Quick Answer: The foreign worker deposit in Israel, known in Hebrew as the פיקדון (pikadon), is a savings account held by the Population and Immigration Authority (PIBA) in your name. Under Section 1YA of the Foreign Workers Law 5751-1991 and the Foreign Workers (Deposit) Regulations 5776-2016, your employer must pay in at least 12.5% of your regular monthly wage to cover severance and pension. You can only take the money out when you leave Israel for good at the end of your permit. You apply by email to PIBA's deposit unit between 30 and 10 days before your flight, and collect the cash at the Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot branch inside Ben Gurion Airport, after security, minus 15% income tax and bank fees.

Most foreign workers in Israel find out about the deposit late. A caregiver finishes four years with a family in Netanya, books a flight to Manila, and only then hears from a friend at the airport that there is money waiting. Some never hear at all and fly home leaving NIS 40,000 or more sitting in a PIBA account under their passport number.

The money is yours. It is not a bonus, and it is not charity from the state. It is the severance pay and pension contributions your employer owed you anyway, parked in a government-run account instead of a private pension fund because the state assumed you would eventually leave the country. This guide covers who has an account, how much should be in it, what gets taken out before you see it, and the exact steps to get paid.

1. What the Pikadon Actually Is

Israeli employees normally receive severance pay (pitzuim) when their employment ends, and their employer pays monthly contributions into a pension fund throughout. Foreign workers on B/1 permits presented the state with a practical problem: a worker who flies home to Thailand or the Philippines cannot easily claim from an Israeli pension fund at age 67, and a worker who is owed severance at the end of a five-year permit may have no way to chase an employer who has closed down.

The solution the Knesset adopted was a centralized deposit. Instead of paying into a private pension fund, employers in certain sectors pay a monthly sum into an account managed by PIBA and held at Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot. The account sits in your name and is tied to your passport number. It earns investment returns while it sits there. When you leave Israel at the end of your permit, PIBA releases the balance to you.

The legal framework comes from Section 1YA of the Foreign Workers Law 5751-1991, with the operating rules in the Foreign Workers (Deposit for Foreign Workers) Regulations 5776-2016. A related provision, Section 1Z1, makes a manpower contractor who supplies foreign workers responsible for the deposit obligation as well, so a worker placed through an agency is not left without an address to claim from.

Two points confuse people constantly. First, the deposit is not deducted from your salary. It is the employer's money, paid on top of your wage, so an employer who quietly skips it is stealing from you, not sparing you a deduction. Second, the account follows you, not the job. Change employers within the same sector and the new employer keeps paying into the same account.

In Practice: Ask for your account number in your first month of work, not your last. Email PIBA's deposit unit at [email protected] with your full name in Latin letters exactly as it appears in your passport, your passport number, and your employer's name and company number (ch.p.). Save the reply. Workers who have the account number on hand can resolve a missing deposit in weeks; workers who show up at the airport with nothing but a boarding pass usually cannot. Also check your monthly payslip (tlush maskoret) for a line reading פיקדון or פיקדון לעובד זר. If that line is missing month after month, something is wrong.

2. Who Has a Deposit Account and Who Does Not

The deposit regime does not cover every foreign national working in Israel. It applies to specified sectors, and the list has been extended over the years by ministerial order.

Workers who have a PIBA deposit account generally include:

  • Construction workers on B/1 permits, including those recruited under bilateral agreements with China, Moldova, Ukraine and other partner states
  • Caregivers (metaplim) whose salary is paid in whole or in part through a licensed nursing care company and not directly by the elderly or disabled person's family
  • Hotel and hospitality workers on foreign worker permits
  • Workers on projects requiring unique technology, a category used for specialist construction and industrial projects
  • Infrastructure sector workers, added to the deposit obligation more recently by extension of the same framework

Workers who typically do not have a PIBA deposit account include foreign experts on the high-salary B/1 expert track, agricultural workers whose severance and pension are handled under separate sectoral arrangements, and caregivers paid directly by a private family with no nursing company involved. That does not mean those workers get nothing. It means their severance and pension rights run through ordinary Israeli employment law, through a private pension fund or through a direct claim against the employer, and not through PIBA.

