Remote Job Contract: What to Check Before You Sign | Sydicom
guides
What to Check in a Remote Job Contract Before You Sign
Before you sign a foreign remote job contract from Nigeria, read a handful of clauses properly: whether it calls you an employee or a contractor, what the pay clause actually promises, how the contract ends, who owns your work, and whose law governs it. Most people sign within the hour of receiving the file. Twenty minutes of reading is the cheapest protection available to you.
The offer email arrives with a PDF attached, and most people sign it within the hour. That file is what decides things later, on the month the payment does not arrive or the week you want to leave.
What is a remote job contract actually for?
The contract speaks for you when the person who hired you has left the company, or when a finance team in another country is deciding which invoices to pay this month. An invoice, if the word is new to you, is simply the bill you send for work you have done.
For a Nigerian working for a company with no office here, this matters more than it would for a Lagos salary job. You cannot walk into reception. You cannot call HR and be seen. If something goes wrong, the contract is most of what you have. Almost nobody reads theirs until the month something breaks, and by then the only question is what the document actually says.
There is a second reason to read it. A lot of fake offers aimed at Nigerians arrive the same way a real one does: a recruiter on WhatsApp or Telegram, a friendly chat, then a PDF. A real contract has a company name, a registered address, named parties and clauses that make sense together. Reading it is also how you check it is real.
So read it once, properly, before you sign. Not the whole thing word for word, but the clauses below. Twenty minutes.
If you are not at offer stage yet, that is the harder part of this whole process. Contracts only arrive after an application actually lands, and a CV written for the specific job is still what gets you into the room, which is what Custom CV and Cover Letter are there to speed up.
Does the contract say you are an employee or a contractor?
This is the first thing to find, and it is usually on the first page or in the schedule at the back. Look for words like "independent contractor", "consultant", "services agreement", or on the other side "employee", "employment agreement", "employer of record".
Contractor means you are a business selling services. You invoice. You handle your own tax. There is normally no paid leave, no pension and no severance, which is the payoff some employees get when they are let go. Notice periods are usually short. Many foreign companies hiring Nigerians directly use this route, often because setting up a legal employer in Nigeria for one person is expensive and slow.
Employee through an EOR means the company hired a third party called an employer of record, a firm that legally employs you in your own country on the hiring company's behalf. You get payslips and statutory deductions, often leave and health cover. You work for the real company day to day, but the name on your contract is the EOR. Wikipedia's explanation of an employer of record covers the structure if you want the formal version.
What matters here is that the rest of the contract should match the label. A contract that calls you a contractor and then sets your hours, forbids other clients, demands you use company equipment and puts you under a line manager is behaving like an employment contract while paying you like a vendor. That mismatch is worth asking about, politely, before signing. Something like: "The agreement is a contractor one but mentions fixed hours. Is the expectation fixed availability or output?"
The answer tells you a lot about how the company really works.
What should the pay clause spell out?
This is where most Nigerians lose money, rarely through fraud, usually through vagueness. A pay clause that says "monthly compensation of 2,000 USD" and nothing else has left out several things that will cost you.
What the pay clause should name
Why it matters from Nigeria
The exact amount and the period
"Monthly" and "per month pro rata" behave differently in your first and last month. Pro rata means you are paid only for the days you actually worked
The currency
Whether you are paid in dollars, pounds, euros or naira changes everything downstream
The payment date
"End of month" and "within 30 days of invoice" can be three weeks apart
The method, or rail, meaning the route the money travels
A bank transfer, a payroll platform, or a payments provider you have to open an account with
Who absorbs transfer and conversion costs
Otherwise the amount that reaches you is always less than the number you agreed
What happens if a payment is late
Most contracts say nothing, which is itself information
If the contract names a number but no date, ask for a date. "Paid monthly" with no day of the month is a common cause of the panic that hits Nigerian remote workers in their second month.
And read the invoicing requirement if you are a contractor. Some contracts only pay against an invoice you submit, which means no invoice, no payment, and no reminder. Nobody is going to chase you to get paid.
Which currency, which rail, and who absorbs the fees?
A dollar figure in a contract is not the amount that reaches your account. Between the employer's bank and yours there is a currency conversion, and usually one or more fees along the way. The contract rarely says who carries them, and the gap is not trivial over a year.
Ask directly: "Is the 2,000 USD the amount that leaves your side, or the amount that arrives in my account?" A reasonable employer answers in one line. A vague answer means you will be absorbing the difference every month.
Also check whether the contract commits you to a specific payment platform. Some work smoothly from Nigeria. Others have a verification step that is harder to complete from here, often because the name on your bank records, your ID and your invoice have to match exactly, or because they want a proof of address in a format Nigerian utilities do not issue. You do not want to discover that on payday. Open the account and complete verification in your first week, not your fourth.
