Most people know Belarus’s Hi-Tech Park for one thing: the tax regime. A resident company pays a fraction of what an ordinary business pays, which is why the HTP has drawn thousands of technology firms and a good share of the region’s IT talent. But the tax benefits are the reward, not the entrance, and the entrance has a gate most newcomers underestimate — a defined list of activities. You do not join the HTP because you are a technology company; you join because what you actually do appears on the Park’s list.
That makes “which activities qualify?” the first and most practical question for any founder eyeing the Park, and the honest answer has two halves. The first is reassuring: the list is far broader than “writing software,” and after a major 2017 expansion it reaches into artificial intelligence, biotechnology, aerospace, fintech, blockchain and much else besides. The second is a caution: it is still a list — a defined, closed set of activities — and a business whose real work sits outside it does not qualify, however technological it feels.
This article maps that list as it stands in 2026: the families of activities that qualify, the newer additions that show the list is alive rather than frozen, and — just as important — what “qualifying” takes beyond the activity itself, because a permitted activity is necessary but not sufficient. The aim is to let a founder answer, before spending money on an application, the question the Park will ask first: does what you do belong here?
It helps to see how the pieces fit before looking at the list. The Hi-Tech Park is a special legal and tax regime created by presidential decree and, since the 2017 reform, one of the most generous technology regimes in the region, running now to 2049. Its benefits — the low tax burden, the relaxed currency and migration rules, the simplified paperwork — attach to a company only once it holds HTP resident status. And resident status is granted only to a company whose business is one of the activities the Park permits. The activity is therefore not a detail; it is the hinge on which the whole thing turns.
This is why the activity question has to be answered honestly and early, rather than reverse-engineered to fit. The Park does not grant residency to a company that calls itself high-tech and then does something else; it grants it to a company whose declared and actual activity sits on the list, and it checks. A business that squeezes itself onto the list on paper, while really doing something outside it, is not saving itself trouble — it is storing it up, because the mismatch surfaces later, when the stakes are higher.
The good news is that the list was drawn to be inclusive of genuine technology work, and most real technology businesses find themselves on it somewhere. The task is not to force a fit but to locate the honest one — to identify which of the Park’s activity categories actually describes what the company does. For many that is obvious; for some, whose work spans categories or sits at the frontier, it takes a careful look. Either way, it is the look to take first.
It is worth being concrete about what sits on the other side of the gate, because the size of the prize is what makes the activity question worth taking seriously. HTP residency is not a badge; it is a package of real, quantifiable advantages, and the tax treatment is the headline. A resident is relieved of the ordinary taxes that weigh on a Belarusian business — the profit tax and value-added tax that an off-Park company pays — and its staff enjoy a low, flat rate of personal income tax rather than the standard one. For a people-heavy technology business, where salaries are the dominant cost, that combination changes the economics of operating in a way few other jurisdictions match.
The benefits go well beyond tax, and several of them matter more than founders expect. Currency-control rules that bind ordinary companies are relaxed for residents, so cross-border payments and contracts run with far less friction. The paperwork burden is lighter, with much of the documentary formality that ordinary businesses carry simply switched off. And — importantly for a firm hiring internationally — the migration rules are simplified, so bringing foreign specialists in on work permits and residence is quicker and less fraught than the ordinary route. For a business built on scarce global talent, that alone can justify the structure.
Set against those benefits, the discipline of getting the activity right is plainly worth it. A company that qualifies captures a regime designed, quite deliberately, to make Belarus one of the cheapest and smoothest places in the region to run a technology business — and the regime is committed in law until 2049, which gives a resident a long and stable horizon to plan against rather than a benefit that might vanish at the next budget. The activity is the key to a door genuinely worth opening, which is why it repays being answered carefully rather than hopefully.
