Two Wage Orders Govern Metro Manila Right Now. Your Employer Of Record Has To Pick One.

An employer of record becomes the legal employer of your staff member in their own country. It signs the contract, runs the payroll, remits the statutory contributions and wears the consequence when a local rule moves. You still direct the work. Outstaffer sells exactly that arrangement, so treat what follows as an interested account rather than a neutral one.

The part founders underrate is the last clause.

How does an employer of record actually work

EOR stands for employer of record: the company whose name sits on the employment contract in the worker’s country, while the person works for you and nobody else. The longer definition is in our older explainer, which is still the post to read for the comparison against a local entity.

Mechanically it is four things. The contract. The payroll. The statutory filings. And the tracking of every rule that governs the first three.

The fourth one is invisible until it is not.

What does that look like on a Tuesday?

It looks like knowing which of two conflicting wage orders is enforceable in Metro Manila this morning.

Metro Manila has had two minimum wage orders in three months

The wages board publishes the current position and it is not tidy.

Wage Order NCR-27 was issued on 23 June 2026 and set to take effect on 25 July, lifting the non-agriculture daily floor to 755 pesos and then to 780 pesos from 20 January 2027. It did not take effect. It is subject to continuing litigation before RTC Pasig Branch 152 and RTC Navotas Branch 287, and the board lists its implementation as awaiting final resolution.

Wage Order NCR-28 was then issued on 7 September 2026, published on 11 September, and took effect on 26 September. It lifts that same non-agriculture floor by 60 pesos a day, from 695 to 755. Agriculture moved from 658 to 718.

So the rate most of the field quotes is correct, and the instrument most of the field cites for it is not the one in force.

Which order actually binds right now?

NCR-28. NCR-27 is the one in court, and its second tranche is the number to watch in January.

What the employer of record is carrying when the floor moves

Sixty pesos a day does not read as much. On a six-day roster it is roughly 1,560 pesos a month and about 18,720 pesos across a year for each person sitting on the floor. If you were still paying 695 on 27 September, you owe the difference from that date rather than from the day you noticed.

Then the number moves again in January, or it does not, depending on two judges in Pasig and Navotas.

None of that arrives in your inbox. There is no Australian notification for a Philippine wage order. The employer of record is the party that has to read the board’s page, decide which instrument is enforceable, and have payroll correct before the cutoff rather than after it. We made the same argument about where payroll specialism belongs.

Related reading

• Moving from an EOR to your own entity later
• An EOR and a staffing agency are not the same purchase

The honest objection: your people earn far above the floor

They do. A Manila bookkeeper, developer or account manager on an offshore team built for an Australian business is paid a multiple of 755 pesos a day, and NCR-28 never touches that payroll line. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling fear.

Which makes the point from the other direction. This rule did not reach you, and you still did not know it existed, that it had moved twice, or that one version of it is sitting in front of a judge. The useful question is how many others are in that category. Get advice for your own circumstances before acting on any of this.

That is what an employer of record is for, and it is a duller product than the brochures suggest. Not a discount. A subscription to somebody else reading the gazette. If you would rather see what the arrangement costs next to your current one, open an account and price a role, or keep tracking Philippine wage orders yourself, which is also a decision.