At a meeting in the Senate on March 12 addressing the problem of informal employment in Kazakhstan, Minister of Labor and Social Protection Askarbek Yertayev revealed informal employment statistics and proposed measures aimed at broader legalization of labor relations in the domestic labor market.
Yertayev noted that informal, or shadow, employment has a negative impact on the country’s socioeconomic development. According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, of Kazakhstan’s total workforce of 9.7 million, 6.7 million people at least once made mandatory pension contributions in 2025, including 5.3 million hired employees and 1.4 million self-employed individuals.
“This means that approximately 3 million people have no pension contributions, well above official statistics. According to the Bureau of National Statistics, at the beginning of 2025, the informal employment rate was approximately 12% of the employed population, or more than 1.1 million people. This means that part of the working population is employed informally or conceals their real income,” the minister stated.
Speaking about the reasons why people choose informal employment, Yertayev emphasized that overdue debts on bank loans and frozen bank accounts often push citizens to conceal income and engage in informal employment. Of the 7.1 million employees in Kazakhstan, only 4.1 million have their contracts registered in the Unified System for Recording Employment Contracts.
To encourage legal employment, the Ministry of Labor plans to implement artificial intelligence technologies on the Electronic Labor Exchange portal. A dedicated AI agent will proactively select relevant vacancies and find jobs for job-seekers based on their professional skills. The new algorithm involves constant feedback between job-seekers and the AI agent regarding job selection, providing personalized support to Kazakhstanis throughout the entire job search process.
At the meeting, Senate Member Asem Rakhmetova emphasized that to reduce informal employment and build a socially protected society, it is necessary to more actively open new industries in the regions, provide vocational training for young people, and engage socially vulnerable groups in the legal economy.
Deputy Chairman of the State Revenue Committee Zhanibek Nurzhanov shared the results of efforts to legalize the work of self-employed citizens, including a successful pilot project which has helped more than 43,000 taxi drivers to have registered as individual entrepreneurs under a special tax regime.
Olzhas Ordabayev, Chairman of the Committee for the Development of Human Capital and Social Policy of Business at the Atameken National Chamber of Entrepreneurs, drew attention to the direct correlation between informal employment and the population’s heavy indebtedness.
According to him, in 2025, 1,383,896 Kazakhstanis had loans from banks and microfinance organizations overdue for more than 90 days, with 76.7% of those people being of active working age (18 to 49 years old). The problem debts and frozen accounts is a barrier to formal employment. Ordabayev proposed aligning employment policy with debt rehabilitation mechanisms to make legal income secure and economically viable for debtors.
The meeting participants agreed that effective public policy should be aimed not only at strengthening controls but also at creating an enabling environment for legalizing employment through the development of digital tools, improved legislation, and increased financial and legal literacy among the population.
