Position dated 5 September 2026. Status: In force. Instrument: Zakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o porezu na dobit pravnih lica, Official Gazette of Montenegro 104/2026, published 17 July 2026, in force on publication, applying from 1 January 2027. Base statute: Gazette RCG 65/01 and 80/04, CG 40/08 through 88/24.
The loan from the company to its owner is the most common single item we see in a Montenegrin balance sheet that nobody has priced for tax. It sits there interest-free, it gets rolled over each December, and until now the statute treated it lightly. Article 8 of this amending law rewrites Article 28a and changes that in three specific ways, none of which depends on the loan bearing interest.
What Article 28a now says
The rewritten first paragraph obliges a corporate taxpayer to calculate, withhold and pay withholding tax on payments made on the basis of a loan to natural persons, with or without interest, and also where the repayment period is extended, on the amount of the loan above 5,000 euros at annual level.
A new second paragraph then removes the allowance where it matters most: the tax-free portion of the loan does not apply to related parties within the meaning of Article 38 of the same act.
| Feature | Position from 1 January 2027 |
|---|---|
| Interest-bearing or not | Irrelevant — the text says "with or without interest" |
| Extension of the repayment date | A trigger in its own right |
| Threshold | Above 5,000 euros at annual level |
| Related parties (Article 38) | No tax-free portion at all |
| Who withholds | The corporate taxpayer making the payment |
Read those together and the picture is plain. An unrelated individual borrowing from the company has a 5,000-euro annual cushion. A shareholder, a director or a related company does not — for them the charge reaches the arrangement from the first euro. And the December roll-over that used to be a bookkeeping entry becomes an event the statute names.
Two other changes worth knowing
Article 11 inserts a new Article 29i, and it reads in the taxpayer's favour: the provisions of that chapter and the provisions of double taxation agreements "apply in the manner that ensures the more favourable tax treatment for the taxpayer". Where the treaty and the domestic withholding rules point in different directions, that sentence decides which one governs.
Article 9 extends withholding to performance income. A new paragraph in Article 29c applies the tax to income from staging entertainment, artistic, sporting or similar programmes in Montenegro. The non-resident recipient files, through a tax representative, with the tax office in the municipality where the programme is performed, within 30 days of receiving the income, and the authority then issues a decision.
Articles 12 to 14 tighten the reinvestment relief. Acquiring shares in agricultural entities now counts as investment for the purposes of Article 31d. The relief is claimed on application within 60 days of the reinvestment and no later than the end of the fiscal year in which it was made, and the taxpayer must file a declaration of any other state aid received in the previous three fiscal years, at the same time as the corporate tax return.
What the text does not say
It does not set the rate. Article 28a governs the scope of the withholding, not its percentage, and we did not read the rate provision in this pass — so do not take a number from this note.
It does not spell out how the 5,000 euros is allocated. The words are "at annual level", which reads as an annual measure rather than a per-loan one, but the statute does not add an allocation rule for a person with two loans or a loan running across a year end.
And it says nothing here about what happens when the loan is repaid. Whether repayment adjusts or refunds the withholding is not addressed in these paragraphs.
Our reading
The date gives you a clean year. These rules apply from 1 January 2027, so a loan account settled, documented or restructured during 2026 is settled under the old treatment. That is not an invitation to paper something backwards; it is a reason to look at the balance sheet now rather than in the spring.
For a related party the planning question changes shape entirely. With no tax-free portion, the choice between a loan, a dividend and a salary stops being a question of thresholds and becomes a question of which charge you prefer and when. If the company is holding property and the owner has been drawing on it informally, that is the conversation to have before the year turns. Our company formation page sets out how we work through the corporate side.
What did not change
The rest of the withholding chapter stands, as does the definition of related parties in Article 38, which this amendment points to rather than rewrites. The corporate tax rate structure is untouched by these articles. Nothing here applies to a period before 1 January 2027, and the amendment does not reopen earlier years. The anti-profit-shifting chapter added by the same law is a separate matter with the same application date.
How to verify
The promulgation decree and the adopted text sit in the Assembly's file for EPA 1059 XXVIII: zakoni.skupstina.me/zakoni/web/app.php/akt/4231. Open the last document, dated 9 July 2026. Article 8 carries the rewritten Article 28a — look for the phrase "sa ili bez kamate" for the interest point and "iznad 5.000 eura na godišnjem nivou" for the threshold, then read the new second paragraph for the related-party exclusion. Article 11 contains the single sentence of the new Article 29i.
The application date is in the final article of the amending law, which pairs entry into force on publication with application from 1 January 2027. We follow this file under Legal Updates.