The Park’s permitted activities run to around thirty-five categories, which is too many to hold in the head as a flat list, so it helps to group them into families. The table below sets out those families with representative examples; the sections after it go deeper into the ones that surprise people. The headline is simply how much ground the list covers — from the classic business of writing and running software to fields most people would never file under “IT” at all.
| Activity family | Examples | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Software & IT services | Development, testing, implementation, support; games; data processing | The classic core |
| Data, cloud & infrastructure | Data centres, hosting, CDN, cloud services | The infrastructure layer |
| Deep tech & R&D | Nano/micro-electronics, mechatronics, materials, biotech, aerospace | Far beyond “IT” |
| AI, IoT & autonomous systems | Neural networks, Internet of Things, self-driving control systems | The frontier |
| Fintech & marketplaces | Contactless & mobile payments, e-trading, online intermediaries | Excludes banking |
| Blockchain, crypto & tokens | Crypto-exchange & platform operators, token services, mining | Extra auditor conditions |
| Newer & catch-all | Esports, cybersecurity centres, government digital support | The list keeps growing |
The activity families in outline; each covers several of the Park’s listed categories. Confirm the exact category for your own business, since the match has to be precise, not approximate.
Start with the family almost everyone fits or expects to: software and IT services. This is the Park’s historic core, and it is drawn generously — the analysis, design, development, testing, implementation, documentation and support of software and information systems, for any platform, including computer games, together with the data processing and IT services that cluster around them. A company that builds, runs or maintains software of almost any kind is on the list here, and for the large majority of applicants this is where the honest match is found.
Where the list surprises people is in how far past software it reaches. The Park is not only for coders; it is for high technology broadly, and several families on the list have little to do with writing programs. Research and development in the natural and technical sciences qualifies. So does micro-, opto- and nanoelectronics, along with the embedded software that runs it; mechatronics and embedded systems; the production of knowledge-intensive materials, devices and systems; and data-transmission and radio technologies, from radiolocation to RFID.
The frontier families go further still. Artificial intelligence — the training of neural networks and the design of algorithms — is expressly on the list, as is the Internet of Things, and the control systems for autonomous and unmanned vehicles. Medical technology and biotechnology development qualify; so do aviation and space technologies. A founder whose instinct is that “HTP is for software houses” tends to be startled to learn that a biotech lab, a chip-design team or a drone-autonomy startup can be looking at the same residency as a web-development studio.
The practical lesson is to read the list with imagination rather than assumption. A business that does not think of itself as “IT” at all may nonetheless sit squarely within one of the deep-tech families, and the value of resident status to a research-heavy or hardware-adjacent company can be as great as to a pure software firm. Where a company’s work spans categories, or sits at the edge of one, that is exactly the situation in which to take advice on the fit before registering the IT company and preparing the application, because the category you claim has to be the one you can defend.
The most talked-about part of the 2017 expansion was the one that put Belarus briefly at the front of the world’s crypto regulation: the Park became a home not just for software but for digital-asset businesses. The list now includes activities built around blockchain and distributed ledgers, and specifically operating crypto-platforms and cryptocurrency exchange services, acting as an operator of token offerings, token creation and placement, mining, and running funds that invest in digital assets. For a crypto business, the HTP is one of the few regimes in the region that offers a defined legal home rather than a grey area.
That openness, though, comes with its own conditions, and this is the family where “your activity qualifies” is least likely to be the end of the conversation. Crypto and token projects face additional requirements that the ordinary software applicant does not — notably confirmation of certain matters by external auditors — reflecting the Park’s wish to keep a genuinely regulated environment rather than an unpoliced one. A digital-asset founder should plan from the start for a heavier application than a web-development studio faces, and for scrutiny that matches the sensitivity of the sector.
The headline, even so, is that the door is genuinely open. A blockchain protocol team, a token issuer, an exchange operator or a mining business can all find an activity on the Park’s list that fits them, which is more than most jurisdictions offer with any clarity. The crypto families are where the list is most distinctive — and where the gap between “permitted activity” and “approved resident” is widest, so that getting the application right matters most.
It is worth understanding why the list looks the way it does, because the history explains both its breadth and its direction. The Park was created in 2005 with a far narrower focus — essentially software development and a handful of related activities — and for its first decade it was, in effect, a regime for IT outsourcing and software houses. That version built Belarus’s reputation as a software-development hub, but it left a great deal of genuine technology work outside the gate.
