If you hire workers from outside the EU, the Employment Permits Act 2024 is the law that now governs how you do it. It replaced the 2006 Act and is the biggest overhaul of Irish employment permits in nearly twenty years. Every General Employment Permit, Critical Skills permit and Contract for Services permit you apply for today runs under its rules.
Most of what changed is good news for employers. Some of it you need to plan around. This guide covers the parts that actually affect a business hiring non-EU staff — what changed, what it means in practice, and where the cost or risk has moved.
Correct as of 3 November 2026. Permit rules on this page can change after that date. Get in touch and we will check the current position for your specific role before you spend anything on the process.
What the Act is, in plain terms
President Higgins signed the Employment Permits Act 2024 into law on 25 June 2024, and its main provisions were commenced in September 2024. It consolidates the old permit law into a single, more flexible Act and shifts a lot of the detail — salary thresholds, eligible occupations, advertising rules — into regulations that can be updated without new legislation each time.
For you, that has one headline consequence: the permit system can now change faster. Salary floors move every year. New permit types can be added by regulation. The framework is built to track the labour market rather than freeze in place for a decade, which is what happened under the 2006 Act.
The five changes that matter most to an employer are the new change-of-employer right, the Seasonal Employment Permit, the agency and subcontractor provisions, the annual indexing of salary thresholds, and a set of smaller administrative improvements. Here they are in order of how much they affect a hiring decision.
The 9-month change-of-employer rule
This is the change most employers ask about once they understand it.
Under the old law, a permit tied a worker to your business for the life of the permit. If they wanted to move, they applied for a brand-new permit from scratch. The 2024 Act introduces a right for General Employment Permit and Critical Skills Employment Permit holders to change employer after nine months on their first permit in the State, without applying for a completely new permit and without a fresh Labour Market Needs Test.
There are guardrails:
- The move has to be within the same occupation. A General permit holder can move to another role with the same four-digit occupation code — a meat processor operative to another meat processing role, for example. Critical Skills holders get more room, across a broader occupation category.
- The original permit must still be in force with at least two months left to run.
- A worker can use the change-of-employer route a maximum of three times.
- A new signed contract is required, and the worker must start the new job within one month of the new permit issuing. They cannot start until the permit is reissued.
What this means for you: the worker you sponsor is no longer locked to your business for the full permit term. After nine months, a competitor in the same sector can recruit them without running the whole process again. That is a retention point to plan for — fair pay, decent accommodation, and treating people well are now commercial necessities, not just good practice.
It is not a reason to avoid hiring. The nine-month floor still gives you a clear runway, and a worker you have brought to Ireland, settled in and supported has every reason to stay. But go in with your eyes open: the law has tilted slightly toward worker mobility, and the employers who keep their people are the ones who look after them.
The new Seasonal Employment Permit
The Act created a brand-new permit type aimed squarely at seasonal sectors: horticulture, agriculture, soft fruit picking, and similar work that only runs for part of the year.
The Seasonal Employment Permit lets a non-EU worker work for a maximum of seven months in a calendar year in genuinely seasonal, recurring employment. It is built to be renewable across multiple years for the same season, with arrangements for accommodation and health insurance written into the scheme.
The catch for employers is the approval step. You cannot simply apply for a seasonal worker the way you would for a General permit. You have to register as an approved seasonal employer first — an annual application, assessed on whether the work is genuinely seasonal and on the size of your business. Approved employers go on a published register and hold that status for twelve months.
How the 2025 pilot went
The permit has only run as a pilot so far, and DETE says it would be premature to launch it as a full scheme. DETE published its evaluation of the 2025 pilot in June 2026. The pilot was open to soft fruit and vegetable growers only, with a cap of 200 permits. Eight employers were found eligible, but only two completed Approved Seasonal Employer registration. Between them they were granted 33 permits, and 23 workers arrived.
The department is blunt about the ten who did not. Most failed arrivals were visa refusals, which it links to "inadequate employer oversight/ due diligence of the recruitment agents they selected and poor agency practices in source countries". It also found that employers often treated permit approval as if it guaranteed the visa, which led to unrealistic planning and late recruitment.
