Almost every new oleh assumes the Israeli safety net makes you wait, and for a lot of it you do. Several Bituach Leumi benefits count a run of prior insured months before they pay anything, and your clock on those starts at aliyah rather than at birth. Which benefits work that way and which do not is the whole subject of Bituach Leumi qualifying periods for olim, and the shape of your cover generally is in What Bituach Leumi covers. The reserve-service benefit, *tagmul miluim*, is one of the ones that does not make you wait.
Bituach Leumi's published conditions of entitlement ask for three things, and a count of insured months is not among them: that you served in reserve service by law, in half-day service, or underwent training under the Emergency Work Service Law; that you produce Form 3010, the authorisation showing the period of service, duly signed with your personal data filled in properly; and that the days you claim are not a period of incarceration during the service, unless a military tribunal or senior judicial officer rules otherwise 9. Land in March, get a *tzav* in June, and those are the same three conditions a reservist of twenty years clears. It is not the only Bituach Leumi benefit that works this way, which is exactly what the qualifying-periods article sorts out.
The amount is a completely different question, and that is where being new bites.
> This is general information, not tax, legal, or financial advice. Cross-border (US/UK) and Israeli tax interact in complex ways, so consult a qualified cross-border professional before acting.
One boundary before we start. This page is about what happens once you have been called up. It is not about who gets called up: draft liability, deferral and exemption for new immigrants are decided by the army and the aliyah authorities rather than by Bituach Leumi, and your own position should come from them rather than from any general guide.
Who actually pays your miluim money, your employer or Bituach Leumi?
It depends on your employment status on the first day of service, and olim land on the Bituach Leumi side of that fork far more often than a lifelong Israeli does. Someone still in ulpan, between jobs, working hourly, or freelancing before their *osek* file is properly registered is not in the employer column. The table below is transcribed from Bituach Leumi's own breakdown by type of eligible person, headed "as of Jan 01, 2026" 3.
| Your status | Who pays you | How the daily wage is built | Floor and cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly-salaried employee | Your employer, which then claims the reimbursement back from Bituach Leumi 4 | Gross income over the 3 months before service, divided by 90 | Not below NIS 328.76 a day, not above NIS 1,730.33 a day (both as of 1 Jan 2026) |
| Daily worker with at least 75 days in the 3 months before service | Your employer | Same as above | Same as above |
| Daily worker with under 75 days, or an hourly worker | Bituach Leumi, on a personal claim | Same as above | Same as above |
| Stopped working, under 60 days before service | Bituach Leumi | You are deemed to have gone to miluim on the day you stopped, so the base is the 3 months before that date 1 2 | Same as above |
| Stopped working, 60 days or more before service | Bituach Leumi | Minimum benefit | NIS 328.76 a day (as of 1 Jan 2026) |
| Drawing unemployment benefit before the service | Bituach Leumi | The unemployment benefit that would have been due had you not been summoned, or income over the 3 months before you stopped working where fewer than 60 days have passed | Same as above |
| Student at an institution of higher education | Bituach Leumi, online claim available | Minimum benefit | NIS 328.76 a day (as of 1 Jan 2026) |
| Neither employed nor self-employed | Bituach Leumi, online claim available | Minimum benefit | NIS 328.76 a day (as of 1 Jan 2026) |
| Self-employed | Bituach Leumi, usually automatic from IDF data 8 | Gross advances declared over the last 3 months, divided by 90 1 | Not below NIS 328.76, not above NIS 1,730.33 a day (as of 1 Jan 2026) |
A few edge cases matter disproportionately to newcomers, and all of them are as published by Bituach Leumi and checked August 2026. A monthly-salaried worker who worked one single day for a new employer and left the next day for reserve service still goes through that employer, and so does a monthly-salaried worker who only works a few days a month 8. If you were on unpaid leave for over 60 days on the first day of service, or your employer has ceased to operate, has entered dissolution proceedings, has died, or has been declared bankrupt, you file personally instead 8. If you work for several employers, the one that paid you a salary during the service pays the benefit and you file a personal claim for the top-up, attaching six payslips from every workplace including that one 8. And for the 75-day test, Sabbaths and holidays, paid and unpaid vacation, absence for accident or illness, and mourning days all count toward the total 8, which matters when your first Israeli months were part-time or interrupted.
Why does your daily rate look wrong next to the person at the next desk?
