Business & Investment

A working reference for agriculture, land, and business registration in Mondulkiri — built for investors and entrepreneurs doing real diligence, not a substitute for a lawyer. See the disclaimer in the footer.

VerifiedReported Council for the Development of Cambodia and the Northeast Investment Working Group, reported through Khmer- and English-language press, February 2025 to August 2026. Terms as stated by the working group at its Mondulkiri meeting of 10 August 2026.

Where Mondulkiri sits in national policy

Mondulkiri is not a province that happens to attract investment. Since 2025 it is one of four inside a named national programme with its own working group, its own thresholds and its own one-window procedure: the Special Programme to Promote Investment in the Four North-Eastern Provinces, 2025–2028, កម្មវិធីពិសេសជំរុញការវិនិយោគក្នុងខេត្តទាំងបួន នៅភូមិភាគឦសាន ឆ្នាំ ២០២៥-២០២៨. It was announced on 27 February 2025 and launched on 9 April 2025 by Prime Minister Hun Manet, with the stated aim of turning the north-east into a new economic pole. Three sectors are named: agriculture, agro-industry and tourism. Everything else on this page sits inside that frame or outside the programme entirely, and the difference matters to an applicant.

The working group is chaired by Northeast Investment Working Group (ក.វ.ឦសាន), chaired by Dr Hean Sahib, adviser to the Prime Minister; the provincial administration sits on it. That is the door: an investor in Mondulkiri deals with a body that has the province in the room.

VerifiedReportedContested Northeast Investment Working Group figures as reported by DAP News (10 August 2026 meeting, provincial hall, Sen Monorom) and by Khmer Times and Cambodianess; earlier totals from a user-supplied intelligence brief citing Khmer Times.

The pipeline is a moving number, so here is the series

Every figure below was the current one on the day it was given. Printing only the newest would hide how fast the programme is filling; printing only an older one would simply be wrong. The count rose from 66 proposals to 72 inside a few months, and Mondulkiri's own share from 20 projects to 22.

Approval batches, which are not additions

These were reported as separate announcements. They are subsets of the series above, at the moment each cleared, and adding them to the totals would double-count.

• Six projects, US$83m, 2,587 jobs. Two in Ratanak Kiri, two in Mondulkiri, one in Stung Treng, one in Kratie. A fresh cassava starch factory, a cashew processing plant, rubber growing and processing, a coffee plantation with processing, and an eco-tourism development. Reported
• Seven projects, US$136m, 1,584 jobs. An earlier batch granted investment principle and incentives across the four provinces. Reported
• About US$400m under review. Reported while the working group was assessing a tranche of proposals. Reported

The $660 million figure, and what it actually counts

This page previously described SPIN as a $660 million programme in which Mondulkiri captures 4 of 13 primary projects, on the authority of an uploaded intelligence brief. That brief's own citation reads: “13 SPIN-backed projects worth $660M to break ground in early 2026”. Those are projects reaching groundbreaking — a milestone, and the narrowest point of the funnel. It is not the size of the programme, and it is not comparable with the US$2,650m of proposals received. Both stay on this page. Neither has been withdrawn by its source, and a reader who meets one without the other will draw the wrong conclusion about scale.

Sized against the country

A proposal figure means nothing without a denominator, and the denominator is published. The Council for the Development of Cambodia registered 630 investment projects worth close to US$10 billion in 2025, up 52% on 2024 by count, carrying about 438,000 jobs; the first half of 2026 brought 276 projects worth about US$4.7 billion. In July 2026 alone, 33 projects worth US$525m were registered, ten of them through capital and provincial sub-committees rather than the Council — which is the mechanism a Mondulkiri applicant would use.

On those numbers Mondulkiri’s US$511m of proposals is about 5% of what the country registered in 2025. The two are not the same stage of the funnel and should not be compared without saying so — but the order of magnitude is the useful part: this province is a small share of a national flow that is itself growing fast, and the programme it sits inside is what closes that gap or does not.

VerifiedReportedDerived Assembled here from the Electricity Authority of Cambodia’s 2024 sector report, the provincial GIS hydropower and mining layers examined in the Data Hub, Sub-Decrees 182 and 05, the Ministry of Tourism’s list of international checkpoints, the Council for the Development of Cambodia, and the programmes named in Development finance below. Each row carries the body that published it.