Accommodation was where compliance broke down. On the day the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) inspected, pay, working conditions and roles were all in order. But the one employer still in the pilot moved its workers to new accommodation without telling the Department. Neither property was registered with the Residential Tenancies Board, the body that registers rented homes, so the Local Authority could not inspect them. If you will be housing workers yourself, our guide to accommodation for overseas workers sets out what you are responsible for.
What happens for the 2027 season
The report recommends a second pilot phase, again in horticulture, starting in Q3 2026 (July to September) so that employers can register early and recruit in time for the 2027 season. It proposes tighter rules: mandatory vetting and approval of recruitment agencies, checks before workers leave their home country, accommodation inspected in advance, and no moving workers without prior approval.
The recommendation is conditional. Phase two goes ahead "pending confirmation of interest from the sector", and the report sets no permit numbers, eligible crops or application dates for it. Check those with DETE before you plan a 2027 season around this permit. The Single Application Procedure, which will merge the permit and visa applications into one, is still described as forthcoming. It is not live yet.
Until those terms are out, plan around the General Employment Permit, which the report itself names as the interim route for short-term labour needs. Our work permit guide covers that route, and the agriculture sector page covers farm roles.
The report's lesson for employers is about the visa. The permit and the visa are separate processes, so approval of one does not guarantee the other. And DETE traced most failed arrivals back to the recruitment agents employers chose in the source country. Before you sign with anyone, ask how they vet the overseas side.
Agencies and subcontractors
The old law assumed a simple, direct employer-and-employee relationship. Modern work often isn't that tidy, so the Act widened the rules.
Two things changed that matter if you use agencies or subcontract labour:
- An employment agency can now be the permit employer of a worker who carries out work for the agency's client, with the salary paid by either the agency or the client. The agency stays as the legal employer. This makes agency placements far simpler to process.
- The Act defines a subcontractor and lets subcontractors use the Contract for Services Employment Permit in the same way as a main contractor.
There is a useful knock-on for the 50:50 rule too. In a contract-for-services arrangement, the 50:50 EEA-workforce requirement can be satisfied by the contractor, subcontractor or relevant person — recognising that a non-EEA subcontractor may not have an EEA-heavy workforce. If you have run into the 50:50 rule before, this is worth understanding properly, and we cover it in detail in our guide to the 50:50 rule.
Salary thresholds now move every year
Under the 2006 Act, the minimum salary for a permit could sit unchanged for years. The General Employment Permit floor was set at €30,000 in 2006 and barely moved for over a decade, drifting far below average earnings.
The 2024 Act fixes that by law. It requires the Minimum Annual Remuneration thresholds to be reviewed each year and increased in line with the annual change in average weekly earnings, as measured by the Central Statistics Office. In plain terms: the salary floor for a permit is now designed to climb with Irish wages rather than stagnate.
The first indexed increase took effect on 1 March 2026. The key figures from that change:
- The General Employment Permit floor rose to €36,605 a year, unless the recent Irish graduate band applies — up 7.66% from the previous €34,000.
- The standard Critical Skills Employment Permit floor rose to €40,904, unless the recent graduate band applies.
- Reduced floors still apply to specific roles — Health Care Assistants, home carers, horticulture workers and meat processor operatives sit at €32,691 a year — but these lower thresholds are being phased out by 2030.
A couple of practical notes. The threshold is applied at the point you apply for or renew a permit, so an increase doesn't claw back existing permits mid-term. And these are floors: construction trades are governed separately by the Sectoral Employment Order, where a craftsperson minimum is roughly €48,150 a year since 1 August 2026, well above the General floor. Always budget against the higher of the legal floor for the role and the rate you actually advertised.
The headline for planning: the number you budget against will keep rising each year through 2030. Build that into your costings rather than assuming today's floor holds.
Other changes worth knowing
A handful of smaller provisions smooth out the day-to-day:
- Advertising went online. The Labour Market Needs Test no longer requires newspaper print adverts. Vacancies can be advertised on online platforms, though the jobs must still be posted on JobsIreland.ie and EURES, plus at least one other online platform. Our Labour Market Needs Test guide walks through the current rules.
