Ireland's Right to Request Remote Work: What the Law Actually Requires of Employers

The headline change came from the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023, which introduced a statutory right for employees to request remote and flexible working. The word that matters is request. The Act does not give anyone an automatic entitlement to work from home. It gives them a formal route to ask, and it puts a process on the employer for how that ask has to be handled.

That distinction is easy to miss, and it shapes everything that follows. An employer can still say no. What an employer cannot do is ignore the request, sit on it past the deadline, or refuse without working through the considerations the law sets out. The risk is not in the decision itself. It is in the manner the decision is reached and recorded.

The detail for employers lives in the WRC Code of Practice, published in March 2024 under Part 4 of the Act. The Code sets out how requests should be considered in an objective, fair and reasonable way, and the Workplace Relations Commission uses it as the yardstick when a complaint comes in.

There are two timing rules, and they often get blurred together. An employee can submit a remote working request from their very first day in the job. There is no waiting period to ask. What they cannot do is begin the arrangement until they have completed six months of continuous service with the employer.

So a new hire can put the request in during week one, the employer works through it on the normal timeline, and the start date simply has to fall on or after the six-month mark. The request and the commencement are two separate events governed by two separate clocks.

On top of that, the request itself has to give notice. Under the Code, a written request must be submitted at least eight weeks before the date the employee proposes to start working remotely. The request has to be in writing, which can include an online form, and it should set out what the employee is asking for and the reasons behind it. That written record is the starting point for the employer's own response.

Once a valid request arrives, the employer picks up three duties. The first is to consider it properly. The Act asks the employer to weigh the request against three things: its own business needs, the needs of the employee, and the requirements set out in the WRC Code of Practice. A refusal that never engages with the employee's stated reasons is the kind that fails on review.

The second duty is to respond in time. The employer must reply as soon as reasonably practicable and no later than four weeks after receiving the request. Where more time is genuinely needed, that window can be extended by a further four weeks, but the total cannot run beyond eight weeks. Missing the deadline is itself a breach, regardless of what the answer would have been.

The third duty is to put the outcome in writing. If the request is approved, the arrangement is agreed and recorded. If it is refused, the employer has to give the reasons for the refusal in writing. Those reasons are what the employee, and potentially the WRC, will look at later, so they need to connect to the actual business considerations rather than read as a template.

• Acknowledge the request and confirm it meets the basic conditions: in writing, with the required notice, and from someone eligible to make it.
• Assess it against the three statutory considerations, your business needs, the employee's needs and the Code, and note how each one fed into the decision.
• Reply within four weeks, or use the extension and tell the employee you are doing so before the first four weeks runs out.
• Give the decision in writing, with specific reasons if you are refusing, and keep a copy on file.

This is the point that reassures most employers once they hear it. If an employee brings a complaint, the Workplace Relations Commission cannot second-guess the commercial decision. It will not rule on whether remote work should have been granted. Its remit is limited to how the decision was made: did the employer consider the request properly, and did it respond within the timeframe the Act requires.

The first decision under the Act made that concrete. In Karabko v TikTok Technology Ltd, an employee requested full-time remote work and the employer refused inside the timeline, setting out reasons that included team collaboration and in-office knowledge sharing. The Adjudication Officer found for the employer. The reasoning was straightforward: the request had been considered and answered in line with the Act and the Code, and that was the limit of what the WRC could examine.

The practical lesson is that process protects you and a weak process exposes you. An employer with a sound business reason for refusing, who still misses the deadline or never engages with the employee's case, can lose. An employer who follows the steps can refuse and be upheld. The remedy where an employer gets it wrong is an award of up to four weeks' remuneration to the employee, alongside a direction to comply with the Act.

The Act also carries a record-keeping obligation that is easy to overlook. Employers must keep records of the flexible and remote working arrangements they have approved. Failing to retain those records is a separate breach, and it can attract a fine of up to 2,500 euro on summary conviction. The administration around a request is not a formality, it is part of compliance.

Put the pieces together and the exposure is twofold. On one side, mishandling a single request can lead to a WRC award and a direction to comply. On the other, poor record-keeping across the organisation creates a standing liability that has nothing to do with any one employee's complaint. Both are avoidable with a consistent process and a place to file the paperwork.

For a business running a handful of Irish employees from abroad, this is the kind of obligation that falls through the cracks. There is no local HR function watching the deadlines, no one owning the records, and the rules sit outside the home-country playbook. That gap is where the risk concentrates.

The companies most affected by these rules are often the ones least set up to handle them: distributed businesses hiring individuals in Ireland where remote work is already the default. The irony is real. A team that works remotely by design still has to operate the formal request process, hit the four-week deadline, and keep the records, the same as any office-based employer.

An Employer of Record Ireland arrangement closes that gap. The EOR is the legal employer on the ground. It receives and processes remote working requests under the Act, applies the statutory considerations, responds inside the timeline, and keeps the records the law requires. The overseas business stays focused on the work; the local compliance machinery sits with the EOR.

It is worth being clear about what an EOR does and does not change here. It does not remove the employee's right to request, and it does not turn every request into an automatic approval. What it does is make sure the process is run correctly every time, by a party that handles Irish employment law as its core function rather than as an exception to a foreign system.

If you already employ people in Ireland and have not built a remote working request process, that is the place to start. If you are about to make a first hire there, it is worth deciding up front who will own this obligation before a request ever lands.