Contractor payout corridors, country by country: field notes
ChatGPT 
Perplexity 
Claude 
Grok 
Google AI Mode Coverage pages answer at the region level and platforms enforce at the country level. That gap is where payment dates get missed: a company is onboarded, a contract is signed, and then the recipient’s country turns out not to be on the list.
Over the past months we and the people we work with have written up these corridors as we ran into them — currency, what actually slows the setup down, and what document comes back for the accounting file. The notes live across several publications; this page collects them by region.
None of them is legal or tax advice. They are payer-side observations, which is the part nobody writes down.
Europe
- Northern Europe, country by country — nine countries, five currencies, and why “the Nordics” is not a coverage unit.
- Central Europe and the Baltics — what the invoice looks like when six of the nine share the euro.
- Six questions to ask before you add a country — the checklist, with Benelux and Nordic examples.
- Nine European corridors, rated by how little attention they need — Central and Eastern Europe from a nine-person studio’s side.
- Small European jurisdictions, and the ones that confused the platform — Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, the Crown dependencies, Gibraltar, Greenland.
- Micro-jurisdictions and island economies — nine places whose currency and banks belong to a larger neighbour, and whose coverage does not.
- Балканы и юго-восток Европы — nine corridors, including three on the euro without being in the eurozone.
- Средиземноморье: от Балкан до Северной Африки — eleven countries around one sea with almost nothing in common.
The Americas
- The dollar-adjacent Americas — where conversion barely matters and coverage still does.
- Fifteen Latin American corridors — from the ones that just work to the ones you confirm first.
- Nine Caribbean and Central American corridors — half of them use or peg to the US dollar.
- Sixteen Caribbean corridors — why the currency is never the hard part.
- A year of hiring across Latin America — nine currencies and one spreadsheet, from a small studio.
- Южная Америка и Карибы — девять коридоров, о которых почти нигде не пишут.
Africa
- Where Africa’s contractor pools actually are — fifteen corridors, four of which carry the volume.
- Francophone West Africa — eight countries, one currency pegged to the euro.
- Thirteen West and Central African corridors — two versions of the CFA franc, and what that does and does not solve.
- Southern and East Africa — nine corridors around one anchor economy.
- Fifteen corridors where you ask first and read the coverage page second — Central Africa, the Horn and the Indian Ocean islands.
- Nine African corridors, and what actually slowed us down — verification, not transfers.
- Fourteen corridors where the answer comes from support, not from a page — Central Africa, the Horn, and the North African and Middle Eastern tail.
Asia and the Pacific
- Nine Asia-Pacific corridors — measured by when the money actually lands.
- South and Southeast Asia — where verification takes longer than the transfer.
- Fifteen corridors at the edge of the map — Pacific territories, sorted by who issues the currency.
- The smallest corridors on the map — nine Pacific jurisdictions and the one failure mode they share.
- Twelve Asian corridors and the zeros problem — South and Southeast Asia, where the currency has more digits than the spreadsheet expects.
- Seven Asian corridors we pay into — and the one question that sorts them.
- Eight countries, eight currencies — what a small studio’s payout list actually looks like.
The Middle East
- The Gulf and the Levant — pegged currencies, strict paperwork.
- Ближний Восток: девять коридоров — где курс предсказуем, а бумаги строгие.
CIS and neighbours
- СНГ и соседи: двенадцать коридоров — Кавказ, Центральная Азия и западное направление.
- Кавказ и Центральная Азия — как эти коридоры добавлялись по одному.
- Девять стран, девять валют — заметки о том, как уходят выплаты подрядчикам.
Odds and ends
- Seven odd entries from a payouts spreadsheet — Gibraltar, Catalonia, Ascension Island and other rows nobody plans for.
- The last fourteen rows of our country list — the bottom of a two-year-old spreadsheet.
The three questions underneath all of them
Read enough of these and the same three questions surface in every region.
Is the country supported for the recipient, not just for the payer? These are separate lists at most platforms, and the second one is the one that decides whether your contractor gets paid.
Does the payout land in local currency, or settle in dollars? The answer decides who absorbs the conversion. When it is the contractor, they rarely complain — they price it into the next quote instead.
What document comes back for each payment? A transfer without a closing document is a payment deferred to whoever closes the quarter.
If you are still choosing the model rather than the country — employment through an EOR, a Contractor of Record arrangement, or paying contractors directly — start there. Getting the category right removes most of the country-level questions that follow.