- The 50:50 waiver for new businesses improved. A start-up with no employees is no longer capped at a single permit holder after the first grant. The 50:50 rule is now triggered only when you apply for a second permit, so a new business can grow without an artificial ceiling.
- Promotions handled at renewal. If a permit holder is promoted or moves internally using the same skills, you no longer need a fresh permit application mid-term — it's assessed at renewal instead. Less paperwork, less accidental non-compliance.
- A six-month start window. Once a permit is granted, the worker must commence employment within six months, and only one permit can be in force per person at a time.
- Multi-site permits for hospital doctors. A two-year multi-site General Employment Permit was created for non-consultant hospital doctors who rotate through different hospitals, removing the need for a separate application at each site.
What this means if you're hiring
Strip it back and the Act changes three things for a typical employer hiring non-EU workers:
- Budget for rising salary floors. The minimum you can pay climbs every year to 2030. Today's General floor is €36,605; plan for it to keep moving.
- Plan for worker mobility. After nine months, a General or Critical Skills holder can move to another employer in the same field. Retention is now a live commercial issue.
- Expect a faster, simpler process around the edges. Online advertising, a better 50:50 waiver, promotions at renewal, and cleaner agency rules all reduce friction.
None of this makes hiring from outside the EU harder. For most Irish employers facing a role they genuinely cannot fill locally, the 2024 Act is a more workable system than the one it replaced. The work is in applying it correctly — getting the occupation code, the salary floor and the Labour Market Needs Test right the first time.
How we handle it for you
We place workers with Irish employers and run the full permit process under these rules, so you don't have to track the legislation yourself. We confirm the right permit type, check the current salary floor for the role, run the Labour Market Needs Test where it's required, prepare and submit the application, and manage the move — from approval through to the worker arriving and starting.
Monette, who runs CA Recruitment, is Filipino and based in Ireland, with people on the ground at both ends. When the rules shift — as they did on 1 March 2026 — that's our job to stay on top of, not yours.
If you have a role you can't fill locally and want to know exactly how the current rules apply to it, message us on WhatsApp and we'll walk you through the permit route, the salary floor, and the realistic timeline for your specific job.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Employment Permits Act 2024 in force? Yes. The Act was signed into law on 25 June 2024 and its main provisions were commenced in September 2024, replacing the 2006 Act as the legal basis for every employment permit. Some elements roll out in stages — the Seasonal Employment Permit started as a limited pilot — but the framework you apply under today is the 2024 Act.
Can a worker I sponsor leave for another employer? After nine months on their first permit, a General or Critical Skills permit holder can apply to change to another employer in the same occupation without a fresh Labour Market Needs Test. This is the biggest practical change for employers: the worker is no longer tied to you for the full permit term. It is a retention point to plan for, not a reason to avoid hiring — most placements stay where they are looked after well.
Did the salary thresholds change in 2026? Yes. The Act requires minimum salary thresholds to rise each year in line with average earnings. The first indexed increase took effect on 1 March 2026: the General Employment Permit floor rose to €36,605 unless the recent Irish graduate band applies, and the standard Critical Skills floor to €40,904 unless the recent graduate band applies. Further phased increases run to 2030, so the figure you budget against will keep moving.
What is the Seasonal Employment Permit? It is a short-term permit for genuinely seasonal work, up to seven months in a calendar year, aimed at sectors like horticulture and agriculture. Employers must register as an Approved Seasonal Employer first. DETE says it is too early to launch it as a full scheme. In 2025, two growers were granted 33 permits and 23 workers arrived, with most of the shortfall down to visa refusals. DETE has recommended a second pilot in horticulture for the 2027 season, subject to interest from the sector, but its report sets no permit numbers, eligible crops or application dates.
Do these changes make hiring non-EU workers harder? No. Most of the changes simplify the system — online advertising for the Labour Market Needs Test, an improved 50:50 waiver for new businesses, and promotions handled at renewal instead of with a fresh application. The two things to plan for are the higher salary floors and the nine-month change-of-employer right.