For a foreign expert, employers are often permitted to hold the pension component and pay it out at the end of the assignment instead of transferring it to an Israeli pension fund, provided the arrangement matches Israeli pension percentages and appears clearly on the payslip. If you are on the expert track, read your contract, because that clause decides whether you collect a lump sum on departure or nothing at all.

In Practice: Caregivers are the group most often caught out. If the family pays you directly in cash or by bank transfer and no nursing company appears on your payslip, there is probably no PIBA deposit account, and your severance rights come from the Severance Pay Law 5723-1963 instead. A caregiver who worked for one family for five years at the 2026 minimum wage of NIS 6,443.85 per month is owed roughly NIS 32,200 in severance on top of any pension contributions. That claim is against the family or the estate, not against PIBA, and it is filed in the Regional Labor Court. Families frequently do not know they owe it. Raise it in writing well before your last day, not at the airport.

3. How Much Should Be Going In Each Month

The minimum deposit is 12.5% of the worker's regular monthly wage for full time work. The figure combines the severance component with the employer's pension contribution, so it lands close to what an Israeli employee would see split between a pension fund and a severance account. The percentage can be reduced proportionally in the first and last months of employment based on days actually worked, and only in those months.

The arithmetic is worth doing before you leave the country, because it is the only way to know whether the balance PIBA quotes you is right.

  • Minimum wage in Israel for 2026 is NIS 6,443.85 per month, or NIS 34.64 per hour on a 42 hour week
  • 12.5% of that is approximately NIS 805 per month
  • Over a full year, roughly NIS 9,660
  • Over a five year permit, roughly NIS 48,300, plus accumulated investment profits

If you earn above minimum wage, the deposit rises with your regular wage. Overtime premiums and one-off payments are generally excluded from the calculation base, so the deposit tracks base salary, not gross pay. A construction worker earning NIS 9,000 base should see roughly NIS 1,125 a month going in.

In Practice: Do the multiplication and compare it to the PIBA balance before you book your flight, not after. Take your base monthly wage, multiply by 0.125, and multiply by the number of months you worked. A gap of a few hundred shekels is usually timing or a partial month. A gap of tens of thousands means months were skipped. One reported case involved a Chinese construction worker with NIS 93,717 in his account, which gives a sense of the sums at stake over a long permit. If the numbers do not line up, send PIBA a written query and copy your employer, then speak to a lawyer before departure. Once you have flown home, collecting from an Israeli employer becomes considerably harder, though it is not impossible.

4. What Gets Deducted: Tax, Fees and the Overstay Penalty

The amount you collect is not the balance shown on the statement. Three things come off it.

Income tax of 15%. PIBA withholds 15% from the payout at source. This reflects the tax treatment of severance and pension sums released to a departing foreign worker. Workers who filed Israeli tax returns during their years in Israel, or who worked partial years, can sometimes reclaim part of this by filing a return with the Israel Tax Authority. Whether it is worth the effort depends on the sums involved and on your total Israeli income for the years in question.

Bank and account management fees. Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot charges account management costs against the balance. These are modest relative to the total but they are real, and they are why the final figure is never a round number.

Overstay deductions. This is the contentious one. Under the 2016 Deposit Regulations, a worker who stayed in Israel after their permit expired lost an escalating share of the deposit, and a worker who overstayed by more than six months could lose the entire balance. Deportation costs charged to the worker were also deducted. The stated aim was to give workers a financial reason to leave on time. The practical effect was that people who had already worked five lawful years lost every shekel of their severance because of a few months of unlawful status at the end.

Against the deductions, the account earns investment returns while it sits with PIBA, and those profits are paid out with the principal. Over a five year permit the returns are not trivial.

In Practice: The single most expensive mistake a foreign worker in Israel can make is letting the permit lapse while waiting for a new employer or an appeal. If your permit is close to expiry and your employment situation is unresolved, deal with the status problem first. A worker whose employer terminated them mid-permit generally has a defined window to find a new employer within the same sector before the permit becomes invalid, and PIBA's placement bureaus (lishkot hasama) exist for exactly this. Do not treat an overstay as a purely immigration problem. It is also a direct threat to a five figure sum of your own money. See our guide on overstaying a visa in Israel for the status consequences.

