Employer of Record in Ireland

What does it take to put a first employee into Ireland?

An Irish contract, an Irish payroll running through Revenue and someone carrying the statutory employer duties. What it does not take is an Irish company.

Ireland is a common-law jurisdiction that operates in English and its employer duties are ordinary and well documented. Nationals of the EEA, the UK and Switzerland need no employment permit and Irish statute sets no annual bonus or thirteenth month payment. What Irish law does require is a contract on statutory terms, payroll operated through Revenue and an employer carrying the statutory duties.

The question is who carries them. Payroll runs on Revenue's real-time reporting, which means a submission on or before every payment of wages, with a monthly statement that becomes the statutory return on the 14th of the following month. Pension auto-enrolment began collecting in January 2026 and adds a second recurring line to the statutory stack. Statutory leave, notice, sick pay and termination all sit with whoever is the employer on paper.

The rest of this page sets out what an Irish employee costs, what moved in 2026 and why the PAYE question reaches a company that has never set foot in the country.

What does an Irish employee cost an employer?

About 12.75% of gross salary on top of pay, for an employee inside pension auto-enrolment earning between €552 a week and €80,000 a year. That is employer PRSI at 11.25% plus a 1.5% employer pension contribution.

Both bounds matter and stating the figure without them misprices real hires. Below €552 a week the Class A employer rate is 9.00%, not 11.25%, so the stack is 10.50%. A full-time employee on the national minimum wage of €14.15 an hour working a 39-hour week earns €551.85, which sits under the threshold. At the other end, auto-enrolment contributions stop on gross pay above €80,000 a year, so the stack falls back towards employer PRSI alone as salaries rise.

What it does not do is fall away. Employer PRSI has no upper earnings limit at all, so the 11.25% keeps applying however high the salary goes. The full cost breakdown prices both legs and the October step.

Two things are outside that figure and belong in any budget. Statutory costs that arrive on an event rather than on pay sit outside it: five paid sick days at 70% of usual daily earnings capped at €110 a day, statutory notice of one to eight weeks and a redundancy lump sum of two weeks' pay per year of service plus a bonus week, both elements capped at €600 a week. So does anything a Sectoral Employment Order or Employment Regulation Order adds in a covered sector.

What changed for Irish employers in 2026?

Two things arrived in January and a third is dated for October and they move the cost of an Irish hire in the same direction.

The dated change is the one to diary. Every Irish PRSI rate rises by 0.15 percentage points on 1 October 2026. Employer PRSI goes to 11.40% and 9.15%, employee PRSI to 4.35% and the statutory stack to about 12.90%. This is enacted law rather than an announcement and it sits under the Government's PRSI Roadmap rather than a Budget 2026 measure. Nothing else moves on that date: the minimum wage, the USC bands, the income tax bands, the €600 redundancy cap, the €110 sick-pay cap and the €80,000 auto-enrolment ceiling are all unaffected.

Why does the Irish PAYE system reach a company with no Irish presence?

Because the charge follows where the duties are performed, not where anyone is resident. Income from a non-Irish employment attributable to duties performed in Ireland is within the PAYE system whatever the tax residence of the employer or the employee and Revenue's manual states that the foreign employer must register in Ireland as an employer for PAYE and PRSI.

There are reliefs and they do not help a company that is hiring. They run to temporary assignees and they turn on the number of Irish workdays, the individual's tax residence and the employment article of the relevant double taxation agreement. A person recruited to work in Ireland on an ongoing basis reaches none of them.

That is the whole of the point for a company weighing its options. The registration duty does not wait for an office, a subsidiary or a permanent establishment. It follows someone doing the work in Ireland. An employer of record answers it by being the Irish employer, so the registration never lands on the client at all. The comparison of routes sets out what each one carries.

One boundary is commonly misread. An Irish employment creates Irish obligations and gives no standing to employ anywhere else in the European Union. Payroll registration and employment law are national. Which member state's social security applies where work crosses borders is decided by Regulation (EC) 883/2004 and sending an Irish employee to work in another member state brings that state's posting rules into play.

Which parts of Irish employment law bite first?

Leave, probation and notice, in that order, because all three are decided before the first payslip rather than after it.

Annual leave is four working weeks, but the calculation is worth understanding before a start date is agreed, because the method that delivers four weeks is not available in the year an employee changes employment. Probation is capped at six months, extendable to no more than twelve on an exceptional basis and only where the longer period is in the employee's interest. Notice begins at thirteen weeks' continuous service and runs from one week to eight by length of service.

Public holidays work differently, because the choice belongs to the employer. There are ten a year and for each one the employer decides between a paid day off on the day, a paid day off within a month of it, an extra day of annual leave, or an extra day's pay. The hiring guide works through all of it, including the leave calculation that catches first-year hires.