The foreign trader card in Algeria, straight from the texts

The carte de commerçant étranger was the instrument of executive decree no. 97-38 of 18 January 1997, which set the rules for granting a trader card to foreign representatives of commercial companies. Article 18 of executive decree no. 06-454 of 11 December 2006 repealed it, together with decree no. 75-111 of 26 September 1975 on commercial, industrial, artisanal and liberal professions carried on by foreigners on national territory.

Since that date the instrument is the carte professionnelle. Its full official title is: décret exécutif n° 06-454 du 20 Dhou El Kaada 1427 correspondant au 11 décembre 2006 relatif à la carte professionnelle délivrée aux étrangers exerçant sur le territoire national une activité commerciale, industrielle et artisanale ou une profession libérale.

Tax vocabulary followed, but late. Article 142 of the code du timbre still said carte spéciale délivrée aux étrangers exerçant une profession commerciale, industrielle ou artisanale in the wording of the 2010 Finance Act, then carte spéciale délivrée aux étrangers exerçant une activité professionnelle sur le territoire national in the 2020 one. It has only said carte professionnelle since the 2025 Finance Act. An older text that says carte spéciale is therefore talking about this very card.

It is that second limb that makes this card a corporate governance matter and not only a sole-trader matter. A foreign manager appointed in the articles of an Algerian SARL is caught by it exactly as a foreign trader operating on his own account is.

Article 2 states the regime the holder remains subject to, on top of the legislative and regulatory provisions governing the situation of foreigners in Algeria: the rules governing the economic domain for foreigners carrying on a commercial, industrial or artisanal activity, and the rules set by the Algerian statute organising the profession concerned for foreigners carrying on a liberal profession.

The real order is in fact the opposite of the one you read everywhere. Article 7 of decree 06-454 provides that a foreigner wishing to carry on a commercial activity as a natural person can obtain the professional card only if he evidences his entry in the trade register. Article 8 says the same for artisanal activity and the register of crafts and trades, and article 9 for a liberal profession and the roll of the order or organisation governing that profession.

Article 10 closes the loop: the foreigner must apply for his professional card no later than sixty days after his entry in the trade register, in the register of crafts and trades, or on the roll of the order of the organisation governing the profession. The register comes first, and the card follows within sixty days.

On the supporting documents this page says nothing, deliberately. Article 3 of decree 06-454 refers the model and content of the card, and the documents making up the application file, to a joint order of the minister of the interior and local authorities and the minister of trade. We searched full text for that order across the 2,456 Official Journal issues we archive, from 2002 to 2026, and it is not there. Publishing a document list would mean inventing one. We would rather tell you where it will appear the day it is published.

The duty stood at 10,000 DZD under article 18 of the 2010 Finance Act. Article 38 of the 2020 Finance Act raised it to 30,000 DZD and set the duplicate at 15,000 DZD. Article 51 of the 2025 Finance Act kept both amounts, created the 70,000 DZD duty for a change of professional status, and specified that the duplicate is paid on top of the stamp duty due.

The 2026 Finance Act does not touch article 142. Its article 46 amends article 141, which covers the resident card, and its article 47 creates an article 142 sexies on the apostille. The professional card scale applicable in 2026 is therefore the one set by the 2025 Finance Act.

Two honest caveats. First, article 142 carries a reciprocity rule: the 2025 Finance Act recalls it through the formula La durée ...... (sans changement jusqu'à) la règle de réciprocité s'applique. The passage that ellipsis hides is not reproduced in full in any issue we hold, and we do not guess at it. Second, the amounts above are the stamp duty: the decree provides for no other charge, but neither does it say there is none.

This order has a practical consequence nobody else will tell you: the amount is not computed by you but notified to you by the wilaya, on a payment order, after your situation has been examined. The three cases in article 3 map exactly onto the three rows of the table above, and it is that mapping which decides whether you pay the issue duty or the change-of-status duty.

The decree sets no deadline for the wilaya to process the file, and none for the wali to issue the card. Any page that gives you a number of days for issue is giving you a figure no text carries. We give none.

This scale is the RESIDENT card's, not the professional card's. The two are separate and do not automatically add up: article 13 obliges you to apply for the first once you hold the second, but the duration the wilaya grants you does not depend on decree 06-454.

Article 141 also carries a reciprocity clause, whose application rules are referred to a joint order of the ministers of foreign affairs, of the interior and of finance. As with article 142, the part the Finance Act abbreviates behind an ellipsis is not reproduced here.

Article 12 adds an obligation that catches foreign groups out: any company concerned by one of those cases, and any foreigner carrying on activity in a personal capacity, must ask the wilaya services that issued the card to cancel it within thirty days of the date the event occurred. A director who resigns therefore triggers a filing owed by the company, not only by the individual.

Article 14 adds that the beneficiary must return the card to the administrative authority that issued it when he leaves national territory for good.

Article 3 of law no. 22-23 of 18 December 2022 on the auto-entrepreneur statute makes eligible any natural person who has reached the legal working age, who is of Algerian nationality and resident in Algeria or a resident foreigner in accordance with the legislation and regulations in force, and who carries on an activity included in the list of eligible activities. A resident foreigner is therefore eligible for the statute.

Article 2 of the same law excludes liberal functions, regulated professions and artisanal activities from the list of eligible activities. Decree 06-454, for its part, covers commercial, industrial and artisanal activity and the liberal professions.

No text we hold says whether a resident foreigner operating under the auto-entrepreneur statute must also hold the professional card. We do not settle a question the legislator has not settled. If your project sits in that zone, have it put in writing by the direction de la réglementation et des affaires générales of your wilaya, and keep the answer.

Every figure and every quotation was read on an image render of the Official Journal page, never on the text stream extracted from the PDF: that stream returns multi-column tables out of order and runs values together. The PDFs used are those on the server of the Secrétariat général du Gouvernement, and every link in the Sources section was tested on 2026-08-21.

Where a text refers to another text we could not open, this page says so and does not fill the gap: that is the case for the joint interior and trade order under article 3, which should carry the list of documents for the application file.