5. The 2023 High Court Ruling on Forfeiting the Deposit

On 12 July 2023, the High Court of Justice struck down the overstay forfeiture provisions of the 2016 Deposit Regulations. The petition was brought by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Kav LaOved (the Worker's Hotline) on behalf of two foreign workers who had lost their deposits after leaving late.

The court ruled six to one. Then President Esther Hayut wrote for the majority, holding that stripping a worker of accumulated social benefits was a disproportionate violation of the constitutional right to property under Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. Justice Noam Sohlberg dissented. The state was given six months to formulate a new arrangement, and the petitioning workers were entitled to have their money returned.

The ruling matters beyond the two petitioners. It established that money accumulated as severance and pension belongs to the worker, and that the state cannot use it as an enforcement lever against immigration violations without a proportionate framework. Israeli employment lawyers read it as a broader statement about pension rights generally, not only about foreign workers.

What it means for you today is less tidy. The forfeiture mechanism has been reworked since the ruling, and PIBA's practice on deductions for late departure has shifted more than once. Do not assume the deposit is gone because someone told you it was forfeited, and do not assume it is safe because the court ruled in 2023.

In Practice: If PIBA has already told you that your deposit was reduced or cancelled because of an overstay, that decision is challengeable. Request the decision in writing, including the calculation, then send a reasoned objection to the deposit unit citing the July 2023 High Court judgment. Kav LaOved and ACRI both handle these cases without charge for workers who cannot pay, and Kav LaOved runs assistance in several languages including Thai, Chinese and Tagalog. A worker who has already left Israel can pursue this from abroad through a representative holding a power of attorney, which must be notarized and, in most countries, apostilled. See our guide on apostille documents for Israel for how that certification works.

6. How to Withdraw Your Deposit: Step by Step

The process is administrative rather than legal, and it runs on email. There is no in-person appointment to book and no lawyer required in a straightforward case.

Step 1 — Confirm the balance. Email [email protected] asking for your account number and current balance. Include your name as written in your passport, your passport number, and your employer's name. Do this weeks before you plan to travel, so there is time to fix a discrepancy.

Step 2 — Buy the ticket. The release request requires a confirmed flight. PIBA will not process a request based on an intention to leave.

Step 3 — Submit the release request. Send the completed deposit release form, a copy of the flight ticket and a copy of your passport to the same address. Timing is the part people get wrong: the request must arrive no more than 30 days and no fewer than 7 to 10 days before departure. Send it too early and it is rejected. Send it two days before the flight and the authorization will not be ready.

Step 4 — Choose how to be paid. You can collect the money in person at the airport, or ask for a transfer to a bank account in your home country by attaching the bank transfer section of the form with your account details, IBAN or SWIFT code, and account holder name.

Step 5 — Get the authorization letter. PIBA emails back an authorization confirming the release. Print it and keep it with your passport. Without it, the bank at the airport will not pay you.

Step 6 — Collect at Ben Gurion. The Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot branch that handles deposit payouts sits inside the terminal past the security inspection area. Present the authorization letter, your passport and your boarding pass. Payment is typically available in US dollars or euros. Bank transfers to a foreign account are generally completed within about 30 working days of departure.

In Practice: Build a real buffer into airport timing. Workers collecting a deposit should arrive at Ben Gurion at least four hours before departure rather than the standard three, because the bank counter is past a security process that is frequently slow for departing foreign workers, and the branch keeps its own hours. On a very early morning or late night flight, the counter may not be staffed at all. If your flight leaves between roughly midnight and 6am, request the bank transfer option instead of cash, and confirm in your email to PIBA that you have done so. Carrying a large sum of cash through a transit airport also creates customs declaration problems in many countries, which is a second reason the transfer is often the better choice.

7. If You Already Left Israel Without Claiming

Flying home without the money does not forfeit it. The account remains in your name and the release procedure still works from abroad, though it takes longer.

Send the deposit unit the same package by email: the release request form, a copy of your passport including the page showing the exit stamp or the Israeli border record, and your foreign bank account details for the transfer. Because you cannot collect at the airport, the transfer route is the only option, and the account holder name must match your passport exactly. A transfer to a spouse's or relative's account will be rejected.