The register nobody publishes

Three sections of this page complain that no register exists, and they are right. The Energy section says it plainly: no published list names every wind project in Mondulkiri with its capacity, its operator and its status. The province publishes counts — 22 proposals, US$511m, 5,003 jobs — and never rows. So the rows below are assembled from what is published, and where a row is thin it says so in the row rather than in a footnote.

52 entries. Filter, or type into the box; everything runs in the browser with no network call, which is the only honest way to build a lookup for a province where eight of ninety-two villages still have no electricity.

Read the Status column down the page and one pattern does the arguing. Of the thirteen hydropower sites, none is built and none has an investor; of eighteen mining licences, two permit extraction; of the wind capacity, every megawatt is approved and none is generating. The province’s register is mostly a register of intentions, and the dates in the mining rows — licences recorded valid with expiries in 2013 and 2017 — say the record itself has not been maintained since. That is a finding about the data, not about the province, and it belongs to whoever is doing diligence on either.

VerifiedReportedContested Cambodian Investment Board approvals via Khmer Times; Sokdom commune chief and the Mondulkiri Provincial Department of Mines and Energy as reported by CamboJA News, 13 June 2026; Ministry of Environment statement in the same report.

Wind is the largest investment here, and nobody agrees how large

Cambodia’s first wind farm is being built in Mondulkiri, with operations reported for 2027. It is the biggest thing on this page by capital. Four sources describe its size and no two match.

These are not four estimates of one quantity. The Board approves named projects one at a time; the commune chief is describing everything being built in her commune at once; the provincial department is counting sections. What none of the sources gives is a register: no published list names every wind project in Mondulkiri with its capacity, its operator and its status. Until one exists the honest range for the province is 300 MW confirmed by approval and 900 MW asserted on the ground.

What the megawatt figures leave out

The turbines are going up on land that Bunong communities use and claim. An investment page that printed only the capital and the jobs would be describing half of this project, and the half that has never been contested.

What the regulator does publish

No wind register exists. The Electricity Authority of Cambodia does, however, publish the grid, and it is a shorter answer than the megawatt claims imply. The province holds three substations out of 75 nationally, of which GS Mondulkiri is 230/22 kV and 50 MVA. Village electrification stands at 84 of 92, or 91.30% — the lowest of any province in Cambodia, against a national 99.09%. One district, Kaev Seima, is supplied from Viet Nam at 22 and 35 kV and pays a different tariff.

Hold that against the wind figures. Somewhere between 300 and 900 MW is being built in a province whose entire distribution network is three substations and which has the worst village coverage in the country. Whatever the true capacity, almost none of it is for here; it is generation sited in Mondulkiri for a grid that runs elsewhere. That is not a criticism — it is where the wind is — but it does mean the project should not be read as electrification, and the eight villages still off the grid are the check on anyone who reads it that way. The tariff those villages’ neighbours pay is in Operating costs.

ReportedDerived State Secretariat of Civil Aviation and Focus Consortium via Khmer Times, Kiripost and Construction & Property News; Electricité du Cambodge via Phnom Penh Post; Border Infrastructure Fund reporting; hydropower derived from the provincial GIS layer in this site’s Data Hub.

The rest of the pipeline

An airport that has been studied since 2019 and never broken ground; a grid that arrived; a border road nearly finished; and thirteen hydropower sites that exist only on a list from 2003. Read together they say something an investor should weigh: in this province, announcement and construction are separated by years.

The hydropower row is the Atlas’s own finding rather than a source’s claim, and the working is set out in the Data Hub.

Three corrections to the airport row

The row above was built from reporting, and later reporting revises it in three ways worth carrying, because each one changes what the project is. First, the model in the 2021 proposal was build-operate-transfer, not build-transfer-operate. Second, the US$60m is that 2021 proponent’s estimate — China Power International Group — and PowerChina International withdrew in September 2022, so the cost is formally undetermined pending the current feasibility study rather than fixed at sixty million. Third, as of May 2026 the live thread is reported to be a Korean investor team responding on a suspended project, not the consortium that launched the study. Reported

The pattern this page keeps finding holds here too: five years, three proponents, two financing models, one number that has outlived the party who produced it. Nothing has been built.

Reported Provincial update presented by Governor Kong Kimny at a meeting with Samdech Techo Hun Sen, 7 July 2026, reported by Construction & Property News, 16 July 2026.