Because the formula reads three months of Israeli payslips and you may only have one. Section 273(a1) of the National Insurance Law computes the benefit on income liable to insurance contributions as an employee or self-employed person for the quarter preceding the service, divided by 90 6 17. Read the qualifying phrase slowly: *income liable to Israeli insurance contributions*. Salary you drew in Teaneck or Golders Green before you landed carried no Israeli insurance contributions, because you were not yet insured here, so it is not income of the kind the section defines and there is nothing for the formula to pick up 6 17.
Then section 273(a2) does the work that decides a newcomer's number. Each month in the three-month base must be topped up to the minimum benefit, in the words of Bituach Leumi's own circular to employers, even if the person serving in reserve duty did not work at all in that month 6 17. The circular's worked example tops up a zero month and a partial month alike. So an oleh with two blank months and one Israeli payslip is paid on (payslip + minimum + minimum) divided by 90. That is a genuine floor and it is worth knowing about, but it also means your daily rate is a statutory construct rather than a reflection of what you used to earn.
The base is wider than base salary alone. Sick pay, maternity allowance, vacation pay, previous reserve-service benefits, unemployment benefits and work-injury allowances all count toward it 1. Three special rules also help newcomers with patchy first months, all as published and checked August 2026: if you worked under 60 days in the three months before service, the base is your wage in the three highest-earning months out of the six that preceded the month your service began; if you are called up again within 60 days of finishing a previous stint you may use the earlier quarter where that works out better for you; and if you stopped working under 60 days before service you are treated as having gone to miluim on the day you stopped 1.
What does that come to for an oleh with one Israeli payslip?
Run it. Say you made aliyah in March 2026, started work in June 2026 on a gross salary of NIS 14,000 a month, and were called up in July 2026 for 22 days.
- The base quarter is April, May and June. April and May are empty; June is NIS 14,000. Because you worked well under 60 days in that quarter, the best-three-of-six rule applies, and with January to May all empty it returns the same three months 1.
- Section 273(a2) lifts each empty month to the monthly minimum benefit, NIS 9,863 as of 1 January 2026 1 6. The base becomes 9,863 + 9,863 + 14,000 = NIS 33,726.
- Daily wage: 33,726 divided by 90 = NIS 374.73. That sits above the daily minimum of NIS 328.76 and well below the daily maximum of NIS 1,730.33, both as of 1 January 2026 1.
- 22 days of service divided by 7 is 3 with a remainder of 1, which earns a 0.4-day increment, so you are paid for 22.4 days 1.
- Total: 374.73 x 22.4 = about NIS 8,394.
Now the two comparisons that matter. A colleague who did the identical 22 days but had been earning NIS 14,000 for all three months has a base of 42,000 divided by 90 = NIS 466.67 a day, and is paid about NIS 10,453. That is roughly NIS 2,059 more for the same stint, and nothing in the system flags it or explains it to you. Going the other way, run the same case hypothetically without section 273(a2): the single payslip alone gives 14,000 divided by 90 = NIS 155.56 a day, which the daily minimum would lift to NIS 328.76, or about NIS 7,364. On those figures the newcomer top-up is worth roughly NIS 1,030 to you. It is a real protection and a real ceiling at the same time.
Note what the top-up does not do. If none of your three months carries income above the minimum, topping each of them up to NIS 9,863 produces a base of NIS 29,589, which divided by 90 is the daily minimum itself. Section 273(a2) lets one payslip above the minimum lift you off the floor. It does not lift you off the floor on its own.
Why do 20 days and 21 days of service pay exactly the same?
Because the 40% increment is not paid on every day, and this is the one part of the calculation you can audit yourself from an English page without reading a word of Hebrew. Divide your days of service by 7 and read the remainder, per the ladder Bituach Leumi publishes, checked August 2026 1.
| Remainder after dividing days by 7 | Increment paid |
|---|---|
| 0 | none |
| 1 | 0.4 day |
| 2 | 0.8 day |
| 3 | 1.2 days |
| 4 | 1.6 days |
| 5 | 2.0 days |
| 6 | 1.0 day |
A remainder of 6 pays a smaller increment than a remainder of 5, so the increment ladder is not monotonic. That is why Bituach Leumi's own published table shows both 20 days and 21 days paying out as 21 days, 22 days paying as 22.4, 33 days paying as 35, and 75 days paying as 77 1.
