The Philippine calendar has 12 regular holidays and 8 special non-working days, and four of them fall between December 24 and 31 this year: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Rizal Day and New Year's Eve. Presidential Decree 851 adds a payroll deadline to the same week: the 13th-month payment is due no later than December 24.
So what happens when a US company hires someone in Manila this month? A lot, and most of it never makes it into the offer letter. The candidate isn't the hard part. Everything around the candidate is.
Start With Who Employs Them
I'd settle this one first. A company can put someone on its own payroll only where it has a registered entity, and building an entity can take weeks to months. Good candidates don't wait that long.
The shortcut is a provider, and there are two kinds. A PEO shares HR duties with you but needs your entity to exist already, so it won't help with a first hire abroad. In places like the Philippines, Colombia or South Africa, a first hire usually rules a PEO out. An employer of record, or EOR, becomes the legal employer itself. Globaltize's EOR versus PEO comparison prices an EOR at roughly $300 to $700 per employee per month and a PEO at 2 to 12 percent of payroll, and says an EOR can have someone on payroll within days. That's a vendor's estimate, so ask for a written quote. Globaltize's cost guide also puts the true cost of an overseas hire at 1.1 to 1.2 times salary, against 1.3 to 1.48 times for a US hire. Also a vendor's number, so test it against your own quotes. Still, the entity question decides this one long before price does.
The Contractor Shortcut
Contractor agreements are fast, which is why so many first hires start there. They're also where the trouble hides. Someone who works fixed hours for one manager and nobody else may legally be an employee, whatever the contract says, and the bill can include unpaid benefits, taxes and penalties.
In the Philippines that bill has specific lines. The 13th-month payment is a twelfth of a year's basic pay, which adds about 8.3 percent to annual cost, and SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG contributions come on top. Budget for them before you compare salaries. Pay on a fixed date through a proper channel, too. Manual transfers on irregular dates are the kind of informal arrangement the Philippines hiring guide lists as a mistake in its own right.
Holidays Cost Money Too
Plenty of managers skip this one entirely. On a regular holiday, Filipino employees get full pay whether they work or not, and double pay if they do. On a special non-working day it's no work, no pay, unless your contract says otherwise. Six holidays fall between November 30 and December 31 in 2026, so that policy will get used.
Write that policy down early. The same holiday guide flags Holy Week, from Maundy Thursday to Black Saturday, and the days between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve as stretches that need buffer time. Ask staff, too, whether they want to work regular holidays, because some do, for the double pay. Eid'l Fitr and Eid al-Adha move with the lunar calendar and are confirmed close to the date by proclamation, so check the Official Gazette before you promise anyone a deadline.
The First Week and the Exit
Consistency beats cleverness in remote onboarding. One weekly video call that nobody skips does more than any tool. A fixed office hour and a shared folder of procedures help as well. For anything complicated, a quick recorded video beats a long thread. Choose your time-zone overlap on purpose, too. According to the EOR guide, Latin America gives you real-time overlap with US business hours and South Africa overlaps with the US East Coast, while the Philippines offers a deep pool of remote and BPO-trained talent.
Write the role down properly. A title like Virtual Assistant on its own attracts poorly matched applicants, so spell out the tasks, the hours and what good looks like. Taking the first capable candidate tends to mean rehiring a few months later, so screen and interview first.
Remote staff often handle sensitive data, so add NDAs and access controls from day one. Then ask every provider how offboarding works in your specific country before you sign anything. The answer tells you plenty about how that provider behaves when something goes wrong. Ask how it handles changes in labor law, too, and what the exchange rate really is after fees.
Get all of it in writing, in one place, before the offer goes out.