What is already here, in the governor’s own figures

The most recent single official statement of the province’s productive base: Provincial update presented by Governor Kong Kimny at a meeting with Samdech Techo Hun Sen, 7 July 2026. It is a presentation rather than a published register, so it is Reported throughout — but it is the province describing itself, which is what an investor is buying into.

The gap in one sentence

Mondulkiri has no coffee processing factory. The province grows coffee on soil and at an altitude that several sources call the country’s best for it, and processes the crop by hand. The same asymmetry runs through the figures above: 43,912 hectares of rubber and 11,165 of cashew are grown here, and the approved processing plants under the Northeast programme — cassava starch, cashew, rubber, coffee — are the first at any scale. An investor reading this page should read that as the province exporting raw weight and importing the margin.

A fourth answer to a question the Data Hub already asks

The Data Hub publishes three official counts of Mondulkiri’s tourism sites — 15, 29 and 106. This report gives a fourth, 105, one away from the third and from a different authority on a different date. It is recorded here and there rather than reconciled, because nobody is maintaining a register and pretending otherwise would be the error.

The economy this province sits inside, according to four bodies that disagree

Any provincial case is a bet on a national trajectory, and there is no single official number for that trajectory. Four authorities published one in 2026 and no two match. They are set out together for the same reason the wind capacities are.

The spread is 4.8 to 5.3 for a year already finished and 3.9 to 4.5 for the year in progress. That is not a reason to distrust any of them; it is a reason to carry a range in a model rather than a point, and to notice that the government’s own figure is the highest in both columns.

The tourism figure the ministry does not publish

The governor counts 105 tourist sites. Nobody counts the visitors to them. The Ministry of Tourism’s monthly statistics disaggregate the country into six zones — Phnom Penh, Siem Reap Angkor, the coast, Preah Sihanouk, the Eco-tourism Zone, and Others — and Mondulkiri is inside the fifth and never named. What the ministry does publish for that zone is not encouraging for a tourism case, and it is the closest thing to a provincial series that exists:

Nationally, international arrivals fell 16.9% in 2025, to 5,569,752. So the province’s tourism investment case is being made against a shrinking domestic base and a growing but very small foreign one — roughly thirteen domestic visitors to the zone for every foreign one. A lodge built for the foreign market is chasing the growing number; a resort built for the Phnom Penh weekend market is chasing the falling one. The zone data cannot tell you Mondulkiri’s own split, and no source can, because nobody publishes it.

Reported Provincial update by Governor Kong Kimny, 7 July 2026; Vietnamese provincial reporting on Dak Nong–Mondulkiri cooperation.

Four gates to Viet Nam, three of them open

For anyone moving goods, this is the province’s most concrete advantage and its most concrete limit.

All four are bilateral crossings with Viet Nam, which means they are open to Cambodian and Vietnamese nationals and goods, not to third-country travellers. Dak Dam faces Bu Prang in Dak Nong province; an upgrade to the Dak Dang bridge there has been discussed between the two provincial administrations. The province’s boundary with Viet Nam is 312 km long. As everywhere on this site, the line drawn on our maps is not an authoritative delimitation.

One qualification that changes what these gates are worth, and it is not in the provincial account. None of the four appears on the Ministry of Tourism’s list of international Cambodia–Viet Nam checkpoints. All four are bilateral, and the nearest international crossing is Trapeang Sre at Snuol in Kratie, outside the province on the road to National Road 7. Third-country traffic and general international cargo therefore leave Mondulkiri before they cross. Proposals to upgrade Dak Dam and Nam Lyr date from 2023 and have not been realised. The customs procedure and what it costs at the water are in Money and logistics. Verified

The three operating gates, on the map: LapakhaMapsDirectionsEarth Dak DamMapsDirectionsEarth Nam LyrMapsDirectionsEarth. Chimeat is not in the provincial layer and has no published coordinate, which is consistent with its not operating.

VerifiedReported Wildlife Conservation Society and Ministry of Environment via Phnom Penh Post and Khmer Times; World Bank project documentation; WWF-Cambodia and the European Union; the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation with FAO, UNDP, WCS and RECOFTC.

Money already here that is not private investment

Multilateral, bilateral and NGO finance has been working in this province for longer than the investment programme has existed, and one strand of it — carbon — has put money into the national budget and into village accounts from the forest standing up rather than coming down. An investor in land or agro-industry will meet these programmes as neighbours, partners or counterparties.