The reason to work it by hand rather than reach for the official tool is that the tool does not meet you halfway: Bituach Leumi's reservists' benefit calculator sits on an English-path URL, but its body and its form render in Hebrew 16. The ladder above, by contrast, is published in English and takes ten seconds with a calculator. Note also that the remainder is read off the whole reported period, which is why the reporting rule in the next section matters as much as the ladder does.
What may your employer do with your miluim money, and what may it not?
On a first Israeli contract you have no baseline for what the payslip should look like, and some of what follows is published only in Hebrew, including the one rule that puts money back in your pocket. Six things are settled and published, as at August 2026.
First, the benefit counts as your salary and must be paid at the time of your regular salary; an employee is entitled to complain under the Wage Protection Law against an employer who delays or refuses to pay it 4. Second, the employer must pay the full computed benefit even in the cases where it comes out higher than your ordinary wage, which Bituach Leumi's 2008 circular to employers states twice 6. Third, and this is the one that exists only in Hebrew, if Bituach Leumi reimbursed the employer more than the employer paid you, the employer is obliged to pay you the difference 5. Fourth, the employer must report the service period exactly as it appears on the military form, without splitting a period that spans two calendar months; the circular says plainly that such a split produces a wrong calculation of the benefit and will not be approved 4 6. Fifth, your employer must keep paying its share into your pension fund, provident fund or managers insurance for the miluim period as if you had not done reserve duty and had continued to work, while you pay your own share for that period too 7. Sixth, and this one matters when a first Israeli job does not last, Bituach Leumi's war-updates employer page states that the 40% increment is part of the reserve-service benefit due to the employee and must by law be paid to the employee even if that employee has stopped working for the employer 13.
Two more mechanics sit around the edges. Where a reservist's wage rose by more than 20%, the employer must file a claim for the difference, and a salaried employee who is paid on a personal claim files that request themselves 4 14. And separately, following a law amendment Bituach Leumi paid employers a compensation for the social contributions they made to funds and HMOs during an employee's service, at 20% of the amount calculated on the three-month wage divided by 90 per day of service. That one is not yours: Bituach Leumi states plainly that the compensation is intended for the employer and not for the employees, it excludes public employers, and its published entitlement period runs from 7 October 2023 to 31 December 2024, so do not expect it on a 2026 service period 13. If you want the full picture of what an Israeli employer carries above your gross, that is in Employer costs above your gross salary.
Job protection around reserve service is a separate subject with its own statute, the Discharged Soldiers (Return to Work) Law, 5709-1949, which is in force 22. It is deliberately outside the scope of this page, which covers the money only.
Which English pages will quietly cost you money?
This part is purely an oleh's problem, because a native reads the Hebrew and never meets it. On this particular benefit, Bituach Leumi's English pages diverge from the Hebrew in three places we could verify, and each divergence runs against the reader.
The clearest case is service performed after a full working day. The Hebrew page states that a salaried employee who worked an ordinary working day and then performed reserve service outside working hours is paid regular salary and the reserve benefit 2. The English page on the same topic says such a worker "will be paid either an ordinary work salary or a reserve service benefit" 1. The 2008 amendment circular supports the Hebrew: it explains that the amendment reversed a 2002 National Labour Court ruling which had barred payment where income did not fall, and that for service periods beginning on or after 1 August 2008 such workers receive both 6 18. We are not characterising why the English reads as it does. We are telling you which text to take to your employer.
The surplus rule above is the second case: it appears on the Hebrew employer page and has no counterpart on the English one 5 4. The third is the stopped-working base. The English table by type of eligible person builds it from the three months preceding the start of the service, while the Hebrew page says in terms that the daily wage is computed on the three months preceding the cessation of work 3 2. If you stopped working and then had a quiet spell before the *tzav*, those are not the same three months, and only the Hebrew wording says which quarter to hand over. The English benefit-rates page gets you to the Hebrew answer by a longer road, since it deems you to have reported for service on the day you stopped 1, but the English table read on its own points at the wrong quarter.
Then there is plain staleness. The live English "How to submit a claim" page still quotes the minimum benefit as NIS 196.02 as of 1 January 2014, while the current figure is NIS 328.76 a day as of 1 January 2026 8 1. And Kol Zchut, the usual English fallback for Israeli rights information, removed its roughly 700 English pages on 2 February 2023 for lack of the resources to maintain the level of up-to-dateness and reliability required, so it is no longer there to fall back on 21.
The practical habit this leaves you with: on this benefit, open the Hebrew page alongside the English one, even if you have to run it through a translator to do it.
