TL;DR
- From 1 March 2026, a General Employment Permit in Ireland requires a job paying at least €36,605 a year, up from €34,000. A Critical Skills Employment Permit requires €40,904, up from €38,000.
- Both rose by 7.66% – considerably less than the 14.7% and 15.8% originally planned, after the government deferred part of the increase.
- Ireland has no digital nomad visa. If you need permission to work there, an employer-sponsored permit is the route, and Remote Work Europe tracks what that means in practice.
- Two Irish state sources currently disagree on the salary above which an employer can skip the Labour Market Needs Test. DETE says €68,911. Citizens Information still says €64,000. The one that decides your application is DETE.
Ireland is one of the most-asked-about countries in Europe among people who want to work remotely, and one of the most misunderstood.
The confusion is structural rather than anyone’s fault. Ireland is English-speaking, it hosts the European headquarters of a great many remote-friendly technology companies, and it has a statutory right to request remote working. All of which makes it sound like an easy place to land. Then people discover there is no visa for arriving as a remote worker, and the picture goes blank.
Remote Work Europe maintains country guides across more than thirty European jurisdictions, and Ireland is a case where the honest answer is more useful than the encouraging one. There is a route in. It is just not the route most people are looking for, and as of 1 March 2026 it costs more to qualify for than it did.
Why Ireland has no digital nomad visa, and what that leaves you
Ireland has never introduced a digital nomad visa, and there is no sign of one coming. We have written separately about why Ireland has no digital nomad visa and what people typically do instead.
The short version is that Ireland’s immigration system is built around employment rather than around location. It asks who is employing you and what they are paying you, not where you happen to be sitting. So the question “can I move to Ireland and keep working for my employer abroad?” does not have a permit attached to it.
What Ireland does have is a well-documented employment permit system. If you hold an EU, EEA, Swiss or UK passport you need none of it – you can live and work in Ireland without permission. Everyone else needs a permit, and there are two that matter for most professional roles.
What the March 2026 salary threshold increase actually changed
On 2 December 2025, Ministers Peter Burke and Alan Dillon published a roadmap for raising the minimum annual remuneration attached to employment permits. The first step took effect on 1 March 2026.
General Employment Permits rose from €34,000 to €36,605. Critical Skills Employment Permits rose from €38,000 to €40,904. Both increases were 7.66%.
The more interesting part is what did not happen. A 2023 roadmap had proposed larger rises – 14.7% for General permits and 15.8% for Critical Skills – with the whole programme complete by 2026. Those were cut back, and the department was unusually candid about why. Businesses were facing rising costs, and migrant worker advocacy groups had raised a specific concern: if thresholds climb faster than salaries, people already holding permits struggle to renew them. Someone who qualified three years ago can find themselves priced out of their own life through no change in their circumstances.
That is a real risk and it is worth understanding if you are planning a move. A permit is not a one-off test. It is a test you re-sit.
The General Employment Permit and the salary you now need
The General Employment Permit is the broad route. It covers occupations that are not on the Ineligible List of Occupations, which is where you should look first, because if your job is on it no salary will help.
The current thresholds, read directly from the Department’s own page:
| Category | Minimum annual remuneration |
|---|---|
| Most employments | €36,605 |
| Meat processing operative, horticultural worker, health care assistant, home support worker | €32,691 (minimum €16.12 per hour) |
| Applicant holding a relevant Irish degree obtained in the previous 12 months | €34,009 |
That second row is being phased out. Those reduced thresholds for agri-food and healthcare roles were originally due to disappear entirely by 2026; they now rise gradually and are scheduled to be gone by 2030. They went up 9% in March 2026.
The third row is the one people miss. If you studied in Ireland and graduated within the last year, the bar is lower – €34,009 rather than €36,605. It is a deliberate retention measure and it is worth knowing about before you assume you cannot afford to stay.
The Critical Skills Employment Permit and who actually qualifies
The Critical Skills permit is the better one, and it is better in ways that go well beyond the salary figure.
Two routes qualify. Either your occupation appears on the Critical Skills Occupations List and the job pays at least €40,904 – or your occupation is not on the Ineligible List and the job pays over €68,911, in which case the list does not matter. Recent graduates get the same discount as on the General permit: €36,848 where the qualification was obtained within the previous twelve months.
What you get for clearing that bar is substantial:
- No Labour Market Needs Test. Your prospective employer does not have to advertise the role for a month first.
- Immediate family reunification. Your dependants can join you straight away, and – this is the part that matters most in practice – they become eligible to seek any employment, rather than being tied to a permit of their own.
- A route out of the permit system. On completing the permit’s duration, holders may apply to reside and work in Ireland without needing an employment permit at all.
That third point is the real prize. A General Employment Permit keeps you inside the system indefinitely, re-qualifying against a threshold that rises annually. A Critical Skills permit has a door at the end of it.
The Labour Market Needs Test, and the figure two state sources disagree on
For most General Employment Permit applications, the employer must first run a Labour Market Needs Test: advertise the vacancy for at least 28 days on the Jobs Ireland website and on EURES, plus one additional online platform, then apply within 90 days.
