An executive sent me a spreadsheet last week. Three columns, four Moroccan cities, percentages everywhere. His question was one line long: "we open in Fès rather than Casablanca, right? There's a ten-point gap."
The spreadsheet was accurate. The conclusion was not.
Morocco has indeed renewed its offshoring support scheme, and the effort is real. But an incentive scheme never picks a location for you. It changes the timeline, it changes the margin, it does not change the underlying question: where are the people you need to hire.
What the new offer contains
The framework is called the Morocco Offshoring Offer. It stems from the contract-programme signed alongside the "Digital Morocco 2030" strategy, and is implemented through circular no. 15-2025, applicable since 1 July 2025 and valid until 31 December 2030 (Ministry of Digital Transition).
It rests on four instruments:
- AIR, relief on employee income tax, capped at 20 % of gross taxable income. The cap drops to 10 % in the secondary platforms, namely Fès Shore, Tétouan Shore and Oujda Shore.
- AIS, a state contribution covering 56 % of the corporate income tax due on eligible activity.
- PAE, a hiring premium of 17 % of annual gross taxable income for each new Moroccan recruit, on a full-time contract of at least eighteen months.
- PAF, a training contribution of 3.5 % of the same income, per recruit.
The contract-programme targets 130,000 additional direct jobs and 40 billion dirhams in additional export revenue, including 50,000 jobs and 25 billion as early as 2026 (Le Matin). The ecosystems in scope go well beyond call centres: IT services, business process outsourcing, engineering services and knowledge work are explicitly covered.
The translation for an executive is simple. The Moroccan state is no longer subsidising volume, it is subsidising value. This is industrial policy, not a discount.
What it actually changes in a project
Three things, and they are not the obvious ones.
The timeline. The hiring premium and the training contribution apply to new recruits, with a minimum duration. They therefore fund precisely what hurts most when a nearshore team starts up: the first six months, when you pay salaries before you collect productivity. That is where the scheme earns its keep, and it is why the file has to be framed before the first hire, not after.
The cost structure over time. The gap between a team in Morocco and the same team in France is rarely about gross salary alone. It sits in the fully loaded cost: social charges, real estate, management, taxation. On our own assignments, the reduction in operating costs lands around 40 %, as it did for Ippon Technologies' Moroccan subsidiary. The new instruments do not create that gap, they consolidate it and secure it through 2030.
Administrative clarity. The scheme comes with a single administrative window inside the platforms and a technical committee that reviews applications. For a foreign company, one identified counterpart is often worth more than a point of tax.
The ten-point trap
Back to that spreadsheet. The 10 % income tax cap in secondary platforms is real, and the state's intent is explicit: relieve pressure on Casablanca and Rabat, spread activity across the country.
Except the relief applies to employees you first have to hire.
A senior developer, a bilingual financial controller, a data engineer: the talent pool is not evenly spread across Moroccan cities. It clusters where the schools are, where companies already train people, and where you can persuade someone in post to move. Saving ten tax points on roles that take nine months to fill is a bad deal. The cost of an unfilled position almost always exceeds the tax advantage of a filled one.
The right sequence is the reverse of the spreadsheet:
- Define the profiles you need over the next eighteen months, by number and by seniority.
- Look at where those profiles genuinely exist, and how fast you can capture them.
- Only then check which incentives apply to that location, and fold them into the funding plan.
If your need is volume with internal skill-building, a secondary platform is a serious option and the advantage becomes structural. If you need fifteen senior people in twelve months, the talent question outweighs everything else. That is exactly how we reasoned when opening Financia Business School's campus in Rabat: the city won on ecosystem and institutional access, not on a tax line.
Three checks before you build your plan
Whether your activity qualifies. The scheme targets exported, high-value services. Not every function you are considering moving falls inside the perimeter. Have the project qualified before it goes into the budget.
Where you set up. Some advantages are tied to an installation inside an integrated industrial platform dedicated to offshoring. Setting up elsewhere remains possible and does not rule everything out, but the package differs. This is a real estate decision as much as a tax one.
Consistency with your legal structure. Subsidiary or provider, the incentives do not read the same way, because they are addressed to the employer. If you go through a third party, the advantage sits in their economics, not yours, unless it is explicitly passed through in the price.
The takeaway
Morocco has just secured five years of visibility on a clear incentive framework, open to engineering and high-value services. For a French or American company that was hesitating, the regulatory risk argument is significantly weaker than it was.
That said, incentives fund execution, they do not replace it. A successful nearshore team is judged on hiring quality, on the strength of local management and on skills transfer, not on the premiums collected.
At Connectis Partners, we build these teams end to end, from choosing the city to the first day of production. If you have a three-column spreadsheet on your desk, write to us: we will tell you what it is worth.