The turning point was the 2017 decree on the development of the digital economy, which rewrote the Park’s scope and briefly made Belarus one of the most talked-about technology jurisdictions in the world. It was the instrument that legalised and brought inside the Park the whole world of blockchain and digital assets — tokens, exchanges, mining and the rest — at a time when most countries had no framework for them at all. But the crypto headlines obscured the broader move: the same reform widened the list across the board, reaching into AI, biotech, aerospace, the Internet of Things and much more, and turned a software park into a high-technology park in the full sense.
The direction since then has been steadily outward. The additions of 2018, 2022 and 2023 — large-event technical support, government digital development, cybersecurity centres — show a regime that keeps extending its reach as new fields mature, rather than one defending a fixed perimeter. For a founder, the lesson of the history is optimistic: the list has grown wider at every revision, and the kind of genuine high-technology work the Park was built to attract has tended, sooner or later, to find a place on it.
One feature of the list is easy to miss and worth dwelling on: it is not frozen. The Park’s Supervisory Board can add new activities, and it has, repeatedly, which means a business whose field did not exist when the list was last updated may still find a home. Technical support for large national and international events was added in 2018. Support for the digital development of government bodies — analytics, standards, organisational and technical support — was added in 2022. Cybersecurity-centre services and incident response, together with management consulting paired with the development of information systems, were added in 2023.
Those additions matter for two reasons. The practical one is that fields such as cybersecurity-as-a-service and govtech, which a founder might assume fall outside a “software park,” are expressly in. The strategic one is what the pattern signals: the Park is actively widening its list to keep pace with the technology economy, so the right question is not only “is my activity on the list today?” but “is it the kind of high-tech work the Park wants, which the list is likely to reach?”
That second question connects to the genuine catch-all at the end of the list: other new and high-technology activities approved by the Park’s Supervisory Board. This is not a loophole to be gamed, but it is a real route for genuinely novel high-tech work that the fixed categories do not yet name — the frontier case where a business is plainly high-technology but hard to file. For such a company, the path runs through persuading the Park that its work belongs, which is a different exercise from ticking a box, and one where early, well-prepared engagement counts.
Abstract categories only get a founder so far; the question becomes real when applied to an actual business. The table below runs a set of common business types against the list, with a verdict and a reason. It is a guide to how the analysis feels rather than a ruling on any particular case — the point is to show that the answer is usually a confident yes, sometimes a “yes, if structured right,” and occasionally a clear no that is better known early.
| Business | Qualifies? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A SaaS or mobile-app developer | Yes | Core software activity |
| An AI / machine-learning startup | Yes | AI is expressly listed |
| A crypto-exchange or token issuer | Yes, with extras | Listed, but extra auditor conditions |
| A chip-design or biotech R&D team | Yes | Deep-tech / R&D families |
| A mixed firm: software plus retail | Yes, if structured | Put the IT work in the resident company |
| An IT staffing / recruitment agency | Usually no | Staffing itself is not a listed activity |
| A general e-commerce shop | No | Selling goods online is not high-tech activity |
Illustrative only — every case turns on what the business actually does and how it is structured.
The pattern in the table is the useful takeaway. A business whose core work is a listed high-tech activity is a clean fit. A business that mixes a qualifying activity with non-qualifying work is often still fine, provided the qualifying work is housed in the company that holds the residency and the rest is kept elsewhere — a structuring point rather than a bar. And a business whose real activity is simply not high-tech, however much technology it uses to run — the online shop, the staffing agency, the digital marketing house selling its own services rather than developing software — is off the list, and is far better off learning that before it spends on an application than after.
Two kinds of business sit in the genuinely grey zone and deserve a closer look, because they are where founders most often misjudge the fit. The first is the mixed business — a company doing some qualifying high-tech work alongside activities that are not on the list. The Park does not require a resident to do nothing but its listed activity in every sense, but the resident company’s business has to be the qualifying activity, and material earnings from off-list work put the status at risk. The usual answer is structural: isolate the qualifying activity in the company that will hold the residency, and keep the unrelated commercial work in a separate entity, so that the resident’s business genuinely is what the Park admitted.
