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Mexican Withholding Tax on Upwork Earnings

lenaellis
Community Member

[Updated March 2023] We would like to update you that we are working with our vendor to have the CFDIs sent out automatically. We hope that this will be functional within the next 2 months and will allow us to provide CFDIs to our Mexican freelancers on a monthly basis. We are continuing to send out any remaining CFDIs that have not been sent out for the last quarter of 2022 as we are aware of the income tax return due date of April 30. We appreciate your continued patience.

 

 

[Updated June 2022] We apologize for the current situation in which CFDIs have not been able to be fully provided  under your name. We are in the process of digitally stamping the CFDIs and we have increased our efforts during the month of June 2022 in order to be able to finalize additional processes and send you the pending documentation as soon as possible.

It is important to mention that any sanction that the tax authority could impose for the non-issuance of a receipt for withholding and payment will not fall on the recipients (i.e. users of the Upwork platform). We understand that at this time you have not been able to prove the calculation of withholdings on your taxes, however, we will notify you as soon as the receipts are issued so that the withholdings may be used by you.

 

[Updated April 2022] We thank you for your patience. As of today, we are able to issue CFDIs for most of the transactions in Mexico and have begun processing all calendar year 2021 transactions. We will email your CFDIs in the coming weeks, but if you need to request that we expedite the process, please submit your request to support@upwork.com and we will send you your CFDIs as soon as we can. 

 

The email with your CFDIs will come from Reachcore (servicioalcliente@reachcore.com). Please add this email to your safe sender list to avoid this email being filtered as spam. The  subject of the email will be “Envío de comprobante fiscal”. In some cases, the email will come from tax@upwork.com.

 

We thank you again for your patience and please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions.

 

[Updated February 2022] We would like to take this opportunity to update you on the latest status of issuing CFDIs in Mexico. As you are aware, Upwork began income withholding in 2021. However, there was a delay in our registration process due to the complexities of a non-resident entity obtaining tax registration in Mexico. That being said, we successfully registered for tax registration in Mexico at the end of 2021. 

 

Now that we’re registered, we've worked tirelessly to issue CFDIs for income withholding that we have made. We were in discussion with one "Proveedores Autorizados de Certificación" (PAC) vendor, but due to the vendor's inability to meet our high data protection requirements, we made a difficult decision to move in a different direction. As much as we want to issue CFDIs ASAP, our user's data privacy is our primary priority and therefore we want to work with the right vendor who maintains high standards of securing our users’ data. A few weeks ago, we entered into a contract with a different PAC vendor and we are currently working through testing of our integrations. Once completed, we hope to issue the CFDIs shortly thereafter.

 

We are aware of the income tax return due date of April 30th, and we will provide an additional update as soon as we have a clear timeline of delivering CFDIs to you. We are working tirelessly to get this done within a reasonable timeframe, and appreciate your continued patience. 



 

[Original Product Release] Upwork has begun withholding income tax from payments to freelancers and agencies based in Mexico as part of the tax law enforced by the Mexican government which became effective June 1, 2020 and was modified effective January 1, 2021 (the Resolución Miscelánea Fiscal). This law requires businesses like us to collect income tax on the earnings of service providers who are based in Mexico, such as freelancers and agencies who use Upwork.

 

As part of our continued efforts to remain compliant with tax laws in Mexico, we are asking that freelancers and agencies based in Mexico provide their Clave en el Registro Federal de Contribuyentes, Income Tax Identification number (RFC) in their Tax Infosection under “Settings”

 

By providing a valid RFC number you are subject to significantly lower tax withholding.

  • If you provide a valid RFC number we will withhold 1% of all your Upwork earnings, starting with all payments made on or after April 6, 2021. 

 

  • If you don’t provide a valid RFC number we will withhold 20% of all your Upwork earnings, starting with all payments made on or after April 6, 2021. 

 

This withholding is required by Mexican law and all funds withheld will be passed to the Mexican government. You will be able to claim a tax credit or refund from the Mexican government should you pay more taxes than required.  


We also want to give you a heads up that the same legislation included adding a Valued Added Tax (VAT) on digital services. Upwork is required to collect VAT on its fees charged to users in Mexico. We have begun configuring our system to be able to collect VAT, and we will let you know when we have a target date to start collection. 

 

For additional information see our Help center article and for questions about withholdings and how this applies to you, we suggest you contact a trusted tax advisor. We cannot provide tax advice.