If your contract pays in foreign currency, a domiciliary account, meaning a Nigerian bank account that holds dollars rather than converting them to naira on arrival, is usually the cleanest destination. We walked through the options in getting paid in dollars from a remote job. Terms, charges and limits on these accounts change, so confirm the current ones with your own bank rather than trusting any article, this one included.
What does the contract say about your working hours?
Look for three different things, because contracts mix them up.
Total hours. "Full time" is not a number. Some contracts say 40 hours a week. Some say "such hours as are reasonably required", which is not a limit at all.
Overlap hours, meaning the window when you must be online at the same time as the rest of the team. This is the clause that shapes your daily life. Nigeria runs on WAT, which is one hour ahead of GMT, and we do not change clocks for summer time. So 9am in New York is early afternoon in Lagos, and 9am on the US west coast is early evening here. A contract asking for four hours of overlap with a west coast team will often run you into the Nigerian night. A UK team is between zero and one hour off your clock depending on the season, which barely changes your day at all.
If the contract does not state overlap hours, that is not freedom. It usually means the expectation lives in your manager's head and you will meet it in week two. Ask for it in writing, even if only in an email rather than a contract change.
On-call or response time. Support and operations contracts sometimes include a response obligation. A two hour response window during a Nigerian night is a real commitment, and it should be paid differently from a daytime one.
What happens during probation?
Probation is a trial window at the start of the job when either side can end the arrangement more easily. Contracts commonly set it at the first one to six months, and notice during it is often much shorter both ways, sometimes only a few days.
That is standard practice rather than a warning sign. What you want to know is how long it lasts and whether anything changes when it ends. On some contracts, leave, benefits or a longer notice period only begin afterwards. If the contract is silent about what changes, ask rather than assume.
The practical Nigerian consideration: avoid resigning from a salaried local job on day one of a probationary foreign contract if you can help it. Where your local notice period lets you, overlap the two for the length of probation, even when the weeks are punishing.
Also expect onboarding paperwork at this stage, especially through an EOR. Being asked for your ID, your NYSC discharge or exemption document, bank details and a signed contract after a real interview process is normal. Being asked for a BVN, NIN or passport scan by a recruiter who has not yet given you a contract or a company email address is not.
Who owns the work you produce?
Almost every contract contains an intellectual property clause, meaning a clause about who owns the things you create: code, designs, documents, writing, artwork. It will say the company owns what you make for them. That part is normal and you should expect it.
Read the edges of it, because the edges vary a lot:
Does it cover only work done for the company, or anything you create during the contract period, including your own side project at weekends?
Does it cover work created on your own laptop, in your own time?
Does it carve out anything you already owned before you started? If you are bringing existing code, designs or templates into the job, a clause with no carve out can swallow them.
Can you show the work in a portfolio? Many contracts forbid disclosure by default, so you quietly lose the ability to show a future employer what you did.
That last one costs Nigerian designers, writers and developers the most, because a portfolio is often the strongest evidence we have when the employer's name means nothing to the next recruiter. Ask for permission to display non confidential work, or for a named reference instead. Ask before you sign, while you still have room to negotiate.
Does a non-compete or exclusivity clause bind you?
People treat these as one clause. They are three, and only one of them is likely to cost you money.
A non-compete says you will not work for competitors, usually for some period after you leave. A non-solicit says you will not poach their clients or staff. An exclusivity clause says you will not work for anyone else at all while this contract runs.
For a Nigerian contractor, exclusivity is the expensive one, because it closes off the second client that makes contractor work worth doing. If you intend to keep other clients, read that clause carefully and raise it before signing. Raising it afterwards is much harder, and it looks like something you hid.
On non-competes, enforceability depends heavily on the governing law of the contract, which is the country or state whose legal system the agreement says applies, and on how broadly the clause is drafted. The picture differs country by country. Wikipedia has a reasonable overview of how non-compete clauses work across jurisdictions. Do not assume a clause is toothless because somebody online said so. If a clause would stop you working in your field, pay a Nigerian lawyer for an hour of their time. An hour of a lawyer's fee against a year of your income is a reasonable trade.
How does the contract end?
Find the termination section and read all of it. You are looking for four things.
Clause
What to look for
What should give you pause
Notice period
A specific number of days, similar on both sides
They give you two days, you must give them thirty
Termination for convenience
Whether either side can end it with no reason given
Only they can, with immediate effect and no notice pay
Payment on exit
That work already done gets paid for
Silence, or a final payment made conditional on vague conditions
Return of equipment or access
A clear process
A charge for equipment you never received
Look at how evenly the two sides are treated. A contract where they can end it instantly but you owe a month tells you something about how the company sees the relationship. Sometimes it is a template nobody edited and they will fix it if you ask. Sometimes it is deliberate. Asking is how you find out which.
