How to Hire an Employee in Ireland: Step-by-Step for International Employers

The first decision shapes everything that follows. To employ someone in Ireland, you need a legal employer in place. There are two main ways to get one.

The first is to set up your own Irish entity, usually a private limited company, and register it as an employer with Revenue. This gives you full control and makes sense once you are building a sizeable local team. It also brings ongoing obligations: company filings, corporation tax, statutory accounts, and the time and cost of incorporation before anyone can be paid.

The second is to use an Employer of Record Ireland arrangement. The EOR is already a registered Irish employer, so it can put your hire onto a compliant local contract and run their payroll without you forming a company at all. You direct the day-to-day work; the EOR holds the employment relationship and carries the compliance.

For a first hire, a small team, or a market you are still testing, the EOR route removes the entity question entirely. For a long-term build-out of twenty or more people, a local entity is often the better fit. Many international employers start with an EOR and move to an entity later, once the headcount justifies the overhead.

If you are employing through your own entity, you must register as an employer with Revenue before you pay anyone. You do this through the Revenue Online Service (ROS), which is also where you will report payroll once you are up and running.

Most employers register electronically. A company already registered for corporation tax can add a PAYE/PRSI registration; a non-resident company or an individual employer typically registers using Form TR1, TR2, or the PREM Reg form depending on their situation. You will need a ROS digital certificate, because payroll has to be reported to Revenue in real time, and that reporting runs through ROS.

Timing matters more than it used to. From 2 March 2026, Revenue only allows a PREM registration to be backdated by one period through ROS. If you need to go back further, you have to register for the current period and follow up separately through MyEnquiries. In practice, register before the first pay date rather than scrambling afterwards.

This is also the step that disappears entirely with an EOR. Because the EOR is already a registered employer, there is no Revenue registration for you to complete and no ROS certificate for you to obtain.

Before you make an offer, confirm that the person can legally work in Ireland. Citizens of Ireland, the EU, the wider EEA, and Switzerland have an automatic right to work and need no permit. Anyone else generally needs either an existing permission, such as a Stamp 4, or an employment permit tied to the role.

For non-EEA hires, the two routes you will meet most often are the Critical Skills Employment Permit and the General Employment Permit. Each carries a minimum salary threshold, and those thresholds rose on 1 March 2026. The General Employment Permit now requires a salary of at least €36,505, while the Critical Skills Employment Permit requires €40,904 for a role with a relevant degree. A roadmap published by the Department of Enterprise will raise these again in stages through 2030.

The reason to check this first, rather than at offer stage, is that the permit process takes time and the salary you offer has to clear the threshold. If the role pays below the relevant figure, the permit will not be granted, and you will need to rethink the package or the candidate. Building the right-to-work check into shortlisting avoids that problem.

Irish law sets firm deadlines for putting employment terms in writing. Within five days of the start date, you must give the employee a written statement of five core terms. These cover the full names of employer and employee, the rate or method of calculating pay, the hours the employee is expected to work, the place of work, and, for a temporary or fixed-term role, its expected duration or end date.

The fuller written terms of employment follow within one month and cover the rest of the relationship: notice periods, paid leave, sick pay, probation, pension, and the like. These obligations sit under the Terms of Employment (Information) Act and the European Union (Transparent and Predictable Working Conditions) Regulations, and they are not optional. Failing to provide the five-day statement without reasonable cause is an offence that can carry a fine.

Beyond meeting the legal minimum, the contract is where you set expectations on probation, confidentiality, intellectual property, and termination. Getting these right at the outset is far easier than renegotiating later. A contract that reflects how the role will actually operate also reduces the risk of disputes down the line.

• Issue the five core terms in writing within five days of the start date.
• Provide the full written terms of employment within one month.
• Set probation, notice, and leave entitlements in line with Irish statutory minimums.
• Include confidentiality and intellectual property clauses suited to the role.

To put someone on payroll correctly, you need their Personal Public Service (PPS) number. This is the individual tax and social welfare identifier, and it lets you request their Revenue Payroll Notification, the document that tells you how much tax to deduct. Without it, the employee is taxed on an emergency basis, which means higher deductions until the position is corrected.

A new hire who already lives and works in Ireland will usually have a PPS number. Someone relocating may need to apply for one after they arrive, so factor that into the start date. Once you have it, you register the employee in your payroll system and request the Revenue Payroll Notification so the correct tax credits and rate bands are applied from the first pay run.

Alongside the tax set-up, collect the practical details: bank account for payment, emergency contact, signed contract, and any documentation tied to a work permit. Good onboarding is partly compliance and partly making the new person feel that the employer has their act together, which matters for retention from week one.

• Collect the employee’s PPS number before the first pay run.
• Request the Revenue Payroll Notification so the right tax credits apply.
• Register the employee in payroll with bank and personal details.
• File any work-permit documentation where a permit applies.

Pay has a legal floor. Since 1 January 2026, the national minimum wage is €14.15 per hour for employees aged 20 and over, with lower sub-minimum rates for younger workers. The floor applies regardless of contract type, so part-time, casual, and agency staff are all covered.

On top of gross pay, the employer pays PRSI. Employer PRSI is charged at a lower and a higher rate depending on the employee’s weekly earnings, and all PRSI rates are scheduled to rise by 0.15 percentage points from 1 October 2026, with a further increase planned for 2027. It is a real cost on top of salary, so build it into your budget rather than treating salary as the whole picture. For a fuller breakdown, see our guide to PAYE, PRSI and USC in Ireland.

The newest item to plan for is pension auto-enrolment. The scheme, branded My Future Fund, began on 1 January 2026. Employees aged 23 to 60 earning €20,000 or more a year, who are not already in a workplace pension, are enrolled automatically. Employer and employee each contribute 1.5 percent of gross pay in the first year, rising in steps to 6 percent over a decade, with a State top-up on top. For a new hire who qualifies, this is an additional payroll cost from the start.

Ireland operates real-time payroll reporting, often called PAYE Modernisation. The rule is simple to state and important to follow: you report each employee’s pay and deductions to Revenue on or before the date you pay them, every pay period. There is no annual catch-up. The reporting happens with each run.

For each pay date you calculate gross pay, then deduct PAYE income tax, USC, PRSI, and any pension contribution, using the tax credits and rate bands from the Revenue Payroll Notification. You submit the payroll details to Revenue through ROS, pay the employee the net amount, and remit the deductions to Revenue by the due date. Most employers run this through payroll software or an outsourced provider rather than by hand.

The first run is the one to get right, because errors tend to repeat. Confirm that the Revenue Payroll Notification has applied correctly, that the employee is not sitting on emergency tax, and that pension auto-enrolment has been picked up where it applies. Once the first cycle is clean, the rest tends to follow.

Every step above assumes you are building the employer infrastructure yourself. There is a shorter path. An Employer of Record Ireland arrangement collapses most of this work into a single relationship, because the EOR is already the registered Irish employer.

With an EOR, there is no entity to incorporate and no Revenue registration to complete. The EOR issues the compliant contract and the five-day core terms, collects the PPS number and onboarding details, and runs payroll under real-time reporting, applying PAYE, USC, PRSI, and pension auto-enrolment correctly. You manage the work; the EOR manages the compliance.

This is why so many international employers use an EOR for their first hires in Ireland. It turns a multi-week setup into a matter of days, and it removes the risk of getting registration, contracts, or payroll wrong while you are still learning the local rules. If you later decide to scale into an owned entity, you can transition at that point from a stable base.