309 Comments
aberberana
Community Member
Any news on Upwork’s Mexican RFC? Up has already started withholding taxes but there is no way for me to prove this to SAT, therefore, I am having to pay double taxes (what Up withholds and what the SAT requires). Up shouldn’t be withholding anything until you have all your paperwork ready. Please, we need Upwork’s RFC ASAP!!
oorlyg
Community Member

So, on February 2020 you sent an email saying the following:

 

"The Mexican government requires us to obtain a Clave en el Registro Federal de Contribuyentes (RFC) from you. Under the law, which became effective June 1, 2020, those who provide a valid RFC number are subject to significantly lower tax withholding.
If you provide a valid RFC number we will withhold 1% of all your Upwork earnings, starting with all payments made on or after April 1, 2021.
If you don't provide a valid RFC number we will withhold 20% of all your Upwork earnings, starting with all payments made on or after April 1, 2021."

 

This was very confusing because that percentage (20%) is the same as the Fee you're charging us, and it seemed that If we provide our RFC you're going to charge 1% of our work but no.
Saddly on the same email on February or on later emails, you didn't made an EXPLICIT example of what was going to happen with our income.

NOW you're saying that YOu're going to collect 3.2% of hour general income. THIS IS SIMPLY UNFAIR!


feed_my_eyes
Community Member

The 20% fee is Upwork's service charge, which we all pay. Any taxes due are because it's required by your government. All you can do is charge an hourly rate that will be enough to cover your expenses and taxes. 

oorlyg
Community Member

I can certanily NOT imagine young freelancers who would like to be charged 20% as a fee and other 20% for you.

Unbelievable!

alexletayf
Community Member

Hey Vladimir, 

 

It's been a while since we have heard an update on the matter, I know Upwork is not looking to charge IVA which is great, because it means you'll have to send us a mexican deductible invoice, and 100% will be deductible for us. Also, that invoice must contain the RFC that everybody has been asking.

 

OR I have been thinking for a while that it is possible you guys are instead of providing the RFC so we send and invoice to UPWORK, find a way where our invoice is sent to the person who hired as and that invoice is valid in México. (That would be cool), but let's what happens. It's been several months, it would be nice to at least acknowledge that this is still something we are waiting for. It is a legal obligaton for UPWORK to release this information after all. 

 

Thanks

AndreaG
Moderator

Hi Alejandro,

 

We actually had an update on this today! Please check out the latest Announcement regarding Mexico Tax here.

 

alexletayf
Community Member

Hi Andrea!

 

Like I mentioned, the news on VAT is great! But Value Added Tax and Income Tax are two different things. What is keeping mexicans awake at night is not VAT, rather Income Tax which in México is ISR. So it's not really an update to the issue, more like an additional piece of information that we did need, but it doesn't solve the core problem where Upwork is not being forthworth about how they are going to handle the income tax situation. 

 

The core problem is Upwork is retaining taxes, but it hasn't released a TAX ID called RFC in México. And it hasn't explained the nature of their relationship with SAT (the Mexican IRS) so our accountants can't know how WE should declare our own taxes. This ambiguity has been going on since February and it's starting to get annoying, as well as ilegal. 

 

From what I understand if Upwork is going to give us an invoice for their services, and our client is not going to be "Upwork" then basically Upwork shouldn't be retaining ISR. I am just as confused as everybody else. So if there is something I am not seeing, someone please explain. Also we will know UPWORK's RFC in the first invoice we get from them, but would we still need it. They are technically not going to be our clients. 

aberberana
Community Member
The problem is not that we have to pay taxes. That’s fine. The problem is that Upwork is withholding a % of out earnings to send to our government but it’s not providing ANY type of proof that we can show when filing taxes. So, even though Upwork is already withholding that tax that we owe, we still have to pay it again directly to the government because there is no way for us to prove those taxes have already been paid via Upwork’s withholding. Whether we charge hourly or per project is irrelevant. Upwork is forcing us to pay double taxes by not providing their Mexican tax ID. I understand those things take time, but they shouldn’t be withholding anything until they can give us the documentation we need.
maru_guevara
Community Member

Thank you for the help. Now give us advice on how we are going to explain our costumers a sudden increase of 16% over the UW fees and other taxes. That is going to be the real challenge, to keep competitive prices in a platform full with other freelancers that can keep low rates. 

hectorgomez7
Community Member

Hello. I am a mexican feelancer and I have provided my RFC number to the platform. Still, Upwork is  taking 20% of my payment for taxing purposes. I read that providing my RFC would reduce this number to 1%. Why is this happening?