183 days makes you a Georgian tax resident. Georgian-source income is taxed at 20%; foreign income is not taxed at all

An individual is a Georgian tax resident for a given tax period if they were actually located in Georgia for 183 days or more in any continuous twelve-month period ending in that tax year. Two features of that wording are worth noticing. First, the window is any rolling twelve months that ends in the tax year, not the calendar year itself, so a stay straddling two years can trigger residency in the later one. Second, status is determined separately for each tax period, and days already counted toward residency in the previous period are not counted again — which stops a single long stay from making someone resident indefinitely. If your days are anywhere near the line, keep a record of entries and exits rather than reconstructing them later.

The operative sentence is that resident individuals are exempt from tax on income that does not have a Georgian source. The whole question therefore collapses into one: where is the income sourced? That is a legal determination about the activity, not about where the money is paid or which bank holds it, and it is where people get into trouble. Receiving a foreign client's payment into a Georgian account does not by itself make the income Georgian; equally, sitting in Tbilisi and performing the work there is a fact that matters. Rent from a Georgian flat is plainly Georgian-source. Salary from a Georgian employer is Georgian-source. A consultancy run from a Tbilisi desk is the case to take advice on rather than to assume.

Alongside the flat 20% there are lighter regimes for small activity. An individual registered as a micro business with turnover under 30,000 lari and no employees is exempt from tax on business income. An individual entrepreneur with small business status pays 1% of turnover up to 500,000 lari, and 3% above that threshold. These are often described as though they were a general low-tax regime for foreigners; they are not. They apply to registered Georgian business activity, carry conditions, and exclude a list of trades. If your income is foreign-source, you do not need them; if it is Georgian-source, they are worth examining properly with someone who can check your activity against the excluded list.

Becoming a Georgian tax resident does not automatically stop you being resident somewhere else, and that is the part most often skipped. Many countries test residency on ties as well as days — a home, a family, a centre of economic interest — and dual residency is resolved by treaty, not by whichever country you prefer. Georgia has a wide treaty network, which usually helps, but a treaty allocates taxing rights rather than erasing an obligation to file. The practical sequence is: confirm whether you have actually exited your old residence under its own rules, then confirm your Georgian position, then look at the treaty between the two. Doing it in the other order is how people end up taxed twice and filing late in both places. This is a summary of published rules, not advice on your own circumstances.