Agricultural Profile

Official cultivated areas from the Ministry of Interior's Information Book on Capitals and Provinces of Cambodia (March 2024). These are the figures a government counterpart will be working from.

VerifiedMinistry of Interior, Information Book on Capitals and Provinces of Cambodia, 15 March 2024, p.110. One caveat worth carrying into any business case: the book also records mining in Mondulkiri as a single site with no activity and zero revenue — which sits oddly against the 213,531 ha recorded under mining licence in the 2021 Provincial Spatial Plan. The two are measuring different things (licensed area vs. operating, revenue-generating sites), and the gap is itself the finding.

Economic Land Concessions (ELCs)

Verified Labour Law of 1997; Prakas 214/25 of 17 September 2025 on the minimum wage for 2026; Prakas 449 LV/PrK.NSSF and Sub-Decree 32 OrNKr.BK on social security contributions; Prakas 443 KB/Br.K of 21 September 2018 on seniority payment; Sub-Decree 167 of 18 September 2025 on public holidays; Prakas 277/20 and Joint Prakas 498 on foreign employment; National Institute of Statistics, General Population Census 2019 and its 2025 thematic report on literacy.

There is no minimum wage in the sector you are entering

This is the single most misread fact about employing people in Cambodia, and getting it wrong in either direction is expensive. Cambodia does set a statutory minimum wage: US$210 a month for 2026, US$208 on probation, fixed by Prakas 214/25 on the recommendation of the National Council on Minimum Wage. It applies to the textile, garment, footwear, travel goods and bag industries and to nothing else. Mondulkiri has none of those industries. An agro-processing plant, a coffee mill, a lodge or a construction contractor in this province faces no statutory wage floor at all; pay is contract and market.

That does not make the US$210 figure useless — it is the number every counterpart in the country knows, and it anchors expectations. It makes it dangerous as a line in a model, because it is neither a floor you must clear nor a ceiling you may assume. It is a different industry’s number.

What is not optional

Foreign staff: a quota with a date on it

Foreign employees are capped at 10% of the Cambodian workforce, split 3% office and administrative, 6% skilled, 1% unskilled. An employer that cannot find qualified Cambodians may apply to exceed it under Prakas 277/20, but the approval is discretionary and it is annual — not granted once. The quota is filed through the ministry’s Foreign Workers Centralized Management System by 30 November for the following year, and the quota has to be approved before any individual work permit can be processed; permits themselves renew by 31 March. Employing a foreign national without a permit carries a fine of about KHR 12.6m per person under Joint Prakas 498, tripled for a repeat.

The practical consequence for a project breaking ground here: the expatriate team has to be planned a calendar year ahead of the build, or it cannot legally be on site.

The workforce you would be hiring

The Frictions section records the province’s Human Development Index as among the lowest in the country and leaves it there. The census puts numbers under it. Mondulkiri had 88,649 people in 19,609 households at the 2019 census, average household 4.5. The National Institute of Statistics’ 2025 thematic report on literacy finds Mondulkiri has the widest urban–rural literacy gap of any province, 23 percentage points, and school attendance among 6- to 11-year-olds of 77.7%, the lowest of any province.

Verified Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia, article 44; Land Law NS/RKM/0801/14 of 30 August 2001, articles 8, 9, 23–28, 52–62 and 106–109; Sub-Decree 83 of 9 June 2009 on registration of indigenous community land; Sub-Decree 146 ANK/BK of 27 December 2005 on economic land concessions; Order 01 of 17 May 2012; Sub-Decree 182 of 17 July 2023 and Sub-Decree 05 of 5 January 2017; Law on Natural Protected Areas of 2008 and the Code on Environment and Natural Resources NS/RKM/0623/007; General Department of Taxation on registration, property and unused-land tax.

How you can actually hold land here

The Frictions section reports the working group telling companies that state land applications are “sensitive and complex” and businesses answering that land title was their main obstacle. Neither side said what the rules are. They are not complicated to state; they are only hard to satisfy.

