What it actually takes for an Irish restaurant to hire a chef from outside the EEA
Most Irish restaurants that look into hiring a chef from outside the EEA give up somewhere in the middle, not at the start. The rules are not especially hard — they are just spread across several places, and two of them can stop you before salary is even discussed. Here is the whole sequence in one place, from an employer's side of the table.
First, check your own workforce — before you do anything else
At least half of your employees must be EEA, Swiss or UK nationals. This is the 50/50 rule, and it is the condition most likely to block a small independent kitchen.
Count your current staff before you spend money on anything. A five-person kitchen with two non-EEA staff is at the limit; the next non-EEA hire may not be possible at any salary. There are narrow exemptions, including for a start-up in its first two years with support from an enterprise agency, but assume the rule applies to you unless you have confirmed otherwise.
This takes ten minutes and it is the cheapest step in the process. Do it first.
Second, check the salary you can actually offer in basic pay
The General Employment Permit — the route almost every chef hire uses — requires a minimum annual salary of €36,605, effective 1 March 2026. The figure for care and home-support roles is €32,691. Thresholds are on a published schedule of annual increases to 2030, so budget for a rising number rather than today's one.
The part that catches people out: that figure must be met by basic pay in the contract. Tips, service charge, and the value of accommodation or meals do not count towards it.
A role paying €31,000 basic where a chef genuinely takes home €37,000 with tips does not qualify. The permit is assessed on the contract, not on earnings. If your kitchen's pay structure leans on tips — and most do — this is the number to fix before anything else, because no amount of paperwork works around it.
Third, confirm the role is one that can be permitted at all
Three chef grades are eligible: Head Chef and Sous Chef, each requiring at least five years of verifiable experience, and Chef de Partie, requiring at least two.
Two things to know:
Chef permits carry no annual quota. The hospitality management categories are capped — 200 Restaurant and Catering Managers, 100 Hotel and Accommodation Managers, 50 Catering and Bar Managers — and once a cap is reached that route closes for the year. Chefs have no such limit.
Fast-food roles are not eligible, at any salary. Neither are waiting staff, bar staff, kitchen porters or cleaning roles — those sit on the ineligible occupations list, and no permit is available for them.
Note that a degree is not required for the General Employment Permit. Eligibility rests on the occupation, the salary and the experience. This matters, because a lot of published guidance conflates the General Employment Permit with the Critical Skills route, which does have a qualifications requirement.
Fourth, run the Labour Market Needs Test
For most General Employment Permit hires you must first advertise the role and be able to show that no EEA candidate was suitable. In practice that means advertising for at least 28 consecutive days on JobsIreland.ie and the EURES portal, plus one additional commercial job board.
Three things employers get wrong here:
It cannot be done retrospectively. You cannot find your candidate, then advertise to tidy up the file. The advertising has to happen first, and the dates have to bear that out.
You have to keep the records. Every application received, and a defensible reason why each was not suitable. "Nobody good applied" is not a record.
The 28 days are consecutive. A gap restarts the clock, and restarting the clock is where a month disappears.
The advertisement itself has to describe the actual job — title, location, salary and hours consistent with what you will later put in the permit application. An advertisement that does not match the application is a refusal waiting to happen.
Fifth, the application
Either you or the candidate can lodge the application; in practice the employer usually does, because the employer holds most of the documents. The permit is issued for up to two years initially and can be renewed.
The Department's application fee is set by regulation and changes from time to time, so check the current figure on the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment's employment permits pages before you budget rather than relying on a number you read somewhere.
What is worth budgeting for beyond the fee: your own time on the advertising and record-keeping, the recruitment cost of finding a candidate who actually clears the salary and experience tests, and the gap between offer and arrival, which brings us to the last point.
Sixth: plan for six to eight months, not six to eight weeks
A chef case commonly runs six to eight months end to end, from offer to the person walking into your kitchen. That covers the 28-day advertising period, the permit application and its processing, the visa application, medicals, police clearance and travel.
Government processing times vary and nobody controls them. If a recruiter gives you a firm arrival date, they are guessing, and you should treat everything else they tell you with the same caution.
The practical consequence is that this route does not solve a vacancy you have this month. It solves next season. Kitchens that use it well start the process against a forecast rather than a crisis — which, awkwardly, is the opposite of when the pressure to hire actually arrives.
The short version
Before you spend anything, answer four questions in this order:
Is at least half your workforce EEA, Swiss or UK?
Can you put €36,605 or more of basic pay in the contract, with tips excluded?
Is the role Head Chef, Sous Chef or Chef de Partie — and not fast food?
Can you commit to a 28-day advertising period, keep the records, and wait six to eight months?
Four yeses and you have a workable route. A no at question 1 or 2 means there is no route today, whatever anyone tells you — and finding that out in ten minutes is worth a great deal more than finding it out in month four.
Figures and occupation lists on this page were last checked on 5 September 2026 against the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Salary thresholds rose on 1 March 2026 and are scheduled to increase annually to 2030, and application fees are set by regulation — check the current figures before relying on them. If you find an error here, tell us and we will correct it.
This is general information about published rules, not legal or immigration advice, and it does not create any expectation of a particular outcome. Employment permit decisions are made by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and visa decisions by the Department of Justice.
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