When can my family join me in Ireland, and what do I need to earn?

Your permit decides this, not your salary

ISD sorts sponsors into three categories. Irish citizens are Category A. Critical Skills permit holders, intra-company transferees, researchers on Hosting Agreements and several others are Category B. General Employment Permit holders, Reactivation Permit holders and independent Stamp 4 holders are Category C.

Almost every difference that matters follows from which of those you are.

	Category B — Critical Skills	Category C — General Employment
Spouse, partner or minor child may apply	Immediately	After 1 year legally working here
Any other family member	After 2 years in the State	After 5 years in the State
Spouse’s permission	Stamp 1G — can work	Stamp 1G — can work (since 15 May 2024)

What you have to earn

For a spouse, partner or minor child, Category C sponsors need gross income above €30,000 in the previous year, with the expectation it will be maintained.

For Category B sponsors — Critical Skills holders — ISD publishes no figure at all. Its wording is that the immigration status granted “assumes certain levels of income either immediately or in the future”. That is not a number we are going to invent, and you should be suspicious of anywhere that quotes you one.

Where children are involved and you are a Category C sponsor, there is a published table. These are net figures, based on the Working Family Payment income limits, with an indicative gross figure beside them:

Children	Net salary required	Indicative gross
1	€39,780	€50,200
2	€45,032	€60,200
3	€50,284	€70,100
4	€55,016	€80,000
5	€61,568	€93,700
6	€67,600	€106,300
7	€74,672	€121,100
8 or more	€79,664	€131,600

That table is Category C only. It does not apply to Critical Skills holders, and ISD says so explicitly.

Bringing a parent: the number nobody expects

This is the one to read before making promises at home. Dependent adult relatives — a parent, or an adult child with a serious medical or psychological condition — carry a threshold that applies to every sponsor, Category A, B and C alike:

Dependent adults	Gross salary required
1	€96,929
2	€130,985
3	€165,042

And it must have been earned in Ireland, in each of the three years before you apply.

A Critical Skills permit holder on €60,000 — comfortably above every permit threshold on the site — does not meet the figure for one parent. Nor does the same person after three years, unless their salary has risen by more than half. This is the harshest number in Irish family immigration and it is the one least often mentioned.

There is a two-year wait on top of it for a Category B sponsor, and five years for Category C.

Two rules that catch people out

You cannot combine incomes. Only the sponsor’s own income counts — not a spouse’s, not a family member’s, not two salaries added together.

Reliance on State supports disqualifies. A sponsor who has been mainly reliant on State support for a continuous period of two years or more immediately before applying cannot sponsor.

Whether your spouse can work — this changed in 2024

Both routes now lead to Stamp 1G, and Stamp 1G allows employment with no employment permit of its own.

This page previously said the opposite for General Employment Permit holders, and the correction matters more than most: since 15 May 2024, eligible spouses and partners of General Employment Permit and Intra-Corporate Transferee holders who have been granted family reunification are registered on Stamp 1G rather than Stamp 3. ISD’s wording is that this “will allow the holder to take up employment, without the need to obtain a separate Employment Permit, of their own”.

The same announcement extended Stamp 1G to spouses and partners of Critical Skills holders and researchers on a hosting agreement who were still on Stamp 3.

What Stamp 1G does and does not allow, either way in:

• Employment: yes, with no permit of their own.
• Study: yes.
• Self-employment or running a business: no. This is the restriction that catches people, and it did not change.
• Renewed annually; after five years on it, a Stamp 4 application becomes possible, and the time counts as reckonable residence for citizenship.

If your spouse already holds an in-date IRP card endorsed Stamp 3, they do not need a new card or a new application to start work. ISD varied those permissions to Stamp 1G conditions administratively, and publishes a letter to give a prospective employer alongside the existing card. The Stamp 1G card issues at the next renewal.

The old DETE point still stands and is now the reason this change matters rather than a restriction on working: spouses and dependants of General Employment Permit holders are not eligible for a Dependant Employment Permit. Before May 2024 that left them with no route to work at all. Now they do not need one.

So the real differences between the two routes are the timing — immediately versus after a year — and the income test, not whether a household can have two earners.

How long it takes

ISD says to expect a decision within 12 months of receiving all required documentation. The New Delhi Embassy publishes Join Family visas at 6 to 12 months for a first decision.

Plan around the year, not around the best case.

What to have ready

If you are applying immediately as a Category B sponsor, you evidence projected earnings — a contract of employment. If you are waiting out a twelve-month period as a Category C sponsor, you evidence what you actually earned: Revenue employment detail summaries for the previous year plus three recent consecutive payslips.

Either way, ISD asks for a contract of at least one year from the proposed date of entry, showing the annual salary.

Indian birth, marriage and divorce certificates must be attested or apostilled by the Ministry of External Affairs before they will be accepted, and so must any translation carried out in India. Start that early; it is the step that most often adds a month.