After you graduate
Rules read 17 Aug 2026
What Ireland's own immigration authority currently publishes. Not a ranking, not a guarantee, and not the same as what any agent or forum will tell you. Whether someone actually obtains residence depends on occupation, points, funds and policy that can change between application and graduation.
Money you must prove before the visa
€10,000for one academic year, described by Immigration Service Delivery as the estimated cost of living in Ireland for a student for one academic year — and the same amount must be available again for each subsequent year of the course
Shown as a balance in a bank account. You keep control of it.
Figure published for: for all academic courses due to begin after 1 July 2023, in ISD's own wording. A separate ISD notice dated June 23rd, 2025 records that from 30 June 2025 the same €10,000 was extended to non-visa-required nationals, described as 'the third increase in a series of adjustments' bringing visa-required and non-visa-required students into alignment. This amount is revised regularly, so check it again before you transfer anything.
The €10,000 is living costs and is separate from course fees: for each subsequent year the student or sponsor must have ready access to €10,000 again IN ADDITION to that year's fees. A shorter course is charged monthly instead: €833 per month, so €4,998 for a six-month stay and €6,665 for eight months — for a course under about eight months the requirement is €833 per month of stay or €6,665, whichever is the lesser. A visa-required national proves this during the visa application and does not need to prove it again when registering the student permission in Ireland; a non-visa-required national proves it on registration. The standard evidence is a bank statement on headed paper covering the last six months of money in and out, for the student and for each sponsor; internet printouts are accepted only if every page is notarised by the bank and accompanied by a letter confirming authenticity, and handwritten entries are not accepted at all. A statement from a deposit or savings account must come with a bank letter confirming the money can actually be withdrawn. Degree-programme students only may use an alternative under a pilot scheme: an education bond of at least €10,000 lodged with an approved student fees payment service, held continuously from the visa application until registration in Ireland and released on arrival (or refunded if the visa is refused). ISD stresses that the bond is a contract between the student and the provider, not with ISD.
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Work during study
A non-EEA student on a course listed on the Interim List of Eligible Programmes (ILEP), registered on Stamp 2 student conditions, has a concession to work up to 20 hours per week during term-time and up to 40 hours per week during vacation time, without needing a separate employment permit. Vacation periods are defined as June, July, August and September, plus 15 December to 15 January. Students on a course leading to a major NFQ Level 7 award or above may also undertake an internship or work placement that is an integral, assessed part of their course, including outside the normal hours limit.
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Post-study work visa
Third Level Graduate Programme (Stamp 1G, sometimes called Ireland's 'stay back' option) . Up to 2 years
Available to a legally resident non-EEA graduate who holds a Level 8 (honours bachelor's) or Level 9-or-above (master's/doctoral) award from a recognised Irish awarding body, notified of the award on or after 1 January 2017, who applies within 6 months of that notification and has not already exceeded the 7-year overall limit on student permission. A Level 8 graduate is granted 12 months' permission, to a maximum of 7 years' cumulative student permission overall. A Level 9-or-above graduate is granted 12 months initially, renewable for a further 12 months (24 months total) provided they can show the immigration authorities they have taken genuine steps to find graduate-level employment (e.g. job interviews, registering with graduate recruiters) and stay within an overall 8-year limit on student conditions. A graduate may re-enter the programme once more after achieving a still-higher award, but never more than twice in total, and it is intended for seeking graduate-level employment and applying for an employment permit — not an open-ended stay.
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Route to permanent residence
The Stamp 1G graduate permission does not itself count as an employment permit, but its holder is explicitly allowed to apply for a Critical Skills Employment Permit while still in Ireland on Stamp 1G — Citizens Information's own eligibility page for that permit lists 'stamp 1, 1G, 2, 2A or 3 permission' as sufficient standing to apply from inside the country. A recent graduate gets a lower salary bar for that permit: if the qualification was awarded within the 12 months before applying and the job is on the Critical Skills Occupation List, the minimum salary is reduced (EUR 36,848, versus EUR 40,904 for that list generally, both as of this reading). From an employment permit, the standard route to long-term status is Long Term Residency: at least 5 years (60 months) of legal residence in Ireland held under a qualifying Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment employment permit (successive permits, including a combination of a Critical Skills Employment Permit and other permit types, can be added together), after which a grant of Long Term Residency allows a further 5 years of work in Ireland without needing another employment permit. This is distinct from, and does not itself equal, Irish citizenship or an unconditional permanent 'Stamp 4' — those follow their own separate rules.
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Route to citizenship
Irish citizenship by naturalisation is granted at the Minister for Justice's absolute discretion under the Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 1956 as amended, administered by the Immigration Service Delivery's Citizenship Division. An applicant must have at least 1,825 days (5 years) of 'reckonable residence' in the State within the 9 years before applying, made up of 365 days of continuous residence immediately before the application plus a further 1,460 days (4 years) of reckonable residence within the 8 years before that; a spouse or civil partner of an Irish citizen can instead apply after 3 years of marriage or civil partnership plus 3 years of reckonable residence on the island of Ireland. Not every immigration status counts toward reckonable residence, and applicants must also show good character. Ireland permits multiple citizenship: Immigration Service Delivery states directly that Irish law does not require giving up another citizenship either to naturalise as Irish or to claim Irish citizenship by birth or descent, though it flags that an applicant's other country of citizenship may not allow the same.
