Which Irish Work Permits Are Quota-Limited in 2026 — and How Many Places Are Left?

Fifteen occupations are capped by quota for a General Employment Permit in 2026. Between them they hold 5,808 permits, and every one of those quotas started on 13 May 2026 under S.I. 213/2026. If the role you are hiring for is on the list, the permit is not simply available on demand — it is available until the national pool runs out, and DETE gives you no warning before that happens.

The question employers actually ask is the second one: how many places are left. The honest answer is that nobody outside DETE knows, and this article explains why, what the published signals actually are, and how to protect a hire that depends on one.

The 15 Quota-Limited Occupations in 2026

Quotas live in Schedule 5 of the Employment Permits Regulations 2024. Regulation 6 of S.I. 213/2026 substituted that schedule in full, so the table below is the operative list — not an addition to what came before, but a replacement for it.

Two of these are new. Fish filleter and seafood operative were created by the May 2026 Occupations Lists Review, which confirmed 32 changes to the eligible occupations in total. The other thirteen are renewals of quotas that existed before, several of which had already filled and expired.

The sector spread matters more than the individual numbers. Care and social services carry the largest single pool at 1,495, with a separate 200 for support workers. Motor and vehicle trades account for six of the fifteen entries. Agri-food holds horticulture at 971, butcher/boner at 548, and the two new seafood quotas. Hospitality management is split four ways into pools of 100, 200, 50 and 50 — worth reading alongside our guide to hospitality work permits in 2026, because that split is a downgrade disguised as a renewal.

How Many Places Are Left? Nobody Outside DETE Knows

There is no published counter. This is the part employers find hardest to accept, so it is worth being precise about what does and does not exist:

• No live quota tracker. DETE publishes the maximum in the regulations and nothing about consumption.
• The statistics don't help either. DETE's 2026 employment permit statistics are broken down by nationality, by company, by county and by sector. There is no breakdown by occupation, so you cannot subtract issued permits from the cap to estimate what remains.
• The only signal is retrospective. When a pool is exhausted, DETE posts a "this quota has now been filled" notice on its latest updates page. That notice tells you the quota is gone — it does not tell you it is nearly gone.

As of 11 August 2026, no quota-filled notice has been published for any of the fifteen quotas that began on 13 May 2026.

That statement needs one qualification, and it is the qualification that trips people up. There are two quota-filled notices sitting on DETE's page right now — one from 19 March 2026 for car mechanics, one from 28 April 2026 for hospitality managers — and both look current if you read them in isolation. Neither is. Both refer to tranches under earlier instruments that S.I. 213/2026 superseded on 13 May. Both roles are open again.

Roles Employers Wrongly Think Are Capped

Being uncapped is better news than being early in a quota, and several roles Irish employers assume are quota-limited are not.

Dairy farm assistant and pig farm assistant. Both are eligible, and neither is capped. Quotas of 850 and 1,000 were introduced for dairy farm assistants and meat processing operatives in December 2025 — but the quota schedule that held them was replaced in full on 13 May 2026, and the replacement contains no entry for either role. Eligibility is unaffected: it turns on the ineligible occupations list, which S.I. 213/2026 also replaced, and the carve-outs for dairy farm assistants and pig farm assistants were carried straight through into the new version. The December 2025 press release announcing those quotas is still online and still reads as current. See our guides to hiring farm workers from overseas and hiring pig farm workers, or the agriculture sector page.

Meat processing operative. Same position — eligible, uncapped since 13 May 2026. Note the distinction from butcher/boner, which sits beside it in the same plants and is capped, at 548.

HGV drivers. The quota table contains HGV/bus mechanics, not drivers. Drivers holding a category CE or C1E licence are eligible and uncapped. A category C or rigid-only licence does not qualify at all, quota or no quota — the detail is in our HGV driver hiring guide.

Chefs and nurses. Executive, head and sous chefs with five years' experience, and chefs de partie and commis chefs with two, are eligible outside fast-food outlets, with no cap. Registered nurses sit on the Critical Skills list and are not quota-limited. Care assistants are the exception in healthcare — eligible, but inside the 1,495 pool, at a minimum of €16.12 per hour basic pay (€32,691 a year on a 39-hour week). See the healthcare and care and social services pages, or our guide to the healthcare assistant shortage.

Construction trades. Carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers, welders, steel fixers and scaffolders are eligible and uncapped. Their real constraint is pay, not quota: Sectoral Employment Order rates put the main construction trades above €46,600 a year, well over the standard permit floor of €36,605. Our construction hiring guide and the construction sector page cover it.

Two Traps in Reading a Quota

Both of these have caught competent people this year, including advisers who read the right page and drew the wrong conclusion.

A "quota filled" notice can be superseded. DETE's latest updates page is chronological and nothing is retracted when it stops being true. The March and April 2026 closure notices described above sat above newer developments for weeks while both roles were open again. Read the whole page top-down, and check the newest Occupations Lists Review before repeating any closure.

A quota you believe is live can be silently deleted. This is the mirror image, and it is nastier. When a statutory instrument substitutes a schedule rather than amending it, everything absent from the replacement is gone — no announcement, no correction to the original press release. That is exactly what happened to the dairy and meat processing quotas on 13 May 2026. Checking whether a quota has been closed is not enough; you have to confirm it still appears in the operative schedule.

The practical rule: verify against the current Schedule 5 as substituted by the most recent instrument, never against the announcement that introduced the quota.

The Timing Problem: 28 Days of Exposure

Quotas interact badly with the Labour Market Needs Test. A General Employment Permit application generally requires the vacancy to be advertised for 28 days before you can submit, so the clock starts when you advertise — not when you decide to hire.

That leaves a minimum four-week window in which the pool can fill without you knowing. If it does, DETE's own wording is unambiguous: applications submitted and awaiting processing are rejected. They are not queued for the next tranche.

The May 2026 review made this concrete. Nine roles needed a fresh Labour Market Needs Test — the two new seafood quotas, the four hospitality manager roles, and car mechanics, vehicle body builders and vehicle paint technicians, whose quotas had previously expired. Where the test started on 13 May, the earliest valid application date was 10 June. Every employer in those nine roles was advertising into the same pool at the same time, and the first application could not land for four weeks.

Nothing about the process gets faster because a quota is tight. In our experience a General Employment Permit hire runs roughly six months start to finish once you count the test, the DETE queue, the visa and travel — the detail is in our costs and timelines guide.

What to Do Before You Advertise

For a capped role, the sequence that protects you is short:

1. Confirm the occupation is actually on the quota list — and confirm the classification. Butcher/boner is capped; meat processing operative is not. HGV mechanic is capped; HGV driver is not. The distinction decides whether any of this applies.
2. Check the current position against the operative schedule, not against a press release or a blog post — including ours. Both can date.
3. Check for a filled notice, then check whether it has been superseded by a later instrument.
4. Confirm the salary clears the minimum for that occupation before the advertisement goes out. A test advertised below the threshold invalidates the application regardless of quota status.
5. Advertise promptly once you commit. In a small pool, four weeks of exposure is the risk you are managing, and it does not shrink.

If the pool for your role is one of the small ones — 50 for fish filleters, publicans or catering and bar managers, 100 for hotel managers, seafood operatives or vehicle paint technicians — treat a delayed start as a real risk to the hire, not an administrative inconvenience.

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