Also check what happens to money owed if they terminate mid month. Payment for work already done should be spelled out.
What about leave, public holidays and sick days?
If you are an employee through an EOR, leave is usually specified in the contract, and the EOR is the party responsible for meeting whatever the local rules require. Read what it actually grants you rather than assuming. If you are a contractor, the default is simple and harsh: you do not work, you do not bill.
Two Nigerian specifics worth settling before you sign.
Whose public holidays apply? A US company will not observe Eid or Nigerian Independence Day, and will close for holidays of its own that mean nothing here. A UK company has a different set again. Most reasonable employers let you take your own country's holidays, but almost no contract says so. Get it in an email.
And what happens when the power goes and the network is down? No contract addresses this, and asking for a clause about generators would be strange. What you want is the norm: if you are offline for three hours, is that a sick day, a lost day, or something you make up later? That is set by team habit rather than by the document, and you want to know it in week one, not in month four during a performance review.
Who pays for your laptop, data and power?
Some contracts include an equipment allowance or a monthly stipend, which is a fixed sum paid to cover costs like these. Many contracts do not mention equipment at all, which means you are buying everything.
Work out your real monthly running cost before you accept: data, fuel or charging for an inverter, and the laptop you will eventually have to replace. For a Nigerian working from home, that figure is not small, and it comes out of the salary that looked generous in the offer email. A role paying well in dollars can still be a poor deal once you are running a generator through the evening to stay online for a US shift.
No stipend is not automatically a reason to refuse. It is a reason to count the cost when comparing two offers, and a fair thing to raise in negotiation. We covered that side in how to negotiate a dollar salary.
What does the contract say about tax?
Usually one line, and usually this: as a contractor you are typically responsible for your own taxes where you live. Some contracts also ask you to confirm you are not a tax resident of the employer's country, or to complete a tax form for their records.
Three things to understand, and none of this is tax advice.
First, a contractor contract does not make tax disappear. Tax normally follows where you are resident rather than where your client sits, so working for a company abroad does not move your obligations abroad with it.
Second, what you owe, to whom, and when is a real question with a real answer, and the rules change. In Nigeria that conversation involves the Federal Inland Revenue Service and your state revenue service, and usually a tax identification number. Get the answer from a Nigerian accountant or tax professional, not from a blog post and not from the employer, who does not know Nigerian rules and is not responsible for them.
Third, if the contract asks you to sign something declaring your tax status, read what you are declaring before you sign it.
We wrote a general orientation in do Nigerian remote workers pay tax, which explains the shape of the question. Treat it as a starting point for a conversation with a professional.
Which country's law governs the contract?
Near the end there will be a line naming a governing law, and often a court or an arbitration venue. It might say Delaware, England and Wales, Singapore, or somewhere you have never heard of. That line decides whose rules apply if there is ever a dispute, and where it would be argued.
Be realistic about what that means for you. If a contract is governed by the law of a US state and three months of invoices go unpaid, pursuing it from Lagos is usually impractical and rarely worth the cost. The lawyer costs more than the money.
This is not a reason to refuse the job. Nearly every foreign contract works this way, and most companies pay what they owe. It is a reason to weight the other protections more heavily: get paid monthly rather than quarterly, invoice the day it is due, never let unpaid work pile up past one cycle, and keep every written confirmation. For a Nigerian contractor, short payment cycles and a good paper trail usually do more practical protective work than litigation ever would.
What are the real red flags?
Most contracts are fine. These are the patterns worth stopping for, and several of them show up before the contract does.
Red flag
What it usually means
No contract at all, just a chat agreement
No record of anything, including the salary you were promised
You are asked to pay for anything: training, equipment, a "starter kit", a visa
A legitimate employer does not ask you to pay them in order to start work
A company email on a free gmail or outlook address, and a recruiter who will only talk on WhatsApp or Telegram
You cannot verify that the company and the person are connected
No company address or registration details anywhere in the document
You cannot check who you are dealing with
They ask for your BVN, NIN or passport scan before any offer or contract exists
Identity documents are collected at onboarding, not at screening
You are asked to receive money and forward it on, or to process payments for them
This is a money laundering pattern, and the account used is yours
Pay quoted only in cryptocurrency, or by a method that leaves no trace
Harder to prove, harder to recover
Pressure to sign today
A real offer survives you reading it overnight
Terms that contradict what you were told in the interview
Whatever is written wins, not what was said
The paying-to-work one deserves its own sentence, because it is the most common pattern in Nigeria and it still catches careful people. No employer sends you a job and then asks you to send them money, for a laptop, for a background check, for training, for a visa, for anything. We wrote about the wider pattern in remote job scams targeting Nigerians.