Israeli treatment: what comes off your miluim benefit
Israel deducts, and exactly what comes off depends on which route paid you. Where your employer pays it, national insurance and health insurance contributions come off just as they do from salary, because the benefit counts as salary 7 5. A salaried employee filing a personal claim has only national insurance and health contributions deducted 7. A self-employed person, a student, or someone not working who files a personal claim has neither deducted from the benefit 7. Income tax is withheld by Bituach Leumi according to the Table of Tax Deductions from Wages for daily workers, with deductions or exemptions granted to those entitled under the income tax regulations 7. If you want to see where any of this lands on the document you actually receive, the Israeli payslip line by line walks through it.
One interaction is aliyah-anchored and worth naming rather than guessing at. For roughly your first six months from the aliyah date, a new oleh sits inside a health-contribution exemption window, set out with its own conditions in Bituach Leumi exemptions for olim. Bituach Leumi's own wording on an employer-paid benefit is that the contributions are deducted "just as" they are from salary 7, which points at the benefit following whatever your salary is doing inside that window rather than carrying a rule of its own. No page we opened, in either language, states that outright for the exemption case, so confirm it with your branch and get the answer in writing rather than assuming it in either direction.
Home-country treatment: what your own tax system does with it
This section is labelled by passport, because the answers genuinely differ and the difference is not a detail.
US olim. You continue to file US returns on worldwide income for as long as you hold citizenship or a green card. The IRS states that the rules for filing income, estate and gift tax returns and paying estimated tax are generally the same whether you are in the United States or abroad, and that you are subject to tax on worldwide income from all sources 20. That is why an Israeli reserve-service benefit reaches a US return at all, and it is the single thing new olim from the States are most often blindsided by. What the US then does with this particular payment is the next section.
UK, Canadian, French, South African and Australian olim. This page does not state your home rules, and you should be wary of any Israel-facing page that does. The point of separating you out is the negative: the paragraph above is US-specific, so do not carry its warnings home with you. What you owe your own revenue authority after aliyah is country-by-country work that turns on when and how you ceased to be resident there. Start with our country guides and confirm your own status with your home revenue authority.
Treaty treatment: what the US-Israel convention does and does not say
It says three relevant things, and we are going to quote them rather than conclude from them. Article 21 of the convention reads: "Social security payments and other public pensions paid by one of the Contracting States to an individual who is a resident of the other Contracting State shall be exempt from tax in both Contracting States. This Article shall not apply to payments described in Article 22 (Governmental Functions)" 19. Note the condition built into the first sentence: it addresses a payment from one state to a resident of the *other* state. Note the second sentence too, given that reserve service is service performed for the state.
Article 6(3) is the savings clause: "Notwithstanding any provisions of this Convention except paragraph (4), a Contracting State may tax its residents (as determined under Article 3 (Fiscal Residence) and its citizens as if this Convention had not come into effect" 19. Article 6(4)(a) is what stops that clause swallowing everything: it lists the Articles whose benefits survive it, and Article 21 is on the list. The list itself has been amended more than once, so read the current subparagraph rather than any enumeration of it, including ours 19.
What we are not going to write is the bottom line for a US citizen who is an Israeli resident receiving an Israeli payment. The residence condition in Article 21 does not obviously fit that fact pattern, the Article 22 sentence sits directly on top of it, and no IRS page we opened states the answer. Take the actual treaty text to a qualified cross-border professional and get your own position. This is exactly the situation the disclaimer at the top of this page exists for.
Does miluim change the PFIC or the US reporting picture?
No, in both directions, and it is worth saying so rather than leaving it implied. This page names pension funds, provident funds and managers insurance because your employer has to keep contributing to them while you serve 7. For a US-citizen oleh, the US treatment of exactly those accounts is complex and unsettled, which is why it gets its own treatment in The PFIC problem for American olim and How to clean up a PFIC you already own. Nothing on this page settles whether an Israeli pension or provident account falls inside the Passive Foreign Investment Company regime, and nothing here should be read as if it did.
What a miluim period does is leave that question exactly where it was. Contributions made during service go into the same vehicles on the same footing as the ones made the month before, so serving does not create a new US analysis and does not remove one. US account reporting is the same story: FBAR and Form 8938 turn on the accounts you hold, not on this payment, and they are their own subject rather than part of this one.
What if you are self-employed, or flew in without a teudat zehut?
