Country reference
Ireland work permits and salary thresholds
Photo: 瑞丽江的河水 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Critical Skills Employment Permit
Ireland's main route for qualified hires. €40,904 a year covers occupations on the Critical Skills Occupations List if you hold a relevant degree, and €36,848 if you obtained that qualification within the previous 12 months. A separate, much higher threshold of €68,911 applies to eligible occupations outside that list. The job offer must run for at least two years.
Salary threshold by year
- Standard
- €40,904
- Reduced criterion
- €36,848
What the amount is:Annual remuneration. The standard figure applies to occupations on the Critical Skills Occupations List when you hold a relevant degree; the reduced figure applies if you obtained that qualification within the 12 months before applying.
Does your offer clear the threshold?
The comparison runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, stored or logged. It checks your figure against the published threshold — it is not a tax calculation and not advice.
Conditions
- A job offer of at least two years' duration.
- An occupation on the Critical Skills Occupations List, with a relevant degree or higher qualification.
- Remuneration at or above the threshold for your case.
- Outside the Critical Skills list, eligible occupations require €68,911 a year and relevant experience instead of a degree.
- The threshold is not pure salary. Employment permit rules count basic salary plus health insurance paid to a registered insurer as remuneration, while bonuses are excluded. Employer-paid health cover therefore moves you towards the threshold and a bonus does not — two opposite carve-outs stated in the same official page.
- Two years is the job offer, twelve months is the lock. Beyond the two-year offer, the permit holder is expected to stay with the initial employer for the first 12 months.
- No Labour Market Needs Test applies, because the shortage is already recognised. That is the practical difference from the General Employment Permit, which does require one in most cases.
- The two Irish permits run on inverted lists. Critical Skills works from a list of included occupations; the General Employment Permit treats every occupation as eligible unless it appears on the Ineligible List. Same country, opposite logic — so an occupation missing from one list is not necessarily barred under the other.
Photo: Darius Whelan · CC BY 2.0
Is that threshold actually high?
A salary threshold means nothing on its own. Here it is next to what people in the country are actually paid, using official statistics you can check yourself.
0.91× the median full-time wage. That is what the visa threshold asks for.
- Median full-time pay (2022)
- €45,188 a year
- Full-time employees, industry, construction and services excluding public administration.
- Average full-time pay (2022)
- €57,116 a year
- Full-time employees, industry, construction and services excluding public administration.
- Statutory minimum, per month (2026-S2)
- €2,391
- Statutory monthly minimum wage, gross.
Earnings figures come from the Eurostat structure of earnings survey, which runs every four years — the latest period available is shown next to each figure. Minimum wages are published twice a year and are current.
The ratio compares the current threshold with the most recent earnings survey, so the two figures are from different years. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a precise multiple.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · CC BY-SA 3.0
More about Ireland
- Ireland has no tax-free allowance, and it changes the arithmetic
Income tax starts on the first euro. Credits then reduce the bill — which means the obvious calculation overstates what you owe, sometimes dramatically.
Quoting a figure from this page
Every number here is checked against the authority that publishes it, on the date shown. Those numbers change without announcement — one on this site was correct for three months and then quietly was not. So if you quote a figure, quote the date with it, and check the source before you rely on it.
Career Space, “Ireland work permits and salary thresholds”. Checked 2026-08-11. https://career-space.com/en/visa/ireland
Sources
- 01Critical Skills Employment PermitDepartment of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment (Ireland) ·
- 02Monthly minimum wages (earn_mw_cur)Eurostat ·
- 03Structure of earnings survey: annual earnings (earn_ses_annual)Eurostat ·
Every figure here comes from an official source and carries the date we checked it. How we work with data.
This page is information, not advice. We are not an employer, a recruitment agency, a visa centre or an immigration adviser, and we are not affiliated with any government body. Rules change — confirm against the official source before you act.