One more practical check before you sign: confirm the company exists independently of the recruiter. Look up the registered company in its own country's public register, check the website domain is the same one the email came from, and see whether the staff on LinkedIn match the size the company claims. A real contract usually arrives through a proper e-signature service rather than as a Word file you are asked to print, sign and photograph, though a small company sending a PDF is not itself a problem.
What should you do in the 48 hours before you sign?
None of this takes long.
Read the whole document once, slowly, including the schedules at the back. Pay and notice are often hidden there rather than in the main body.
Write down every question and send them together. One organised email reads as professional. Six scattered messages read as anxious.
Check the numbers against the offer conversation: salary, start date, title, hours. If anything differs, say so now.
Verify the company independently, as above.
Confirm the payment rail works for you before the first payday rather than on it.
Save the final signed copy somewhere you will find it in two years. Email attachments get buried. Put it in cloud storage with a sensible filename.
If a clause could cost you your career, meaning exclusivity, a broad non-compete, or an IP clause with no carve out, pay a Nigerian lawyer for an hour.
Asking questions does not lose you the job. The recruiter has seen these questions before and usually has answers ready.
What if they refuse to change anything?
Sometimes you ask and the answer is no. Large companies with standard templates often cannot edit a clause for one contractor, and that alone is not a bad sign.
When it happens, sort the clauses into two piles. The inconvenient ones, like a thirty day notice period or a strict IP clause, you can accept with your eyes open. The dangerous ones are different: exclusivity when you need other clients, or a non-compete that would stop you working in your field. Those are decisions about whether to take the job at all.
It is also worth asking for the smaller version of what you wanted. If they will not drop a thirty day notice period, ask for fourteen. If they will not loosen the IP clause, ask for written permission to show non confidential work in a portfolio. Narrow asks get agreed far more often than broad ones.
The outcome to avoid is signing a clause you know is a problem while telling yourself it will probably never come up. Often it never does. Sometimes it does.
And if the answer to every question is no, including the reasonable ones, you have learned something about how this company handles problems bigger than a contract clause.
Where Sydicom fits
We do not draft contracts and will not pretend to. What we do sits earlier in the chain: finding remote and hybrid roles that are genuinely open to people in Nigeria, and getting your application in front of them in a shape that gets read.
Browsing, searching and CV matching on Sydicom are free, always, with no card. A plan unlocks applying through Sydicom and the AI tools that prepare each application, which you can see on the tools page. The FAQ sets out what is free and what a plan adds.
If you are still trying to get a foreign employer to reply at all, start there. Create a free profile and see what matches you. The contract clauses can wait until the PDF actually arrives.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a lawyer to read a remote job contract?
Many people read it themselves. Go through the pay clause, the termination clause, the intellectual property clause and the governing law, and ask the employer about anything unclear. Pay a Nigerian lawyer for an hour when a clause could stop you working in your field, such as a broad non-compete or an exclusivity clause, or when the money involved is large enough to justify it.
Is a contractor agreement worse than an employment contract?
It is different rather than worse. Contractor means you invoice, handle your own tax, and usually get no paid leave or severance, with shorter notice on both sides. Many foreign companies hiring Nigerians directly use contractor agreements, often because setting up a legal employer in Nigeria for one person is expensive. The problem is not the label. It is a contract that labels you a contractor while controlling you like an employee.
What if the contract does not say when I get paid?
Ask for a date before you sign, and get the answer in writing even if it only lives in an email. A pay clause with an amount but no payment date is a common reason Nigerian remote workers hit a cash gap in their second month. Also check whether payment depends on you submitting an invoice first, because if it does, no invoice means no payment and nobody will remind you.
Can a foreign company hire me while I am in Nigeria?
In practice, yes, and it happens every day through one of two routes: a direct contractor agreement, or an employer of record that legally employs you in Nigeria on the company's behalf. Both are normal. Which one your contract uses affects your tax position, your leave and how much notice either side must give, so confirm the specifics of your own situation with a Nigerian professional.
Should I sign a contract governed by another country's law?
Most foreign remote contracts are, and refusing on that basis alone would rule out most of the market. Just be realistic: enforcing a dispute abroad from Nigeria is usually impractical and often costs more than the amount in question. Protect yourself with short payment cycles, prompt invoicing, never letting unpaid work pile up, and keeping every written confirmation.
Is it risky to ask the employer to change a clause?
Asking politely, once, in one organised email, does not cost people jobs. Recruiters see these questions regularly and usually have answers prepared. What does damage you is arguing over every line, or raising a major objection after you have already started working.
Apply faster with Sydicom
Sydicom matches you with verified jobs and tailors a custom CV and cover letter for each one, ready for you to review and send. You always click submit.
