Manila Tied a 90% Remote-Work Cap to Export and Headcount Floors

The Fiscal Incentives Review Board raised the ceiling on remote work inside Philippine economic and freeport zones to 90% from 50% in Resolution No. 005-2026, dated April 8, 2026 and made public two days later. Trade Secretary Cristina Roque, who co-chairs the board, said the change would let registered business enterprises hold their cost competitiveness and would ease the burden of higher fuel prices on their workforce. The measure applies retroactively from March 24 and expires after one year unless the President lifts or extends it.

An energy emergency produced it rather than an industrial strategy. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. issued Executive Order No. 110 in March 2026, placing the Philippines under a state of national energy emergency and encouraging private employers to adopt flexible work to cut operating costs. The sector that pressed hardest was IT-BPM, which IBPAP counts at about US$40 billion in export revenue for 2025 and roughly 1.9 million employees, up from US$38 billion in 2024 and US$35.5 billion in 2023. Services stood at 63% of GDP and 45% of total exports on the record of the WTO's sixth Trade Policy Review of the Philippines, held June 24 and 26, 2026.

Read past the ceiling and this is an aftercare instrument. FIRB attached a floor to the relief: a registered enterprise must maintain its prescribed export revenues and retain its current number of employees whatever share of its staff works from home. The concession buys cost flexibility and prices it in the two variables the incentive was granted to produce. Most incentive relief is not written that way, and an agency reading this resolution is looking at a covenant it could ask for the next time an exporter comes asking for room.

The board also kept the promotion agencies in the decision. It authorized them to permit up to 90%, and an agency may set a lower threshold of at least 50% depending on the nature of an enterprise's operations, so PEZA holds the operative number for its own register. It holds the compliance file too. Enterprises must notify the agency before starting, submit an inventory of technology assets taken outside the zone, lodge a surety bond, and file monthly updates on equipment held outside, with penalties calculated as regular income tax multiplied by the amount by which the threshold is exceeded in a given month. Relief on this design is only as good as the agency's capacity to process it.

Cost relief triggered by an oil shock may say little about promotion practice anywhere else. The measure expires in March 2027, the conditions may go unenforced, and the Asian Development Bank's May 2026 assessment ties the sector's growth to upskilling and digital infrastructure rather than to incentive design. If FIRB lets the resolution lapse without reporting whether enterprises held their export revenue and their headcount, the conditions were decoration and the reading here is wrong.

The resolution expires in March 2027. FIRB has not said whether it will report on the export revenue and employment condition when it does.