Expect the process to run slower than it does for a worker still in Israel. Correspondence in English is accepted, but a query written in Hebrew tends to move faster. If months pass with no reply, escalate in writing, and consider appointing a representative in Israel through a notarized power of attorney.

Where a worker died before claiming, the deposit forms part of the estate. Heirs can claim it, but they will need an Israeli succession order or a foreign probate order recognized in Israel, which is a slower and more formal route than the ordinary release procedure.

In Practice: Keep every document from your years in Israel, even after you go home. The items that matter most in a late claim are your payslips, your permit stickers or B/1 visa pages, your employment contract, and the passport pages showing entry and exit stamps. Photograph all of them before you fly. Israeli employment claims are subject to a seven year limitation period under the Limitation Law 5718-1958, so a worker who left in 2021 still has time to act in 2026, but the clock is running and evidence gets harder to reconstruct every year.

8. When Your Employer Never Deposited Anything

Sometimes the balance is not short. It is zero, because the employer never opened the account or stopped paying after the first few months.

The obligation sits squarely on the employer. Failing to deposit is a violation of the Foreign Workers Law that exposes the employer to administrative fines from the Ministry of Labor's enforcement and regulation administration, and can affect the employer's licence to employ foreign workers at all. Losing that licence is a serious commercial consequence for a construction firm or a nursing company, which is why a well drafted demand letter often produces payment without litigation.

Your civil route is the Regional Labor Court (Beit Din Ezori La'avoda), which has exclusive jurisdiction over employment claims in Israel. There are five regional labor courts, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Be'er Sheva and Nazareth, and you file in the district where the work was performed. Court fees for employment claims are low by design, and foreign workers can file even after leaving the country.

A claim of this kind typically bundles the missing deposit together with anything else that was shorted: unpaid overtime, unlawful salary deductions above the regulated caps, missing recreation pay (dmei havraa), and unpaid annual leave. In practice the deposit is rarely the only thing missing from an employer who was ignoring the deposit rules.

In Practice: Before filing, send a written demand giving the employer 14 days to deposit the missing sums, and state the exact amount with the calculation attached. Israeli labor courts view a documented pre-suit demand favourably, and it sometimes triggers payment on its own. Check your payslips against the regulated deduction caps while you are at it: total deductions cannot exceed 25% of salary, and the 2026 monthly health insurance deduction cap for a foreign expert is NIS 147.11, with a separate cap of roughly NIS 109.80 for housing utilities. Deductions above the caps are recoverable in the same claim. Our guides on foreign worker rights in Israel and minimum wage in Israel set out the underlying entitlements.

Frequently Asked Questions

Email the PIBA deposit unit at [email protected] with your full name, passport number and employer's name, and ask for your account number and current balance. Your monthly payslip should also show the deposit line. If the payslip shows nothing and PIBA has no account in your name, your employer is probably not depositing, and you should raise it in writing straight away rather than waiting until your last month.

No. The deposit is released only when you leave Israel permanently at the end of your permit. It is not accessible while you are still in the country, it cannot be borrowed against, and it does not pay out when you switch employers. It stays in the same PIBA account under your passport number, and the new employer simply continues paying into it.

PIBA withholds 15% income tax from the payout, and the bank takes account management fees. What reaches you is the accumulated deposit plus investment profits, less that 15% and the fees. Some workers can reclaim part of the tax by filing an Israeli income tax return for the relevant years, which is worth checking with an Israeli accountant if you worked several years and your total income was modest.

You may lose part of it. The 2016 Deposit Regulations reduced the payout the longer a worker stayed past permit expiry, with full forfeiture after six months. The High Court struck those provisions down in July 2023 as a disproportionate violation of property rights, and the arrangement has been reworked since. Ask PIBA for the decision and calculation in writing rather than assuming the money is gone.

The deposit obligation sits on the employer under Section 1YA of the Foreign Workers Law 5751-1991, and skipping it exposes them to administrative fines and to their foreign worker licence being reviewed. You can sue for the missing sums in the Regional Labor Court, and you can do so from abroad. The limitation period is seven years, so claims going back several years are still viable.

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