Morocco’s 2026 Labour Code Reform: What Changes for Employers

Draft law 032.26, amending law 65-99, has been approved by Morocco’s Council of Government. For the first time since 2004, the Labour Code is being reopened on questions that practice had already settled without it: remote work, fixed-term contracts, and the status of platform workers.

Why the reform is happening now

Morocco’s Labour Code dates from 2004. It was written for an economy in which employees travelled to a site, the permanent contract was the norm, and “platform worker” was not a category. Twenty years on, the gap between the text and how companies actually operate has become hard to sustain.

The reform follows on from the collective agreement of 29 April 2024 and the conclusions of the central social dialogue session of April 2026. That matters for how employers should read it: the trade-offs have already been negotiated with the social partners, so this is the end of a bargaining cycle rather than an isolated legislative initiative.

The six workstreams in draft 032.26

Remote work: closing a twenty-year legal gap

This is the most structural change. Today, remote work in Morocco is arranged by private agreement, in-house addendum, or simply tolerated custom. When a dispute arises — an accident during working hours at home, who pays for equipment, the right to disconnect, how working time is measured — a judge has no specific framework to apply.

For HR leadership the issue is not ideological; it is documentary. A company that has been running remote work since 2020 without a solid contractual basis will need to regularise a backlog of informal arrangements once the new framework takes effect. That work can be staged: inventory actual practice department by department, identify the gaps, then bring things into compliance progressively.

In practice this is an organisational diagnostic before it is a legal exercise — you first need to know what the organisation actually does.

Fixed-term contracts, platforms, penalties

Fixed-term contracts

Widening the grounds for using fixed-term contracts is presented as flexibility. It cuts both ways: the broader and more precise the permitted grounds, the more clearly sanctionable any use outside them becomes. The companies with most to revisit are those using fixed-term contracts as a disguised probation period or as a permanent adjustment variable.

Platform workers

Giving platform workers a legal status settles a classification question many actors preferred to leave open. Any company that engages “independent” providers on an exclusive, closely supervised and long-running basis should re-examine its contractual arrangements before the statute does it for them.

Penalties

Raising penalties for minimum-wage breaches and undeclared work follows a simple logic: make non-compliance cost more than compliance. In practical terms it reverses the economics. An SME that used to round its declarations needs to understand that the financial calculation now points the other way.

What an employer should prepare now

1. Map actual practice. How many people genuinely work remotely, on what contractual basis, with which equipment covered?
2. Audit the fixed-term contract stock. Grounds, cumulative duration, renewals — identify the contracts that would not survive an inspection.
3. Re-examine “independent” engagements. Exclusivity, de facto subordination and duration are the three criteria that tip a classification.
4. Check payroll compliance. Minimum wage, social-security declarations, overtime — before the penalty scale changes.
5. Train line management. Front-line managers apply employment law daily without ever having been taught it. That is where most irregularities originate.

On that last point, a targeted training programme for managers usually achieves more than an internal memo.