The second is the frontier business — one whose work is plainly high-technology but does not map neatly onto any named category, because the field is new. Here the catch-all for Board-approved activities is the route, but it is a demanding one. Rather than pointing to a line on the list, the applicant has to make the case that its work is the kind of novel, high-technology activity the Park exists to attract, and persuade the Supervisory Board accordingly. That is a matter of framing, evidence and engagement, not form-filling, and it rewards a founder who comes with a clear account of what the business does and why it belongs, prepared with advice rather than improvised.
What both edge cases share is that the answer is rarely a flat no — it is a conditional yes that depends on getting the structure or the argument right. A mixed business can almost always be arranged so that a clean resident entity sits at its core; a frontier business can often be brought within the catch-all with a well-made case. The mistake is to treat either as hopeless, or to treat either as automatic. Both are winnable with the right preparation, and both are lost by assuming the question answers itself.
A permitted activity opens the door; it does not walk you through it. Three further things decide whether a company with a qualifying activity actually becomes a resident. The first is the vehicle: an HTP resident must be registered in Belarus — in practice almost always as a Belarusian legal entity, typically a limited liability company — rather than a representative office or a foreign company operating directly, so a foreign founder’s first step is usually to incorporate a Belarusian company to hold the residency.
The second is the business plan, and it is where applications are really won or lost. A company applying for residency submits a business plan to the Park’s administration setting out its planned activity, how it will carry it out, and its projected financial results — revenue, profit, jobs created, average salary — which are measured against the average performance of existing residents and serve as the real screening threshold. A qualifying activity with a thin or unconvincing HTP business plan behind it is not a strong application; the Park is choosing businesses it expects to succeed, not merely ones that fit a category. The third is the review itself, which the Park conducts within about a month of a complete application — quick by regulatory standards, but only once the plan and the papers are genuinely complete.
For crypto and token projects, as noted, there is a further layer on top of all this. The point to carry away is that “my activity qualifies” is the beginning of the analysis, not the end: the activity gets you to the starting line, and the vehicle, the plan and the review decide whether you cross it. Treating the activity as the whole question is the most common way a well-suited business still stumbles on its application.
Put in order, the path from idea to resident status runs through a recognisable sequence, and knowing its shape helps a founder see where the real work lies. It begins before the application itself, with the activity analysis — confirming, honestly, which listed category the business fits, and how it will be described. Only once that is settled does the structure follow: incorporating the Belarusian company that will register as an IT company and hold the residency, since a foreign entity cannot be a resident directly and the vehicle has to exist before it can apply.
With the company in place, the centre of gravity shifts to the business plan. This is not a formality to be dashed off; it is the document the Park actually weighs, setting out the planned activity, how it will be carried on, and the projected financial results — revenue, profit, jobs, salaries — that the Park compares against the average of its existing residents. A strong plan is specific, credible and backed by real numbers; a weak one, however genuine the underlying activity, invites rejection. For many applicants, the time and care invested here is the single biggest determinant of the outcome, which is why it is worth preparing with people who know what the Park looks for.
The application and its supporting documents then go to the Park’s administration, which reviews them within about a month of a complete submission. Crypto and token projects carry their extra requirements through this stage, including the external-auditor confirmations their sector attracts. A positive decision confers resident status, and with it the regime’s benefits; from that point the founder’s task changes from getting in to staying in good standing — carrying on the admitted activity and keeping the company’s reality matched to the basis on which it was admitted. The sequence is not complex, but each step depends on the one before it, and skipping the honest activity analysis at the start is what makes the later steps go wrong.
Two practical disciplines follow from all this. The first is at the entrance: identify the honest activity match before anything else, build the company and its residency application around that match rather than around a hoped-for tax outcome, and where the fit is anything other than obvious, test it with advice before committing. A clean match, well evidenced in the business plan, is the foundation of a smooth application; a forced or approximate one is the seed of a problem.
The second discipline is after the entrance, because residency is not a one-time test but a continuing condition. A resident is expected to carry on the permitted activity it was admitted for, and a company that drifts — that starts earning materially from work outside the Park’s list — puts its status, and the benefits that hang on it, at risk. Protecting the intellectual property and the people the business runs on sits alongside this: much of what makes a resident valuable, from its code to its foreign specialists on simplified permits, depends on keeping the residency sound. Where a business genuinely outgrows or moves beyond the Park’s scope, the clean course is a planned exit from the HTP rather than a quiet drift out of compliance.