Self-employed reservists receive a compensation on top of the benefit, at 25% of the benefit calculated on self-employed income alone in the quarter preceding reserve duty, as published and checked August 2026, and capped so that benefit plus compensation never exceeds the maximum benefit 10. Two details matter in a first Israeli year: months in which you had no self-employed income at all are compensated at the minimum benefit, as are months where that income fell below the minimum benefit rate, and the compensation is conditional on being registered with Bituach Leumi and paying insurance contributions regularly 10. Tax is withheld at source from it 10. Your base comes from the gross advances you declared over the last three months divided by 90, so if your *osek* file was opened recently, the base reads whatever you declared then rather than what you are billing now; it is recalculated after the final Income Tax assessment, with underpayments paid automatically and linked to the Consumer Price Index, and overpayments becoming a collectable debt 1 10.
If you came from overseas to volunteer and hold no Israeli ID, there is a route built for exactly that, and no Hebrew page needs it. Where the IDF transferred your details, payment goes out automatically, including to a bank account abroad 12. Where nothing arrived, the page asks for a passport photocopy, Form 912 and a bank account certificate, sent to the email address published on that page, quoting your personal IDF identification number. The alternatives it lists are payment into an Israeli account belonging to a relative or friend against a signed declaration, or the postal bank for holders of a valid Israeli ID, where up to four months of accrued benefit can be withdrawn in cash at any branch 12.
What if the number is wrong?
You appeal to the Labor Court, and the deadline is 12 months from the date you received the written notification of the decision, as published and checked August 2026 11. Claims committees for re-examination of a claims officer's decision and free legal aid also exist 11. That window is generous, but the notification that starts it is not something you can count on receiving in English, so diarise the date the moment it lands. Before you get there, check the mechanical causes first, because for a newcomer they cluster: a service period split across two calendar months, a base quarter that ignored section 273(a2), or an employer that never handed over a surplus.
One interaction is worth flagging if you were drawing unemployment when the *tzav* arrived: unused unemployment days are restored after service. If the unemployment year has not ended you report again to the Employment Service and resume; if it has ended you file a new claim, and if you no longer meet the conditions Bituach Leumi extends the entitlement and pays out the unused remaining days anyway 15. The wider picture is in Unemployment benefits in Israel for olim.
A note on scope. This page covers the reserve-service benefit only. Longer-term loss of earning capacity runs through entirely different systems: the Bituach Leumi side is in Disability allowance for olim, and the private side in Income protection for olim and Critical illness insurance for olim. If underwriting as a newcomer is the worry, that is Aliyah with a pre-existing condition.
One live rule to watch rather than treat as settled: from 1 May 2025, following a Ministry of Finance legislative amendment, the benefit is computed differently for a narrow group. It applies only where you were a salaried employee or not working during your earlier wartime service, you were called up again from 1 May 2025 onwards with less than three months since that service, and your gross income in the three months before the current service differs by 20% or more from the comparable earlier quarter. Where income fell, the prior higher income is used; where it rose by 20% or more, the prior income plus an automatic 20% uplift 14. Bituach Leumi's own page adds that the differentials for reservists whose salary rose by more than 20% are still being calculated and paid out, and that from 1 May 2025, during the emergency period only, salary can no longer be carried over from an earlier service period even inside the 60-day window, with a narrow exception for those whose first wartime service was calculated that way 14. Read it against your own dates.
Check your own number before you accept it
Run your dates and your three months through Bituach Leumi's own reservists' benefit calculator before you sign off on whatever landed in your account. Be warned that the page sits on an English URL while the calculator itself runs in Hebrew, that it covers service periods of up to 120 days in the current year, and that Bituach Leumi states the final amount is set only by its claims officer, not by the calculator 16.
Frequently asked questions
Bituach Leumi's published conditions for the reserve-service benefit set no count of insured months, so an oleh clears the same entitlement test as anyone else. The amount is what bites: it is built from income liable to Israeli insurance contributions in the three months before service, divided by 90, with empty pre-aliyah months topped up only to the statutory minimum.
No. Bituach Leumi's published conditions of entitlement for the reserve-service benefit list three things and no count of insured months: that you served in reserve service by law, in half-day service, or underwent training under the Emergency Work Service Law; that you produce Form 3010, the authorisation showing the period of service, duly signed with your personal data filled in properly; and that the days claimed are not a period of incarceration during the service, unless a military tribunal or senior judicial officer rules otherwise [[9]]. This is not the only Bituach Leumi benefit that asks for no qualifying period, and our article on qualifying periods for olim sets out which benefits test insured months and which do not.
