can be onboarded in as little as 5–7 working days.

That is not an argument against ever having your own entity. It is an argument against having one on day one, before you know how large the team will be or how long you will need it.

This is the question that stops most EOR conversations in diligence, so it is worth stating plainly. Our Master Service Agreement includes confidentiality and IP-assignment provisions so that all work product belongs to you. Employees sign matching undertakings, so the chain runs from the individual through us to you without a gap.

The two documents are designed to line up. An assignment in the client agreement is worth little if the person who actually wrote the code never signed anything equivalent — which is why the employee undertakings mirror the MSA rather than sitting alongside it.

Your protection here is contractual and practical. The MSA gives you a transition right: employees can be moved to another EOR or to your own Indian entity, with full handover of employment records, payroll registers and statutory filings.

Those records are shared with you monthly in any case, so you always hold a current copy rather than having to request one at the worst possible moment. And employee dues — Provident Fund balances, funded gratuity — sit with government bodies and with a regulated insurer, not on our books, so they are protected independently of us.

If you later decide you do want your own Indian subsidiary, we advise on incorporation and transition employees across.

You receive one consolidated monthly invoice in USD covering salaries, statutory contributions and our service fee, payable by wire before the salary date. As an exporter of services under LUT, our invoices carry no Indian GST.

Salaries reach employees on schedule every month. We maintain the working discipline that your team's payday is never dependent on a same-day transfer landing. Filing proofs and payroll registers accompany every cycle, so your finance team can reconcile what was paid against what was filed.

We employ across all Indian states and major cities. State-specific items — Professional Tax schedules, Shops & Establishments rules, state holidays and state Labour Code rules — are applied per each employee's work location, and the compliance calendar tracks them state-wise.