Ownership

Leases, and the sentence that matters

Hard title, soft title, and how much of the country has either

Hard title is a certificate of ownership on the national cadastral register, and it is the only thing that confers ownership. Soft title is recognition of possession at commune or district level; it does not. The Ministry of Land Management stated in May 2019 that about 5.2 million parcels are registered nationally, roughly 4.6 million of them through systematic adjudication and 600,000 sporadically. No official figure exists for Mondulkiri’s share of that, and the absence is itself the finding: a province cannot be described as titled or untitled from a national number.

Indigenous communal title, which is the Mondulkiri problem

Articles 23 to 28 of the Land Law grant indigenous communities collective ownership of their residential land, their traditional agriculture and the reserved land needed for shifting cultivation. Article 28 is one sentence and it is categorical: no authority outside the community may acquire any rights to immovable property belonging to an indigenous community. Not lease, not buy, not concession.

Registration runs through three ministries under Sub-Decree 83 — the Ministry of Rural Development recognises the community, the Ministry of Interior grants it legal personality, the Ministry of Land Management maps, displays and titles the land. The World Bank’s own project documentation records 30 communal titles issued nationally as of January 2020, seven of them in Mondulkiri, against twenty applications from this province.

Read those two numbers together and you have the diligence problem stated exactly. Most Bunong claims in Mondulkiri are neither titled nor extinguished; they are somewhere in a three-ministry process that has taken more than a decade for the communities that finished it. Land that is mid-application does not appear on a cadastral search as encumbered, and it is not free either. The wind project’s consultation record on this page is what that looks like when a project meets it after committing capital.

Concessions

Protected land, which is a third of the province

Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary was enlarged to 317,456 ha by Sub-Decree 182 of 17 July 2023; Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary covers 222,500 ha and was zoned by Sub-Decree 05 of 5 January 2017. Protected areas are divided into four zones and only one of them contemplates investment:

Impact assessment is mandatory for any proposal or investment within or adjacent to a protected area boundary, and clearance is prohibited outright in the core and conservation zones. One live caution: the Code on Environment and Natural Resources of 2023 terminates the 2008 Protected Areas Law. Any summary of zoning rules written before mid-2023 — including, in part, the one above — should be checked against the Code before it is relied on. This page flags that rather than papering over it.

What the transaction costs

Verified Electricity Authority of Cambodia, Salient Features of Power Development in the Kingdom of Cambodia Until December 2025 and Report on Power Sector for the Year 2024, both giving effect to Ministry of Mines and Energy Prakas 0275.ME.T.EBP.PR of 4 November 2024 and EAC Decision 008.SR.25.EAC of 22 January 2025; Ministry of Commerce retail fuel ceiling, Notification 2853 of 11 August 2026; Telecommunication Regulator of Cambodia telecom statistics; International Telecommunication Union price baskets.

What the meter actually reads

In the Frictions section, businesses operating in this province named the electricity price as a cost problem to the government’s working group in August 2026. The page recorded the complaint and printed no tariff. This is the tariff they were talking about. It is published, it is national, and it is not negotiable at the provincial level.

Electricity, 2026

Two things follow that are specific to this province and are not obvious from the table. First, the schedule is national: since the tariff reduction programme, a factory in Sen Monorom pays what a factory in Phnom Penh pays. The complaint recorded in Frictions is therefore about the level of the Cambodian tariff, not about a Mondulkiri penalty, and no provincial body can move it. Second, there is an exception, and it is in this province: Kaev Seima district takes supply from Viet Nam at 22 and 35 kV, and pays 650 KHR/kWh — a different rate on a different grid, at the district that also holds most of Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary.

And whether there is a wire at all

Mondulkiri is last in the country on village electrification, and the gap to the national figure — 91.30% against 99.09% — is nearly eight points in a country that has essentially finished the job everywhere else. For a site selection exercise this is the more useful number than the tariff: the price of power here is the national price, and the question is whether power reaches the site.

Fuel, telecoms, water

Verified National Bank of Cambodia official exchange rate and its series on deposit money banks’ interest rates to June 2026, published 3 August 2026; NBC press release on the circulation of US dollar banknotes, 2 August 2026; Law on Foreign Exchange of 1997 as stated by the Council for the Development of Cambodia; Ministry of Tourism list of international checkpoints; National Trade Repository guide to import and export; published tariffs of the Sihanoukville Autonomous Port and the Phnom Penh Autonomous Port.