None of this should obscure the headline, which is an encouraging one. The Park’s list of qualifying activities is wide, actively growing, and reaches far past the software businesses it is known for — into deep tech, biotech, AI, crypto and more. For most genuine technology companies the question is not whether they can find an activity that fits, but which one, and whether they will build the application around it with the care the opportunity deserves.
Most of the trouble founders run into is concentrated in a handful of avoidable errors, and naming them is the quickest way to sidestep them. The first is leading with the tax benefit rather than the activity — deciding to join the Park because of what residency saves, and only then reverse-engineering an activity to justify it. That is backwards, and the Park can tell. The analysis has to start from what the business honestly does, with the benefit as the reward for a real fit, not the motive for a manufactured one.
The second is underestimating the business plan. Founders with a plainly qualifying activity sometimes treat the application as a formality and submit a thin, generic plan, then are surprised to be turned away — because the Park is screening for businesses it expects to perform, measured against its existing residents, not merely checking a category. The third is the structure error: a foreign founder assuming they can hold residency through a foreign company or a branch, when the resident must be registered in Belarus, so that the incorporation step gets skipped or left too late.
The fourth is treating residency as permanent once granted, and letting the business drift into material off-list work without a thought for the status that depends on staying within scope. And the fifth, specific to digital-asset businesses, is not budgeting — in time and effort — for the extra requirements crypto projects carry, and arriving with a software-company application for a sector the Park scrutinises more closely. Each of these is simple to avoid with foresight; each is expensive to fix after the fact. The common cure is to treat the activity analysis and the residency application as the serious, front-loaded exercise they are, rather than a box to tick on the way to the tax rate.
No. Software and IT services are the historic core, but the list runs to around thirty-five activity categories and reaches well beyond coding — into R&D, micro- and nanoelectronics, biotechnology, aerospace, AI, the Internet of Things, fintech, blockchain and more. A business that does not think of itself as “IT” at all may still sit squarely within one of the deep-tech families on the list.
The activity you bring into the Park has to be one of the permitted categories, and your resident company is expected to carry on that activity. The cleanest position is a company whose business is genuinely a listed high-tech activity. Where a group has mixed operations, the usual approach is to put the qualifying activity into the Belarusian company that holds the residency and keep non-qualifying work elsewhere — a structuring question worth taking advice on.
Yes. The list expressly includes blockchain and distributed-systems work, operating crypto-exchanges and crypto-platforms, token creation and placement, acting as a token-offering operator, and mining. The HTP is one of the few regimes in the region with a defined legal home for digital-asset businesses. Crypto projects do, however, face additional requirements — including external-auditor confirmation of certain matters — so plan for a heavier application than a pure software firm faces.
Yes, but not directly. Only a business registered in Belarus can be a resident, so a foreign founder typically incorporates a Belarusian company, usually a limited liability company, to hold the residency — and a foreign company can own it. Operating through a representative office or a foreign entity directly does not qualify — the residency attaches to the Belarusian company, not to the foreign parent.
Three things, broadly. A Belarusian legal entity (or, in rare cases, an individual entrepreneur) to be the resident; a business plan submitted to the Park’s administration, with projected financials measured against the average of existing residents; and a successful review, which the Park completes in about a month of a complete application. For crypto and token projects there is an extra layer of requirements on top. The activity gets you to the starting line; these decide whether you cross it.
Possibly. Besides the fixed categories, the list ends with a catch-all: other new and high-technology activities approved by the Park’s Supervisory Board. This is a genuine route for novel high-tech work the named categories do not yet cover, but it is not a loophole — it means persuading the Park that your work belongs, which is a more involved exercise than ticking a box and benefits from early, well-prepared engagement.
The Park’s review is relatively quick by regulatory standards — on the order of a month from the submission of a complete set of documents. The important words are “complete set”: the clock runs from a properly assembled application with a convincing business plan behind it, so the time a founder most needs to invest is in preparing the application well, not in waiting for the decision.
