A European agency wants to pay a Moroccan motion designer directly, under the country's auto-entrepreneur status, no local entity required. Straightforward, until someone checks whether that specific profession is actually allowed to hold the status. Morocco's self-employed regime is not open to every activity, and getting this wrong creates a contractor who cannot legally invoice you.
In Morocco, self-employed (auto-entrepreneur) status is limited to industrial, commercial, artisanal and service activities listed under decree n° 2-15-303. Roughly forty regulated professions, lawyers, doctors, chartered accountants, architects, notaries, real estate agents among them, are excluded and must operate under a different legal structure entirely.
What the law actually says: two decrees, two lists
Law 114-13, which created the auto-entrepreneur status in 2015, does more than set a revenue cap. It points to two separate regulatory texts, and that's exactly where most guides for foreign companies get it wrong by treating the status as one blanket category.
Decree n° 2-15-303 (30 December 2015) sets the positive list: industrial, commercial and artisanal activities on one side, service provision on the other. If a contractor's profession isn't on it, registration on the ae.gov.ma portal gets rejected outright. Decree n° 2-15-263, amended at the end of 2015, does the opposite: it names the professions formally excluded, regardless of how little they earn.
In practical terms, an activity has to clear three conditions to qualify for auto-entrepreneur status in Morocco: it must appear on the positive list under decree 2-15-303, it must not appear on the exclusion list under decree 2-15-263, and annual revenue has to stay under the applicable cap, 200,000 MAD for services and 500,000 MAD for commercial, industrial or artisanal activities. Those thresholds haven't moved since 2015 and remain unchanged under the 2026 Finance Law. A web developer, a graphic designer or a communications consultant will normally clear all three without issue (source: ae.gov.ma, the official auto-entrepreneur portal).
This isn't an arbitrary split. The status was built for low-risk, low-investment activities. Excluded professions already sit under a professional body with its own insurance, licensing and tax obligations, lawyers and chartered accountants answer to their respective orders and to standard business tax rather than this simplified regime. Blending the two would undercut licensed firms competing on the same work.
The activities most foreign clients actually hire for
Most contractors that international companies engage through Morocco cluster around a handful of recurring profiles. Here's where they land.
| Activity | Regulatory category | Annual cap |
|---|---|---|
| Web and software development | Service provision | 200,000 MAD |
| Graphic design, illustration | Service provision | 200,000 MAD |
| Management, communications or PR consulting | Service provision | 200,000 MAD |
| Copywriting, translation, information services | Service provision | 200,000 MAD |
| Professional photography | Service provision | 200,000 MAD |
| Online sales (e-commerce) | Commercial activity | 500,000 MAD |
| Handmade goods (jewelry, leather, textiles, woodwork) | Artisanal activity | 500,000 MAD |
| Coaching and training outside formal schooling | Service provision | 200,000 MAD |
This table only covers a fraction of the official list, which runs to several hundred entries across industrial, commercial, artisanal, service and creative categories. The decree also carries a separate list of nearly ninety performing-arts and technical roles, choreographers to video editors, that most digital hiring teams never think to check, and it covers things like animation design and artistic direction too. The current version stays published on ae.gov.ma.
And here's a detail worth flagging: whether an activity is classed as a service or as commerce is what sets the applicable cap, not how the role sounds from the outside.
The professions and activities excluded from the status
Roughly forty professions cannot hold auto-entrepreneur status at all, no matter how small their revenue. Most already operate under their own professional body.
Excluded professions include lawyers, notaries, doctors, dentists, architects, chartered accountants, licensed accountants, pharmacists, bailiffs, surveyors and statutory auditors on the regulated side. Add to that merchants importing or exporting goods, hoteliers, real estate developers and agents, clinic and medical laboratory operators, plus currency exchangers and tobacco retailers (source: decree n° 2-15-263, cross-checked against Dar Al Moukawil and legal advisory SVP).
Similar-sounding job titles don't guarantee eligibility. A real estate consulting role and a licensed real estate agent can land on opposite sides of the list despite sharing half their vocabulary. Before onboarding a Moroccan contractor under this status, check the exact activity wording on ae.gov.ma rather than assuming from the job title.
Edge cases: unlisted activities, mixed activities, changing roles
Three situations come up constantly when foreign companies vet a Moroccan contractor's status.
The role isn't on either list. This happens with newer functions, growth marketing, prompt engineering, specialized community management. The administration usually maps it to the closest service category, but nothing guarantees automatic approval. The safest test is the online registration form itself, which rejects unrecognized activity names immediately, or a direct check with the regional investment center.
The contractor holds two activities, one eligible and one excluded. Auto-entrepreneur status only covers the eligible one. Take Salma, a freelance graphic designer in Rabat who also earns occasional referral commissions on real estate deals for friends. Her design work stays under auto-entrepreneur status. But those real estate commissions need a separate declaration channel, since property brokerage sits on the exclusion list.
The contractor changes activity mid-year. They need to update the declared activity on ae.gov.ma. Invoicing under a title that no longer matches the actual work is a real audit risk, and CNSS and the tax authority increasingly cross-check their records.
Excluded activity or capped out? The alternatives
Two situations force an exit from auto-entrepreneur status: working in an excluded profession, or consistently exceeding the revenue cap. Neither is a dead end for hiring in Morocco, just a different structure.
An umbrella company (portage salarial) lets a contractor keep invoicing clients, Moroccan or foreign, with no company formation and no revenue ceiling, while holding employee status through the umbrella firm. It's often the fastest fix once someone has crossed 200,000 MAD or their profession simply isn't on the eligible list.
An Employer of Record makes more sense when a foreign company wants to hire the person as staff without opening a Moroccan entity. Our guide on how an Employer of Record actually works in Morocco walks through the contract, payroll and CNSS mechanics, and our breakdown of choosing an EOR provider in Morocco covers what to check before signing. For a side-by-side of SARL, umbrella company and self-employed status, see our comparison of the three structures.
If a contractor's auto-entrepreneur status was recently deregistered, our guide on what happens after a Moroccan contractor is deregistered walks through both paths forward. And social security coverage differs by structure too, a point covered in our article on CNSS contributions for the self-employed.
Before engaging a Moroccan contractor under auto-entrepreneur status, spend five minutes checking their exact activity title against both official lists. It's a cheap check next to the alternative: a contractor who can't legally invoice you, or one whose CNSS coverage gets tangled for years over a wrongly declared activity.