Money in, goods out

The currency, and what it costs to borrow

The spread between riel and dollar lending is the whole de-dollarisation debate in one figure, and it points the wrong way for a borrower with dollar revenue. A project earning dollars from exports and borrowing in dollars carries no currency mismatch and the cheaper rate; a project selling domestically in riel and borrowing in dollars carries the mismatch and still pays less. That asymmetry is worth stating plainly rather than leaving in a footnote.

Getting money in and profits out

The border you cannot actually use

The Border trade section calls the province’s four gates its most concrete advantage. Here is the limit on that advantage, and it is sharper than the word “bilateral” suggests. None of Mondulkiri’s four crossings appears on the Ministry of Tourism’s list of international Cambodia–Viet Nam checkpoints. The nearest international gate is Trapeang Sre at Snuol, in Kratie — off the province, on the National Road 76 to National Road 7 corridor.

So third-country traffic and general international cargo leave Mondulkiri before they cross a border. A project whose logistics case rests on the Viet Nam frontier being 312 km long should be modelled on the road to Snuol, not on the gate at Dak Dam. Vietnamese proposals to upgrade Dak Dam and Nam Lyr to international status date from 2023 and have not been realised.

Clearing customs, and what a box costs at the water

And the honest gap: no Cambodian government body publishes road freight or container haulage rates, and the works ministry publishes no road distance table. The province’s own presentation gives 382 km to Phnom Penh, and that is the only distance on this page with a name behind it. Every trucking figure in a Mondulkiri business plan is a quotation, not a published rate, and should be sourced in writing from a carrier before it is modelled.

Verified Joint Prakas No. 1217 MEF/MoC of 27 November 2017 on the provision of public services of the Ministry of Commerce, read from the Ministry’s own scanned instrument; Law on Commercial Enterprises, articles 7, 86, 107, 118 and 144; Ministry of Commerce online business registration portal.

What it costs to become a company, from the fee schedule

This section used to say “register through CamDX, 8–10 working days” and stop. Here is the tariff. Every figure is a line in Joint Prakas 1217, which is the instrument the counter works from.

So incorporation itself is about US$425 including the name check, and the recurring obligation is a US$20 annual declaration whose penalty for non-filing is twenty-five times the fee. That ratio is the one to carry: this is a cheap country to incorporate in and an expensive one to be casual in.

There is no minimum capital, and almost every source says there is

The figure repeated everywhere is a minimum capital of KHR 4,000,000, about US$1,000. It is not a minimum. Article 144 of the Law on Commercial Enterprises is a default: “if the articles fail to provide the number and price attached to the shares, the company shall issue a minimum of one thousand shares with a par value of not less than four thousand Riels per share.” It is what the law does when your articles leave the box empty. The Law states no minimum capital for a private limited company at all. Verified

One caution on all of the above, and it is a real one. Prakas No. 117 of 9 December 2025, effective 8 January 2026, simplifies business registration in twelve chapters and adds a company secretary requirement. Its official text could not be obtained, so whether it changes the 2017 fee schedule is unresolved. Treat the tariff above as the last schedule this Atlas could read in full, and check it at the counter. Reported

Two further gaps worth naming because their absence is what a foreign investor runs into: Joint Prakas 1217 has no fee line for a branch of a foreign company and no fee line for a representative office. Only the domestic branch appears. Any figure quoted for either is not from this instrument.

VerifiedReported Environment and Natural Resources Code, Royal Kram NS/RKM/0623/007 of 29 June 2023, in force 28 June 2024; Sub-Decree No. 72 ANRK.BK of 11 August 1999 on the EIA process; Ministry of Environment Prakas No. 359 of 6 May 2025 on classification of development projects; Law on Mineral Resource Management and Exploitation, NS/RKM/0701/09 of 13 July 2001; Law on Tourism of 10 June 2009; Ministry of Industry, Science, Technology and Innovation SME portal.

The permits, and the thresholds nobody publishes

Registering the company is the easy part and it is priced. What follows is the part that decides whether a project happens, and much of it is not published at all. This section is written so that the absences are as visible as the rules, because a reader who does not know which of the two they are looking at will plan on sand.

Environmental assessment: the test changed in 2025, and the new test is not public

The Environment and Natural Resources Code came into force on 28 June 2024, and its Book V carries eighty articles on assessment. Underneath it, Prakas No. 359 of 6 May 2025 expressly repealed Prakas 021 of 2020 and set three classes of project:

And here is the problem. Which class your project falls into is set by an annex to Prakas 359 that is not publicly obtainable. This Atlas could not get the official text from the Ministry of Environment. So the single question an investor most needs answered — is my plant a 30-day filing or a 90-day one — has no published answer, and the honest badge is that the current thresholds are not available in accessible form.

