Ireland's post-study offer is one of Europe's most generous, and one of its least understood. The short version: Stamp 1G gives you time, an employment permit gives you a future, and Stamp 4 gives you freedom. Here is how the chain works.
Step 1: Stamp 1G, the graduate runway
- Level 9 graduates (master's) and above get up to two years under the Third Level Graduate Programme, level 8 (honours bachelor's) gets one year.
- It is an open permission: work full-time for any employer without a permit, which makes it the ideal window to convert a job into a sponsored permit.
- It does not itself count toward long-term residence the way work-permit years do, so the goal is to move off it into a permit, not to ride it to the end.
Step 2: the two permits that matter
- Critical Skills Employment Permit (CSEP): for occupations on the critical skills list (software, engineering, many health and finance roles) at the qualifying salary, or any occupation at the higher general threshold. This is the gold ticket: no labour market test, family reunification rights, and eligibility for Stamp 4 after two years.
- General Employment Permit: broader occupations at a lower threshold, requires a labour market needs test, and reaches long-term security more slowly (typically Stamp 4 after five years).
Salary thresholds were raised through 2024-2026 in steps, broadly in the mid-thirty-thousands for critical skills and lower for general permits, with exact figures moving, negotiate with the current table open in front of you.
Step 3: Stamp 4 and beyond
Stamp 4 means working without any permit, changing employers freely, and building toward citizenship, which typically requires five years of reckonable residence. Ireland allows dual citizenship, and an Irish passport is an EU passport, which is the quiet long-term prize of this whole pathway.
The honest market read
- Dublin hosts European headquarters of Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Stripe and most of US pharma, Cork has Apple and pharma, Galway has medtech. The demand for engineers, data roles, accountants and pharma scientists is structural.
- But the graduate market is competitive and CV-driven: Irish employers value internships and referees. Use your course's placement module if it has one, it is the main hiring pipeline.
- Costs, especially Dublin rent, eat salaries, read the housing guide before celebrating an offer number.
The stay-back basics are in the Ireland stay-back guide, the overall verdict in is Ireland right for you, and a mentor working in Ireland can sanity-check an offer against the permit rules in one call.