There are exceptions. The job is on the Critical Skills Occupations List. The applicant was previously made redundant from a permitted role. Enterprise Ireland or IDA Ireland recommended the hire. Or – the one that most often applies to experienced professionals – the salary is high enough that the test is waived.
Here is where it gets awkward, and it is the reason we check figures at source rather than quoting whichever page ranks first.
The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment states that threshold as €68,911. Citizens Information, the state’s own public information service, states it as €64,000. Both figures were read off the live pages on 4 September 2026. Citizens Information has correctly updated its headline General Employment Permit figure to €36,605 and flagged the 1 March 2026 date – it simply appears to have missed this one number when the thresholds moved.
Nearly five thousand euro is not a rounding error. It is the difference between an employer being able to hire you directly and an employer having to run a month-long advertising exercise before they can even apply. Employers make hiring decisions on exactly that kind of friction.
Use the Department’s figure. DETE administers the permits and decides the applications; Citizens Information explains them. When the two disagree, the administering body is the one that governs. And check both again yourself before acting, because the whole point of this section is that published figures drift.
Notice, too, that €68,911 is the same number that lets a non-listed occupation qualify for a Critical Skills permit. It is the pivot point in the Irish system – the salary at which the state stops asking whether an Irish or EEA worker could have done the job instead.
What the roadmap means for permits after 2026
The thresholds now move annually, indexed, through to 2030. That changes how you should plan.
If you are negotiating an offer, negotiate against next year’s threshold rather than this year’s. A salary that clears €36,605 today may not clear the figure you have to meet at renewal, and renewal is where people get caught. If you are choosing between two offers and one of them clears €68,911, that offer is worth more than the difference in salary – it removes the Labour Market Needs Test and opens the Critical Skills route with everything that follows from it.
And if you are an employer reading this from outside Ireland, the same roadmap is the argument for engaging people through an employer of record rather than sponsoring permits, at least until a role is proven.
Where remote work actually fits into this
None of the above is a remote work route, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. An Irish employment permit ties you to a named employer doing a named job in Ireland.
What it does give you is a legal basis to live there – and once you are employed in Ireland, you acquire the statutory right to request remote working that we cover in our guide to Ireland’s right to request remote work. The sequence matters, and people get it backwards. You do not move to Ireland as a remote worker. You move to Ireland as an employee, and then you negotiate the remote part from the inside, which is very often the faster route in any case – the same logic behind treating your current job as the gateway into remote working.
There is also a straightforward option people overlook: work remotely for an Irish employer without moving at all. Irish companies hire across Europe, and a role advertised in Dublin is not always a role that requires you to be in Dublin.
Remote Work Europe Connected
Every weekday we read the recruitment systems of 170 European employers directly and hand-pick the roles worth your time – including the Irish employers hiring across borders.
€15 a month, and the filtering is done by a human rather than an algorithm.
For the wider picture of where Europe does offer a route for remote workers specifically, our complete guide to European digital nomad visas covers the countries that have one – and Ireland’s absence from that list is the whole point of this article.
Frequently asked questions
What is the minimum salary for an Irish work permit in 2026? €36,605 a year for a General Employment Permit and €40,904 for a Critical Skills Employment Permit, both from 1 March 2026. Reduced thresholds apply to recent graduates of Irish institutions (€34,009 and €36,848) and to certain agri-food and healthcare occupations (€32,691, with a minimum hourly rate of €16.12).
Can I move to Ireland as a digital nomad? Not on a dedicated visa, because Ireland has not introduced one. Citizens of the EU, EEA, Switzerland and the UK can live and work in Ireland without permission. Everyone else needs an employment permit tied to an Irish employer.
Which Irish employment permit is better? The Critical Skills Employment Permit, clearly – it skips the Labour Market Needs Test, allows immediate family reunification with dependants free to seek any employment, and leads to permission to reside and work without a permit once its duration is complete. The General Employment Permit has none of those advantages.
Do I need my employer to advertise the job first? Usually yes, for a General Employment Permit: 28 days on Jobs Ireland and EURES plus one further platform. It is waived where the occupation is on the Critical Skills Occupations List, where the hire is recommended by Enterprise Ireland or IDA Ireland, where the applicant was previously made redundant from a permitted role, or where the salary reaches €68,911.
Will the thresholds rise again? Yes. The roadmap published in December 2025 sets out annual increases through to 2030, and the reduced thresholds for certain agri-food and healthcare roles are being phased out entirely by then. Plan against the renewal figure, not the entry figure.
Sources
- General Employment Permit – Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment
- Critical Skills Employment Permit – Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment
- Government unveils roadmap for gradual increase in employment permit salary thresholds – DETE, 2 December 2025
- Employment Permits Minimum Annual Remuneration: Outcome of the Roadmap Review 2025 – DETE
- General Employment Permit – Citizens Information
Figures verified at source on 4 September 2026. Employment permit thresholds in Ireland now change annually – check the Department’s own pages before acting on anything here. This is general information, not immigration advice.