This matters more than it sounds, because the old thresholds are still all over the internet. The 1999 sub-decree’s annex — mining at all sizes, food processing at 500 tonnes a year, agro-industrial land at 10,000 ha, tourism areas at 50 ha, hotels at 60 rooms, power plants at 5 MW — is quoted everywhere as if it were current. For classification purposes it is superseded. It is printed here only so a reader can recognise it when they meet it somewhere else. Contested

Two things from the 1999 sub-decree that are still worth carrying. Article 18 provides that if the Ministry misses its deadline, the approving institution treats the assessment as compliant — a deemed approval, which cuts in the applicant’s favour and is unusual enough to be worth knowing. And article 11 requires a review and monitoring fee to the National Budget, with no amount stated in the instrument. No EIA fee schedule could be found in the 1999 instrument, the 2025 one, or anywhere else.

Mining: six licence types, and a royalty rate that does not exist in public

The province holds eighteen mining licences. The law behind them is the 2001 Law on Mineral Resource Management and Exploitation, and it is thinner than the licence count suggests.

Read that against what this page already records — over 18 tonnes of gold refined since 2021, and a provincial licence register whose entries carry expiry dates in 2013 and 2017 — and the gap is not academic. The share the state takes from mineral extraction in this province is not a number a member of the public can look up.

Everything else, and how little of it is priced

Verified Law on Investment, NS/RKM/1021/014, 15 October 2021, and Sub-Decree No. 139 ANKr.BK on its implementation, 26 June 2023, both as published by the Council for the Development of Cambodia.

What a Qualified Investment Project is actually worth

The Compliance checklist at the foot of this page says to “consider QIP status with the CDC if seeking tax incentives,” which is advice without a number attached. Here are the numbers. A Qualified Investment Project is a project holding a Registration Certificate from the Council for the Development of Cambodia or from a Municipal-Provincial Investment Sub-Committee; the certificate is due within 20 working days. The sub-committee has the same authority as the Council inside its own jurisdiction.

The threshold you have to clear, by sector

Annex 1 of Sub-Decree 139 sets a minimum for each activity, in capital or in land or in either. These are the lines that matter in a province whose named sectors are agriculture, agro-industry and tourism. Note the second column: an agricultural project has to maintain the minimum until the last year of its exemption, not merely reach it on the day it registers.

Set that against the province’s own gap. Mondulkiri has no coffee processing factory and 43,912 ha of rubber it does not process. A food processing plant qualifies at US$500,000, which is the lowest threshold on the list and a fifth of what the rubber planting line demands. The instrument is pointed at exactly the thing the province is missing.

The menu, and how long it runs

The group assignment is where an agro-industrial case gets uncomfortable. Group 3 — three years, the shortest exemption — is the low-technology group, and it contains food processing, furniture, garments, paper and rubber goods. Those are the province’s sectors. The nine-year exemption is not aimed here, and a model built on it will be wrong by six years.

One correction worth making explicitly, because it survives in a great deal of advisory material: the trigger period, three years, priority period structure belongs to the 2003 amended investment law, which the 2021 Law replaced. Neither term appears in the current Law or its sub-decree. If a document you are handed uses them, it is describing a regime that no longer exists.

Duty, VAT, and the deductions worth more than they look

The 150% list reads like general encouragement until you read it against this province. There is no confirmed vocational training centre in Mondulkiri and the lowest primary school attendance in the country, so an employer here will be training its own workforce and housing it. The two largest costs a Mondulkiri plant cannot avoid are the two the instrument lets it deduct at one and a half times.

Expansion, and the pro-rata that catches people

An expanded QIP does not get a fresh exemption on the whole business. Exempt income is the total taxable income multiplied by the expansion capital over total investment capital, and the clock starts at the expansion’s first income. Minimum tax exemption for a QIP is conditional on an independent audit report filed annually by June; without the audit the exemption is not available.

Verified Sub-Decree No. 124 ANKr.BK of 2 October 2018 on tax incentives for small and medium enterprises in priority sectors, read in full from the General Department of Taxation’s own copy, where it is registered as valid; Sub-Decree No. 17 ANKr.BK of 7 February 2017.