Residency is a continuing condition, not a one-time test. A resident is expected to carry on the permitted activity it was admitted for, and a company that comes to earn materially from work outside the Park’s list puts its status, and the benefits attached to it, at risk. If a business genuinely moves beyond the Park’s scope, the clean course is a planned exit rather than drifting out of compliance and risking the loss of status on the Park’s terms rather than your own.
Broadly, a resident is relieved of the ordinary profit tax and VAT that an off-Park Belarusian company pays, and its employees enjoy a low flat rate of personal income tax rather than the standard one. For a salary-heavy technology business that combination is substantial. There are also relaxed currency-control rules, lighter paperwork and simplified migration for foreign staff. The exact treatment can change over time, so confirm the current regime, but the thrust has consistently been to make a resident one of the lightest-taxed businesses in the country.
No. HTP residency is a legal status, not a physical tenancy — a resident can be located anywhere in Belarus and still enjoy the regime. You do not need office space inside the Park’s campus to benefit. What matters is the resident company, its qualifying activity and its good standing, not a particular address, which makes the regime workable for businesses across the country.
Legally, either can: the HTP Regulation allows both Belarusian legal entities and Belarusian individual entrepreneurs to become residents. In practice, however, individual entrepreneurs are a rare exception — the regime, its business-plan requirements and the Park’s focus on growing teams are built around companies, and almost all applicants register as a limited liability company. A foreign founder will normally incorporate a Belarusian company to be the resident; operating as a foreign company or through a branch does not qualify. Take advice on the right vehicle for your situation before committing, since the structure shapes everything that follows.
Against the Park’s own residents. The business plan sets out the planned activity and projected financial results — revenue, profit, jobs, average salary — and the Park measures those projections against the average performance of existing residents, using them as the real screening threshold. A plan that is specific, credible and backed by real numbers passes; a thin or generic one struggles, even where the underlying activity plainly qualifies. It is the part of the application most worth investing in.
A resident operates within the activity basis on which it was admitted, so moving into a new line of work is not simply a matter of starting to do it. Where a business wants to take on a further listed activity, that is generally handled through the Park rather than unilaterally, and a company should keep its actual work matched to what it is admitted for. If your plans are likely to evolve, it is worth flagging that at the outset and taking advice on how to accommodate growth without jeopardising status.
For a genuine technology business, the HTP is usually the strongest option — its tax relief and its breadth of permitted high-tech activities are hard to match. Other regimes serve different needs: a free economic zone suits larger manufacturing and export projects, and the rural and small-town incentives target regional trade and services rather than technology. The art is matching the business to the regime built for it, and for software, deep tech, AI or crypto, that is generally the Park.
The regime is committed in law until 2049, which gives residents an unusually long and stable horizon compared with incentives that expire every few years. That does not make its detailed rules frozen — tax specifics and the activity list can and do change — but the core bargain has a long statutory life. A business planning around HTP residency is planning around a durable regime, not a short-term promotion, which is part of what makes the structuring worth doing properly.
Yes — the Park admits new companies, not only established ones, so a pre-revenue startup can apply. What matters is that the activity qualifies and that the business plan is credible: because the plan is judged on projected results rather than a track record, a young company competes on the strength and realism of its projections. A convincing plan for a genuine high-tech activity can carry an early-stage applicant, while a vague one will struggle regardless of stage. The key is to make the projections specific and defensible rather than aspirational.
The question “which activities qualify for HTP residency?” has a wider answer than its reputation suggests. The Park’s list runs to around thirty-five categories and reaches far past software — through deep tech, electronics, biotech, AI, the Internet of Things, fintech, blockchain and crypto, and a growing set of newer fields, with a catch-all for genuine high-tech the named categories do not yet reach. For most real technology businesses, there is an honest match to be found; the work is in finding the right one rather than forcing a fit.
And the activity, important as it is, is only the gate. Behind it sit the Belarusian company, the business plan measured against the Park’s own residents, the review, and — for crypto — a further layer of scrutiny, all of which decide whether a qualifying activity becomes an approved residency. Our team advises technology founders and investors on HTP resident status and the application behind it, from locating the right activity to building the business plan that carries it — so that a business that belongs in the Park gets in on the strength of a case made properly, rather than a category claimed hopefully.
