Full year
A year is labelled full-year only when all 12 monthly source periods are available. The directory does not annualise a partial year or treat a missing month as zero.
This page defines the terms, periods, source files and limitations behind the IrishTalents DETE employment permit directory. It is a research reference, not government guidance or individual immigration advice.
Last reviewed: 14 July 2026
The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment (DETE) is the official publisher. IrishTalents transcribes and presents public source files; it is not affiliated with the Irish government and does not replace the official publications.
The source archive and workbook links below were checked on 14 July 2026. DETE can publish a later revision, so the number shown on an IrishTalents page can change when the underlying source or import changes.
The archive is the source of truth for publication periods and revisions. Each annual publication can link to separate workbooks for nationality, company, county and sector views.
| Publication | How it is used |
|---|---|
| DETE employment permit statistics archive | The Department archive of annual employment permit statistics publications. |
| Employment permit statistics for 2026 | The latest annual publication page and its linked official workbooks. |
| Employment permit statistics for 2025 | A prior annual publication used when checking historical source revisions. |
| Employment permit statistics for 2024 | An earlier annual publication in the official archive. |
| Source document | Scope in the source contract |
|---|---|
| Permits by nationality 2026 | Nationality-level issued permit workbook when published for the year. |
| Permits issued to companies 2026 | Company-level issued permit workbook used for employer history. |
| Permits by county 2026 | Official county-level workbook. County is not a company-city field. |
| Permits by sector 2026 | Official sector workbook and its source labels/codes. |
Source provenance has three separate ideas: the source period (the year or month represented), the extraction/import time (when IrishTalents processed it), and revision identity (whether the publisher supplied a newer file). Where a public page does not expose a checksum or import identifier, do not infer that the source is unchanged. Historical pages remain subject to DETE revisions and corrected IrishTalents imports.
The directory describes recorded permit activity. It does not turn those records into applications, approvals, vacancies or forecasts.
| Term | IrishTalents meaning | Do not infer |
|---|---|---|
| Issued permits | A count supplied by an issued-permit source column or published issued-permit total for the stated period. | A live vacancy, current employer demand, job offer, future sponsorship or individual eligibility. |
| Refused permits | A refused count only when the official source explicitly supplies a refused field with a clear period and denominator. | A zero when the field is absent. The current IrishTalents dataset may not expose refusals consistently. |
| Approval rate | Not calculated by IrishTalents from issued counts alone. Official denominator semantics must be verified first. | Issued ÷ (issued + refused), unless DETE explicitly defines those fields as a complete comparable denominator. |
| Distinct companies | Company entities represented in the relevant IrishTalents source and entity view for that period. | A count of brands, offices, vacancies or every legal entity in Ireland. |
A year is labelled full-year only when all 12 monthly source periods are available. The directory does not annualise a partial year or treat a missing month as zero.
A selected month can show YTD as the sum of available January-through-selected-month records. YTD is a partial-year snapshot, not a forecast of the final annual total.
Annual comparisons use the same available month set in both years. This prevents a partial current year being compared with a complete prior year. If the available months differ, the comparison is not treated as like-for-like.
Monthly and annual pages identify the source period and may be refreshed after DETE publishes a new file. A revised historical source can change an earlier total; page freshness should follow the source/import revision, not simply a deployment date.
A monthly page compares its selected month with the prior month and the same month in the prior year when those periods exist. Its YTD label covers January through the selected month. These temporal rules describe the available source records and do not establish a causal trend.
An official county statistic and an enriched company location answer different questions. They must not be merged into one label.
| Dimension | What it represents | Coverage warning |
|---|---|---|
| Official county | The geography in DETE's county workbook for the published period. | It is not a city total, and it should not be reconstructed from company profile locations. |
| Company city or location | A company field that may come from the legal entity or enrichment data and may be missing or unverified. | A top-company subset can have lower location coverage than an official county workbook. |
| Public county/sector aggregates | A separately quality-gated read model would be needed for new canonical public claims. | Unsupported county/sector public aggregate claims are not yet available on this methodology page. We do not invent totals. |
These taxonomies have different owners and purposes. Similar words do not make them interchangeable.
| Label | Meaning | Relationship to other labels |
|---|---|---|
| Official DETE sector | The sector name or code supplied by the official sector source for a permit period. | A source sector is not a company industry, NACE activity or SOC occupation. |
| Company.industry | An industry field attached to a company entity in IrishTalents. | It can have different coverage, normalization and update timing from an official DETE sector file. |
| NACE | An economic-activity classification code, when a company has a usable NACE reference. | NACE must not be presented as an official DETE sector alias or a SOC job code. |
| IrishTalents internal taxonomy | Internal macro-sector, subsector or business-type groupings used for product organization when available. | It is not an official government classification and is not currently a basis for unsupported public aggregate claims. |
| SOC 2010 | An occupation classification used for job-title classification support. | SOC classification does not determine permit eligibility, Critical Skills status, sponsorship or legal advice. |
DETE labels, canonical aliases and historical mappings can change between source publications. IrishTalents may normalize a display label, but a public versioned mapping table is not currently exposed here. Treat cross-year category comparisons as source-aware, not as proof that every label has remained identical.
DETE files may use a legal entity name while a public brand uses another name. Alias and duplicate handling can be imperfect across historical files. A company page is not proof that every name variant belongs to one current employer.
Website, LinkedIn, careers URL, location and industry fields may be missing, stale or unverified. Unknown fields should remain unknown; they are not replaced with a guessed location, sector or hiring status.
A historical issued permit does not prove a live vacancy, current sponsorship, future permit, job offer, eligibility, approval outcome or willingness to sponsor a new candidate.
Rankings and subsets can exclude records with missing dimensions or unresolved entities. Do not interpret a company, county or sector list as a complete market census unless the official source explicitly supports that claim.
Use the route that owns the question, then read its period and caveat labels before comparing numbers.
Follow the public data refresh without treating historical permit activity as a job-list or sponsorship guarantee.
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