The cheaper route, which this page had not mentioned

The QIP section sets out what the Law on Investment offers and what it demands: US$500,000 for a food processing project, US$2m or 500 ha for rubber. For most things anyone would actually build in Mondulkiri, that is the wrong instrument. There is a second one, it is much smaller, and its priority sectors are this province’s sectors.

Set the two instruments side by side and the gap is the finding. A coffee or cashew processing plant here needs US$500,000 to be a Qualified Investment Project and get three years. The same plant needs turnover of about US$62,000 — or simply ten employees — to get three years under Sub-Decree 124, and five if it buys 60% of its raw material locally, which in this province is what it would do anyway. The province’s missing coffee factory is a Sub-Decree 124 project, not a Law on Investment one.

Two adjacent instruments, and one that does not reach here. Sub-Decree No. 272 of 29 November 2024 gives tax incentives for informal economic development. And Prakas No. 122 of 30 January 2026 gives tax incentives to tourism businesses — in Siem Reap only. It is frequently cited as Cambodia’s tourism tax incentive; it is a provincial one, and this is not that province. Verified

Verified Law on Taxation NS/RKM/0523/004 of 16 May 2023; Sub-Decree No. 47 ANKr.BK on patent tax, Sub-Decree No. 48 ANKr.BK on tax on salary and Sub-Decree No. 49 ANKr.BK on value added tax, all of 11 March 2024 and all read from the General Department of Taxation’s own copies; the Department’s published filing calendar and taxpayer classification.

Compliance Checklist

The checklist below is unchanged and still the right starting point. What follows it is what the checklist never said: the rates, the bands and the dates, from the instruments in force. One warning first — the Law on Taxation of 16 May 2023 replaced the 1997 law, and the three sub-decrees of 11 March 2024 replaced the rate tables before them. A great deal of advisory material still quotes the old ones.

Patent tax, the annual licence to trade

Start trading in the last six months of the year and you pay half. Sub-Decree 47, article 3(4). Verified

Tax on salary, monthly, for a resident employee

Deductions on proof of family status: KHR 150,000 a month per dependent child and KHR 150,000 a month for a non-working spouse. Where both spouses work, the child deduction goes to one of them only. Sub-Decree 48, article 3(2).

Read this against the labour section and something useful falls out for this province. There is no statutory minimum wage in any sector likely to operate here, and the salary tax threshold is KHR 1,500,000 a month, about US$371. A wage typical of rural Mondulkiri sits below it, so for most of a local payroll the salary tax is nil and the real employment cost is the 5.4% of gross in social security contributions, capped at about US$16 a head.

Sole proprietors, annually

Value added tax, and a threshold that is no longer there

The calendar, and who counts as medium

Finally, the honest limit of this section. Prepayment of tax on income, minimum tax, withholding tax rates, fringe benefit tax and the late-filing penalties are not printed here, because they could not be read from an instrument — the Department’s own English page on withholding tax returns a not-found error, and the Law on Taxation is published as a scanned image. Every figure in circulation for those five traces to a consultancy booklet rather than to a published rate. They are real obligations; this page simply will not invent their numbers. Verified

VerifiedReported Statements by companies and by the Northeast Investment Working Group at the Mondulkiri provincial hall, 10 August 2026, reported by DAP News; concession history via Open Development Cambodia, LICADHO and Phnom Penh Post; Human Development Index via multidimensional poverty analysis.

What the brochures do not say

Most of this list is not from critics. It is what companies already operating in Mondulkiri told the government’s own working group across a table on 10 August 2026, and what the working group told them back. It is on this page for the same reason the contested figures are: an investor who learns it after committing capital has been badly served by whoever wrote the page.

The working group’s answer was that it and the provincial administration stand ready to advise, support applications, smooth procedure and help clear blockages through the one-window mechanism, resolving problems as a package. That is a commitment, not an outcome, and this page will record what follows.

Four of these now have a number against them

A friction stated without a figure is a mood. Since this section was written, four of the eight rows above can be answered from published sources, and the answers are on this page rather than left to the reader:

The four that remain unanswered — idle concessions, telecommunications, the unfinished land use master plan, and what actually happens to an application — are unanswered because nothing is published, not because nobody looked. Each is named in the open buffer of the section it belongs to.