Ireland

The private limited company, or LTD, is the standard vehicle. You register it with the Companies Registration Office, known as the CRO. Filing online through CORE costs EUR 50, and incorporation typically wraps up in about a week once your documents and director identity verification, the IPN, clear. Formation-agent packages add a few hundred euro on top. You will need a registered Irish office address, at least one director, a company secretary and a constitution. Fees and timelines are current as of 2026. Confirm with the CRO before relying on them.

Yes. There is no residence or nationality requirement for shareholders. A company may be wholly foreign-owned, and you can form it remotely. The real constraint sits on the board. At least one director must be resident in the European Economic Area, and the UK no longer qualifies after Brexit. A board with no EEA-resident director must instead lodge a Section 137 non-resident bond. That means EUR 25,000 of cover, at a premium of roughly EUR 1,600 to 2,000 for two years. As of 2026.

The headline rate is 12.5% on active trading profits. It has not changed, and it applies to the great majority of companies. Passive or non-trading income, such as dividends, interest, rents and royalties, is taxed at 25%, and capital gains at 33%. Groups with consolidated revenue of EUR 750m or more fall under the Pillar Two global minimum tax and pay an effective 15% through a domestic top-up tax, in force since 1 January 2024. Rates are current as of 2026.

An Irish-incorporated company is automatically Irish tax-resident under the incorporation rule that has applied to all companies since 1 January 2015. The exception is when a double-tax treaty makes it resident elsewhere. Incorporation alone does not secure the 12.5% rate. That rate is reserved for a genuine trade, and a genuine trade requires real activity, real decision-making and real people in Ireland. If you control the company from another country, that country's CFC rules, not Irish law, may tax its profits to you. Substance is not optional.

It depends on turnover and where you are based. A resident Irish business must register once taxable turnover exceeds, on a rolling 12-month basis, EUR 42,500 for services or EUR 85,000 for goods. Those thresholds were raised on 1 January 2025 and remain unchanged into 2026. A non-established foreign trader making taxable supplies in Ireland has no threshold at all and must register from the first sale. The standard VAT rate is 23%.

This, rather than the incorporation itself, is usually the real bottleneck. Irish pillar banks apply strict anti-money-laundering checks. They are cautious with non-resident directors and with companies that lack local substance. Many require an in-person meeting and evidence of an Irish trading connection, and the process can take weeks. Electronic money institutions such as Revolut Business or Wise are the common practical workaround, though they are not full-service banks. Expect friction and plan for it. That is the picture as of 2026.

Yes, and as of July 2026 it is unreformed. Ireland has made no move to follow the UK's abolition. A non-Irish-domiciled resident is taxed on foreign income and gains only when that money is remitted to Ireland. There is no time limit and no annual charge, and the treatment applies automatically, with nothing to elect. This is now the sharpest contrast in Europe. The UK gives a new arrival four years before taxing worldwide income. