Argentina's Labour Reform (Ley 27.802): How Severance Is Now Calculated, What Was Repealed, and the Court Case Still Open

Argentina's Labour Modernisation Law (Ley 27.802) was published in the Official Gazette on 6 March 2026 and, under its own section 217, took effect on publication unless a provision says otherwise. Six months on, most of what is written about it covers the same four or five headline items. This guide covers what a foreign employer actually has to price and sign: how severance is calculated now, which articles of the Employment Contract Law disappeared, which special statutes expire on 1 January 2027, and the litigation that suspended more than eighty articles of this law once already — which is the part almost nobody writing for an international audience mentions.

Three pieces of the reform already have their own sourced entries on our regulatory radar and are not repeated here: the Labour Assistance Fund starting 1 November 2026, the hours bank and working-time rules, and the repeal of the Teleworking Law. There is also a separate entry on collective agreements, where the structural change is that a company-level agreement now outranks the sector one.

Start here: the law is in force, and it is being litigated

This belongs at the top rather than in a footnote, because it changes how much weight you should put on any of it.

On 30 March 2026, judge Ojeda, sitting in the labour courts, granted an injunction in an amparo brought by the CGT — Argentina's main labour confederation — suspending more than eighty articles of Ley 27.802. In April 2026, Chamber VIII of the National Labour Court of Appeals (María Dora González and Víctor Arturo Pesino) granted suspensive effect to the National State's appeal, which meant the injunction stopped operating and the suspended articles regained force. The CGT then moved to recuse those judges and sought to annul that ruling. The case was subsequently sent to the administrative courts, where judge Marra Giménez also left the injunction without effect. The CGT maintains its substantive challenge.

Read precisely, that means two things at once. The law applies today — the Executive has continued implementing it, including Decree 408/2026 in June and the securities regulator's framework for the Labour Assistance Fund in September, both after the April ruling. But what sustains that force is a series of decisions about the injunction while the proceedings continue, not a rejection of the union's case on the merits. For a company building a multi-year payroll model, the honest framing is: plan on the new rules, and know that a court has already switched them off once.

Two things we could not verify and therefore do not assert: sources differ on whether the number of articles restored was 82 or 83, and we could not confirm the exact date of the administrative court's decision.

Severance: the calculation, not the headline

Section 51 of the reform replaced section 245 of the Employment Contract Law, the article that sets severance for dismissal without cause. The formula everyone quotes did not change: one month's salary per year of service, or per fraction greater than three months, calculated on the best monthly remuneration, regular and customary, earned in the last year — or over the period worked, if shorter.

What changed is the part that decides the actual number: the definition of the base. The new text settles three questions that used to be litigated one case at a time.

• What counts as remuneration. Amounts earned and paid in each calendar month. The text states that non-monthly items have no bearing on the base — it names the Sueldo Anual Complementario (the statutory 13th salary), holiday pay and bonuses that are not paid monthly. If you have been modelling Argentine severance with the 13th salary inside the base, the new text says it is outside.
• What "customary" means. Items earned for at least six months in the last calendar year.
• What "regular" means for variable pay. For items such as monthly bonuses, overtime and commissions: the average of the last six months, or of the last year if that is more favourable to the employee.
• The cap, now in the statute. The salary base may not exceed three times the average monthly salary of the remuneration set in the collective agreement applicable to the employee at the time of dismissal, for the statutory or agreed working day, excluding seniority. The caps for each agreement are calculated by the signatory parties, and their homologation or registration is sufficient involvement by the enforcement authority.

For a foreign employer the practical consequence is that severance exposure became more predictable and easier to model, and that the collective agreement covering your workforce is an input to the calculation, not background reading. Note what this section does not do: it does not reduce the entitlement. And the Labour Assistance Fund does not change it either — section 58 of the same law says expressly that the fund's regime "does not modify, substitute or alter the severance system".

What was repealed from the Employment Contract Law

Section 207 of the reform repeals nine articles of the Employment Contract Law outright. Named by the headings in the statute, they are:

• Section 28 — the worker's auxiliaries.
• Section 54 — the evidentiary use of registers, payroll sheets and other control records.
• Section 61 — forms.
• Section 113 — tips.
• Sections 174, 175 and 176 — three provisions from the chapter on women's work: the midday rest, the prohibition on home-based work, and the prohibition on arduous, dangerous or unhealthy tasks.
• Section 216 — dismissal or failure to reinstate, within the chapter on employees holding elected or representative union office.
• Section 275 — malicious and reckless conduct.

Two of these matter commercially. Section 275 allowed a court to penalise an employer that litigated recklessly or in bad faith by increasing the interest applied to the award; it was a standard feature of claimant strategy in Argentine labour litigation, and it is gone. Section 54 governed how much evidentiary weight a company's own records carried, which is a quieter change but goes to the heart of how a dispute is proved. Separately, section 208 of the reform repeals section 6 of Law 11.544, part of the working-hours regime.

We are naming these by their statutory headings, which is what we verified. What each repeal means in a specific dispute is a question for counsel, not for a guide.

The statutes that disappear on 1 January 2027

The reform sets a single future date for several special regimes. From 1 January 2027 it repeals:

• Law 27.555 — the teleworking statute, with no replacement. This is the one that affects remote-team employers most directly, and it has its own radar entry.
• Law 12.908 — the Professional Journalist's Statute.
• Law 14.546 — the statute for commercial travellers (sales representatives).
• Laws 23.947, 23.472 and 12.867, and Decree-Laws 13.839/46 and 14.954/46, along with any other rule conflicting with the reform.

If your Argentine operation employs journalists, content staff under the press statute, or field sales representatives, their governing regime changes on that date and what replaces it is the general Employment Contract Law plus whatever the contract and the applicable collective agreement say. That is a contract-drafting task with a deadline, and it is the same task the teleworking repeal creates.

What this law did not touch

Worth stating plainly, because it is a common misreading: Ley 27.802 does not change the general probationary period in the Employment Contract Law. The six-month probationary period that appears in the reform's text belongs to the regime for domestic workers (Law 26.844), which the reform amends separately. If the probationary period matters to your hiring plan, check the general rule with counsel against the framework currently in force rather than reading it out of this law.

Where the rest of the reform lives

The pieces with dates attached are tracked individually, because each has its own clock:

• The Labour Assistance Fund — monthly contributions start 1 November 2026; cover begins about six months later.
• The hours bank, average working time and split holidays — in force since 6 March 2026, and available by agreement with union representation at company level.
• The teleworking repeal — 1 January 2027.
• Collective agreements — company-level agreements now prevail over sector-level ones within their scope.
• The formalisation incentive (RIFL) — employer contributions at 5% for qualifying hires registered before 30 April 2027.

This is regulatory information, not legal advice, and labour law is the area where the gap between the statute and the outcome of a specific case is widest. Every figure here is taken from the official text of Ley 27.802; the litigation timeline is sourced to Infobae's reporting of the rulings.

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