If you run a company in Ukraine, or you're a foreign business with a Ukrainian team, sooner or later you run into the same question: can we protect our key people from mobilization?
The short answer: yes, through a mechanism called employee reservation (бронювання). The longer answer: only some companies qualify, you can't reserve everyone, and the whole thing takes time and ongoing effort. This article walks you through how it actually works as of mid-2026, in plain language.
One warning before we start. The rules change several times a year. What you read last autumn, or even this spring, is already partly outdated. The government made major updates in June and July 2026, and everything below reflects the current version.
01
What employee reservation is and why it matters
Reservation is an official deferral from mobilization for a specific employee, valid while that person works for your company. A reserved employee cannot be mobilized. They keep working, and you keep your team.
For many businesses this is an existential issue. Picture a production site with twenty staff, ten of whom are men liable for military service. If your lead engineer and two line operators get mobilized next month, production stops. Reservation is what lets you keep critical people in place and actually plan a year ahead.
Here's the thing most people miss, though: reservation is not a service you can simply "order" or "arrange" whenever you want. It's a state mechanism with strict entry criteria. And the first gate is critical enterprise status.
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Step one: getting critical enterprise status
Only companies officially recognized as critically important — for the economy, for essential public services, or for the needs of the Armed Forces — are allowed to reserve employees. No status, no reservation. There is no way around this.
The framework is set by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 76 (January 2023), which has been rewritten several times since. The logic: the state defines general criteria, and then individual ministries and regional military administrations add their own sector-specific and regional criteria on top. So the requirements for an agricultural company, an IT firm, and an energy provider all look different.
What gets checked
To qualify, a company generally has to meet at least three criteria from the list. The typical ones:
Salaries. This is the big one, and usually the painful one. The average salary across the company must be above a set threshold. Since July 2026, the threshold is three times the minimum wage — at least UAH 25,941 (roughly USD 620) per month. For the reserved employees themselves there's a transition period: until 31 August 2026 their individual salary must be at least UAH 21,617.50, and from 1 September it also rises to UAH 25,941. If part of your payroll is paid unofficially "in envelopes," forget about reservation.
No debts. Zero outstanding tax or social security liabilities. This is checked automatically against state registers, so there's nothing to negotiate.
Significance for the sector or region. This is where sector criteria kick in: taxes paid, headcount, participation in defense contracts, strategic importance of your products. To give one example, the minimum farmland requirement for agricultural companies was recently doubled from 500 to 1,000 hectares. Every sector has its own thresholds, and they keep moving up.
A detail worth knowing: the state is deliberately shrinking the circle of critical enterprises. In 2026, ministries were ordered to fully review their criticality criteria, and the specific criteria under which each company got its status are now recorded on the Diia portal. Everything became more transparent and stricter at the same time. Banks, for instance, already lost a loophole that many of them had used to obtain the status.
Who grants the status and how long it takes
The decision is made by the relevant ministry (based on your main business activity) or by the regional military administration. On paper, they have 10 working days to review your application.
In reality, the full journey is longer. You need to prepare a document package, prove you meet the criteria, wait for the decision, get added to the Unified List of critical enterprises — and only then can the actual reservation process begin. Realistically, plan for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, especially if you're doing it for the first time and something in your paperwork doesn't line up. The status is granted for a limited period and has to be re-confirmed regularly.
Speaking of re-confirmation: in 2026, every company that held critical status as of 2 June was required to prove compliance with the updated criteria by 1 September 2026 — otherwise the status expires, taking all employee reservations down with it. On top of that, companies had to submit a salary certificate and their latest tax report by 10 August. That's a good illustration of how this works: critical status is not "get it once and relax." It's an ongoing obligation with deadlines.
03
Step two: the quota — why you can't reserve everyone
Got the status? Good. Now comes the second limit: the quota.
The standard rule is that you can reserve no more than 50% of your employees who are liable for military service as of the date the list is drawn up. Not 50% of total headcount — 50% of those liable for service. If you have 40 employees and 20 of them are draft-eligible men, your ceiling is 10 reservations. And yes, the CEO and deputies count toward the quota; there are no separate "management" slots.
There are exceptions in both directions:
- 75% applies to companies providing essential public services: district heating, centralized water supply, and similar.
- 100% applies to a narrow group, mainly defense industry companies and enterprises critical for the Armed Forces.
- If a critical enterprise has only one employee liable for military service, the quota doesn't apply — that one person can be reserved.
How the quota is calculated (and how companies get burned)
Counting 50% sounds trivial. It isn't. Since 3 July 2026, the calculation base changed: employees who already hold a deferral on other legal grounds, as well as part-timers working for several employers, are now counted at only one employer — the one where they've worked the longest. So an employee who also holds a second job elsewhere might not count toward your base at all.
Why does this matter so much? Because since June 2026, exceeding the quota is direct grounds for losing critical status. If a recalculation shows you have more reserved employees than allowed, you get just 10 working days to file cancellation requests through Diia for the "excess" reservations. Miss that window and you lose the status — and every reservation along with it. One miscalculation by your accountant can wipe out the protection for your entire team.
[ THE GATE TO RESERVATION ]
Reserved staff earn ≥ UAH 21,617.50 until 31 Aug 2026, then ≥ UAH 25,941. The 50% quota rises to 75% for essential public services and 100% for the defense industry.
04
What the process actually looks like
Once the status is in place and the quota is calculated, the mechanics are fairly straightforward. Everything runs through the Diia government portal:
- The company prepares the list of employees to reserve, within the quota.
- You check that each employee's military registration records are in order. This matters: a person with unresolved registration issues puts the application at risk. That said, since March 2026 defense-sector companies can use a temporary 45-day reservation even for employees with registration problems, giving the person time to fix their records.
- The application goes in through Diia.
- Once approved, the employee's deferral appears in the Reserve+ app.
A reservation is valid for a limited term and is tied to your critical status. Lose the status — lose the reservations. An employee resigns — their reservation ends. In other words, this is a living process, not a one-time filing. Someone has to watch the quota with every hire and departure, track the salary thresholds, and keep an eye on re-confirmation deadlines.
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What it really costs
There are no direct state fees for reservation. The real cost sits elsewhere.
Payroll. This is the main item. If your current salaries are below the threshold, you'll have to raise them — and not just for the reserved employees, because the average-salary criterion is calculated across the whole company. From 1 September 2026, every reserved employee must earn at least UAH 25,941 officially. For a company with 15 reserved staff, that's a noticeable jump in payroll and payroll taxes.
Administration. Preparing the criticality application, maintaining military registration records, monitoring the quota, handling annual and ad-hoc re-confirmations — that's dozens of hours across HR, accounting, and legal. In many companies nobody owns this process end to end, and that's exactly why they lose the status over formalities.
The cost of mistakes. Exceed the quota without noticing, miss a re-confirmation deadline, forget to file a certificate — and the whole structure collapses. And the consequences don't land on an abstract "company." They land on specific people who suddenly find themselves without a deferral.
Reservation is not "get it once and relax." Critical status must be re-confirmed on deadline, the 50% quota recalculates with every hire and departure, and exceeding it gives you just 10 working days to cancel the excess before the status — and every reservation under it — collapses.
06
The mistakes we see most often
- "We'll apply when it becomes urgent." The most common strategy, and the worst one. The process is slow, and mobilization doesn't pause while a ministry reviews your file. You have to prepare in advance.
- Raising salaries only for the reserved employees. Doesn't work. The average is calculated company-wide, and the authorities see your full tax reporting. Artificial schemes — part-time contracts, payroll "optimization" — get spotted quickly and end with the status being revoked.
- Ignoring military registration. Many companies never set up proper military record-keeping for their staff. Then, when it's time to file, it turns out half the list can't be reserved because the employees' own records are a mess.
- Getting the status and relaxing. The rules changed twice in 2026 alone, each time with new deadlines and requirements. Companies that don't track the changes find out about them after the fact — when the reservation is already gone.
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The bottom line
Employee reservation in Ukraine in 2026 is a real, working tool — with three big caveats. First, it's only available to critical enterprises, and that status is getting harder to obtain: the state is deliberately raising the bar. Second, even with the status, you can usually reserve only half of your draft-eligible employees. Third, it's not a one-off filing but a continuous process of salary thresholds, quotas, deadlines, and re-confirmations, where a single slip can cost you everything.
If losing key people is a critical risk for your business, the time to work on this is now — not when the problem is already at the door.
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How we can help
Ukrany supports foreign and Ukrainian companies with employment, HR administration, and compliance in Ukraine — and employee reservation is our daily practice, not theory from government resolutions. We assess whether your company has a realistic path to critical status, prepare the full document package, calculate the quota without surprises, handle the filings through Diia, and track every rule change and deadline so that the status you worked for doesn't burn down over a formality.
If you want to understand whether reservation is possible in your specific situation, get in touch. The first conversation costs nothing — and it might save you months of work and some very expensive mistakes.
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