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What the government currently prioritises
The Critical Skills Employment Permit — the main employment permit a Stamp 1G graduate would realistically apply for — is explicitly built around a Government shortage list: a job on the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment's own Critical Skills Occupations List qualifies at a lower minimum salary (EUR 40,904/year generally, or EUR 36,848/year for an applicant who was awarded their qualification within the previous 12 months) than a job in an occupation that is merely not on a separate 'ineligible occupations' list (EUR 68,911/year). No labour-market needs test (advertising the role first) applies to this permit either way. Reading the List itself (organised by the UK's Standard Occupational Classification, SOC 2010, current from 13 May 2026 under SI 213 of 2026) directly, rather than relying only on a secondary description of it, confirms this dataset's brief was right that ICT, engineering and specific healthcare roles feature heavily: under 'ICT Professionals' and 'Information Technology and Telecommunications Professionals' it names IT specialist managers, IT project/programme managers, IT business analysts/architects/systems designers, programmers and software development professionals, and web design and development professionals; under 'Engineering Professionals' it names Civil, Structural and Site, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronics, Design and Development, Production and Process, and Chemical Engineers, plus Material Scientists; and under 'Health Professionals', 'Therapy Professionals' and 'Nursing and Midwifery Professionals' it names Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists, Radiographers, Registered Nurses and Registered Midwives, Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists and Speech and Language Therapists, among many others. An occupation only qualifies if it also carries a specific named specialism listed under 'Employments with Specific Skills' where the broad category requires one — appearing in a broad category alone is not always enough.
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Read 17 August 2026. Employment-permit salary thresholds referenced here (EUR 40,904 / EUR 36,848 / EUR 68,911) took effect from 1 March 2026 under a new roadmap for Minimum Annual Remuneration and are stated on Citizens Information's own page to be subject to further scheduled increases — re-check the current figures before relying on them, the same caution this dataset applies to every other country's post-study-work numbers. Trinity College Dublin is the one Ireland university currently in this dataset (this correction supersedes an earlier draft of this note that said Ireland had no university here yet). No university international-office or migration-agency page was used anywhere in this entry — every figure is cited to irishimmigration.ie (Immigration Service Delivery, Department of Justice), citizensinformation.ie (the State's own citizen-information service) or enterprise.gov.ie (Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment), all pre-approved official sources for Ireland in this dataset. Deepening pass, 17 August 2026: inDemandOccupations replaced with the Critical Skills Occupations List's own actual content (previously this dataset described the List's existence and salary mechanism but deliberately did not reproduce its contents). Added enterprise.gov.ie to IMMIGRATION_DOMAINS in scripts/verify.mjs — it is the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment's own site and the List's actual publisher (the List is 'set out in Schedule 3 of the Regulations', per the page itself), a more direct authority for this specific figure than citizensinformation.ie's general-public paraphrase of it, and DETE administers employment permits directly — the same class of reasoning already used for the United States' ice.gov/uscis.gov/studyinthestates.dhs.gov entries. citizenshipRoute added 17 August 2026: the 1,825-day reckonable-residence figure is cited to citizensinformation.ie's 'Becoming an Irish citizen through naturalisation' page (b6641b36b2759a70, already archived above), the State's own citizen-facing explainer of the Department of Justice's rules. The dual-citizenship statement is cited instead to irishimmigration.ie's own dedicated 'Dual Citizenship' page (0e896c631a62efb8) — a cleaner, more directly authoritative statement of Irish law than a general search summary would have given, and on the same already-allowed domain used elsewhere in this entry. naturalisationStatus set to 'published-route' on 18 August 2026: the authority already cited under citizenshipRoute publishes criteria a foreign resident could actually follow, which is the only claim this field makes. It is deliberately not a judgement about how attainable that route is in practice. citizenshipTerms cites the already-archived citizensinformation.ie naturalisation page (snapshot b6641b36b2759a70) because it states the 5-year reckonable-residence total as a figure; the Immigration Service Delivery page cited by citizenshipRoute covers dual citizenship rather than the period. Route is recorded as application even though the Minister for Justice holds absolute discretion under the 1956 Act: Irish naturalisation is applied for against published criteria, unlike the decree- and nomination-based routes this dataset records as discretionary or nomination. studentVisaFunds added 19 August 2026. Two ISD pages were archived and agree: the standing 'Information on Student Finances' page (59befbadd4df9bac), cited here because it carries both the figure and the shorter-course rules and the accepted evidence, and the June 2025 notice 'Reminder on Student Finance requirements from 30 June 2025' (23c82cfb02d385a6), which supplies the alignment date for non-visa-required nationals and repeats the same €10,000 and €833-per-month figures. The €833 monthly rate for short courses is recorded in conditions rather than as the amount, because the €10,000 annual figure is the one that applies to the degree-length courses this dataset carries.
Open the immigration authority's own page ↗