No. Section 273(a1) computes the benefit on income liable to Israeli insurance contributions as an employee or self-employed person for the quarter preceding the service, divided by 90 [[6]] [[17]]. Salary you drew before aliyah, when you were not yet insured in Israel, carried no Israeli insurance contributions, so it is not income of the kind that section defines. What does protect you is section 273(a2), which tops each month in that three-month base up to the minimum benefit even for a month you did not work at all [[6]] [[17]]. Note the limit of that protection: if no month in your base carries income above the minimum, the top-up leaves you exactly on the daily floor rather than above it.
The minimum benefit is 95% of the basic amount, which came to NIS 9,863 a month and NIS 328.76 a day as of 1 January 2026. The maximum is five times the basic amount, NIS 51,910 a month, with a daily maximum of NIS 1,730.33, both as of 1 January 2026 [[1]]. The multiples of the basic amount are the durable rule; the shekel figures carry that date and move when the basic amount moves, so read the current figure off the benefit-rates page rather than quoting these.
No. Bituach Leumi's Hebrew employer page states that if Bituach Leumi paid the employer more than the employer paid the employee, the employer is obliged to pay the employee the difference [[5]]. That sentence has no counterpart on the English employer page [[4]]. The employer must also pay the full computed benefit even where it exceeds your ordinary wage, which the 2008 circular to employers states twice [[6]], and must pay it at the time of your regular salary, with a Wage Protection Law complaint route if it delays or refuses [[4]].
The Hebrew page says both. It states that a salaried employee who worked an ordinary working day and then performed reserve service outside working hours is paid regular salary and the reserve benefit [[2]]. The English page on the same topic says "either an ordinary work salary or a reserve service benefit" [[1]]. The 2008 amendment circular supports the Hebrew, explaining that the amendment reversed a 2002 National Labour Court ruling and that for service periods beginning on or after 1 August 2008 such workers receive both [[6]] [[18]]. Take the Hebrew text to your employer.
Because of how the 40% increment ladder works. You divide days of service by 7 and read the remainder: a remainder of 5 earns a 2.0-day increment while a remainder of 6 earns only 1.0 day, so the increment ladder is not monotonic. Bituach Leumi's published table shows 20 days and 21 days both paying as 21 days, 22 days paying as 22.4, and 33 days paying as 35 [[1]]. This is the rule as published, checked August 2026, and it is one of the few parts of the calculation you can check from an English page.
The contributions do not stop. A worker who is a member of a pension fund or provident fund, or who is covered by managers insurance, pays for the period of reserve service, while the employer of a salaried employee pays its share as if the employee had not done reserve duty and had continued to work [[7]]. So the employer contribution continues through the service period, and your own employee share still comes out.
We are not answering that one, and you should be wary of any page that answers it without knowing your facts. What is settled: US citizens and resident aliens file US returns on worldwide income while living abroad [[20]]. Treaty Article 21 exempts social security payments "paid by one of the Contracting States to an individual who is a resident of the other Contracting State" in both states, then adds that it "shall not apply to payments described in Article 22 (Governmental Functions)", and Article 6(4)(a) keeps the Article 21 benefit outside the reach of the Article 6(3) savings clause [[19]]. Whether that residence condition and that Article 22 sentence leave an Israeli payment to a US citizen resident in Israel inside or outside Article 21 is a question for a qualified cross-border professional.
A compensation at 25% of the benefit calculated on your self-employed income alone in the quarter preceding reserve duty, as published and checked August 2026, capped so that benefit plus compensation never exceeds the maximum benefit [[10]]. Months in which you had no self-employed income are compensated at the minimum benefit, as are months where that income fell below the minimum benefit rate, which matters if your first Israeli year had quiet months. It is conditional on being registered with Bituach Leumi and paying contributions regularly, and tax is withheld at source [[10]]. Bituach Leumi usually pays self-employed reservists automatically from IDF data; file personally if nothing arrives within three weeks of finishing service [[8]].
Yes. Where the IDF transferred your details, Bituach Leumi pays automatically, including into a bank account abroad [[12]]. Where nothing arrived and you hold no Israeli ID, the page asks for a passport photocopy, Form 912 and a bank account certificate, sent to the email address published there, quoting your personal IDF identification number. The alternatives it lists are payment into an Israeli account belonging to a relative or friend against a signed declaration, or the postal bank for holders of a valid Israeli ID, where up to four months of accrued benefit can be withdrawn in cash at any branch [[12]].