Employment permits are decided by the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment (DETE). They publish one date per permit type, and that date is the whole answer.
It tells you how far down the queue they have reached. Find your permit type, compare it to the day you applied, and you know where you stand.
| Critical Skills Employment PermitNew applications | 28 July 2026 |
| General Employment PermitNew applications | 6 July 2026 |
| All other new applicationsContract for Services, Reactivation, Sport and Cultural, Internship, Exchange Agreement, Dependant | 21 July 2026 |
| Intra-Company TransferNew applications | 7 July 2026 |
| Intra-Company TransferRenewals | 28 April 2026 |
| Renewal applicationsAll other permit types | 24 April 2026 |
| Reviews and appealsThe slowest queue by a distance | 5 January 2026 |
Reading the table
It is not a deadline and it is not an estimate. It is a marker showing how far into the queue the department has worked. Everything follows from where your application sits relative to it.
The seven queues
DETE splits its work into seven queues, each moving at its own speed. Renewals and reviews sit a long way behind new applications, which surprises most people.
Tap a card to see what that queue covers
While you wait
Most of the trouble we see does not come from the waiting. It comes from what people assume the permit does once it lands.
A work permit is the Department of Enterprise confirming that you are allowed to do one particular job, for one particular employer. That is all it does. It is not permission to enter Ireland, and it is not permission to live here.
Permission to live here is a separate decision, made by a different department, Immigration Service Delivery. You apply for it after the work permit is approved, and once you are in Ireland it is what your IRP card records. Two departments, two applications, and the order matters.
Whether you need a visa comes down to your nationality, not your job. Some nationalities can book a flight and travel to Ireland without a visa once the work permit is approved, then register after they land. Others have to apply for a long stay D visa first, wait for their local Irish embassy to decide it, and only travel once it is issued.
If you are in that second group, the embassy wait is a real part of your timeline and nobody else is counting it for you. Factor it in early, and make sure your employer is counting it too when they talk about a start date.
A visa gets you to the border, not through it. Whichever group you are in, the immigration officer at the airport makes the final call on whether you are admitted and for how long. A visa-free arrival can still be refused. Keep your permit approval letter and your supporting documents in your hand luggage, not in the case you check in.
The question we are asked more than any other. Bringing your spouse, partner or children over is called family reunification, and it does not work the same way on every employment permit.
A Critical Skills Employment Permit and a General Employment Permit put you in different sponsor categories. That is what decides how long you must already have been working in Ireland before you can apply, whether you have to meet an income requirement, and whether your spouse can work here on arrival or needs permission of their own.
Your family's nationality matters as well, because a dependant joining you may need a Join Family visa, or preclearance before they travel. None of it is guesswork, but the timing catches people out constantly, and starting late costs months.
Find out when your family can join you
Category B and Category C sponsors explainedWhen it is taking longer than expected
Almost everyone answers this the same way, and almost everyone answers it wrong. There is one thing that has no effect whatsoever, and one thing that decides whether you keep your place at all.
DETE processes applications in strict date order of receipt and does not pull individual cases forward. An email asking for an update will not change your position in the queue, and neither will the second one, or your employer's, or your recruiter's.
It is the thing people put the most energy into and the one thing with no effect at all. A late application is almost never a stuck application. It is just an application that has not been reached yet.
Applying and then looking away is the version that genuinely costs people. The one thing that can stop your file dead is a request for further information sitting unanswered, and you get 28 days to reply to it.
Far more applications are refused over a missed reply than are refused on merit. Keep checking your status, and keep the email address you applied with alive and watched, spam folder included, until a decision lands.
Waiting well is not doing nothing. It is watching closely and pushing not at all.
If the department asks for further information, you have 28 days to answer. Miss it and the application can be refused on that basis alone, no matter how strong the rest of it is.
The same 28 day window applies to asking for a review of a refusal, counted from the date of the refusal decision. Both are fixed legal deadlines rather than processing estimates, so they do not shift with the queue.
If your permit and your IRP card are both coming up, or a renewal is running close to the expiry of your current permission, the timing matters more than the queue does.
Processing dates on this page are taken directly from the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment and refreshed automatically each day. They change regularly and the department's own page is always the current source. Nothing on this page is legal advice.
