Offer letter vs employment contract

How it works

USD figures in the offer must translate to a peso basic, 13th month, and hours in the contract. At-will sentences in the offer die on contact with Article 296. If EOR employs, the EOR signs the contract. You sign the service agreement. For a U.S. company hiring one Filipino teammate, write this into the brief, the employment contract, and the peso payroll file before the start date. Slack habits do not override the Labor Code, BIR, or NPC. If the local employer of record holds the paper, they run the statutory step; you still owe a clean operating definition so the seat does not fail in week three. Put a number on the example when you budget loaded cost, because a nameless allowance always returns as a December surprise or a missed SLA.

Example: offer: $1,200/month. contract: ₱68,000 basic, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. PHT, 6-month probation. Those have to be the same deal after FX.

How it differs

Start date lock is the calendar. Service agreement is your contract with the local firm.

Common errors

Only an offer, never a contract. Two numbers that cannot both be true.

In practice

Treat Offer letter vs employment contract as a week-one operating object. Put this on the scorecard or the start-date checklist. If it only appears in a pitch deck, it will not survive week one. Write an owner - founder, local employer, or worker - and a date you will look at it again: first cutoff, first holiday, or first miss. If nobody can show a contract clause, a payslip line, a calendar block, or a checklist box, you do not have offer letter vs employment contract yet. You have a conversation. Convert the conversation before the person starts, while changing the deal still costs a paragraph rather than a resignation. Re-read the worked example above against the actual hire in front of you. If the numbers in that example cannot be swapped for this seat’s pesos, hours, and start date, the brief is still unfinished.