Do you need a work permit to hire a developer in Bermuda?

One disambiguation first, because the names collide: the Work From Bermuda certificate you may have read about is for remote workers living here while employed elsewhere. It is not a route for you to hire anyone, and it has nothing to do with this question.

The four routes

A Bermudian or PRC-holder developer. No permit, no immigration process, and the whole regime below is designed to push you here first. The honest constraint is supply: the local pool of working developers is small, employed, and expensive to move. If you find the right person, this is the simplest answer there is.

A remote contractor overseas. No permit either. Work permits govern who works in Bermuda, and a contractor in another country invoicing you is not doing that. A good deal of Bermuda development gets done this way. The trade: you get the global market and its rates, and you give up timezone overlap and anyone who has stood in a Bermuda shop or driven a Bermuda road. Whether that matters depends on how much local judgment the thing you are building needs.

A work permit hire. Real, doable, and heavier than people expect.

Then come the categories, a Standard permit running one to five years, short-term permits up to six months, current published fees in the several-hundreds to low-thousands per permit, and the ongoing obligations of being someone’s immigration sponsor.

Buying the outcome instead of the headcount. A local studio that already employs its developers. You get Bermuda presence without becoming a sponsor, and the engagement scales down to the size of the actual need, which for most small businesses is a project and a maintenance arrangement, not a salary. We are one of these, so weigh our interest accordingly, but the structural point stands whoever you would choose: the local-versus-remote trade is about who answers when something breaks, and a permit is not the only way to have a local answer.

The question underneath the question

A full-time developer is a six-figure commitment here once salary, payroll tax and the rest are counted, permit or no permit, and it is a standing one. That makes sense for a business whose product is the software. If software is instead something your business needs, a website, a store, a booking system, a workflow, then the permit question was never the real one, and the comparison worth making is between a contractor, a studio, and doing without.

That is a scoping conversation, not an immigration one. Tell us what you are trying to build and we will tell you honestly whether it needs a hire at all, and the cost guide has the real numbers for the project-shaped version.

This is orientation, not immigration advice. The policy was revised again in May 2026; treat the current Work Permit Policy on gov.bm as the authority.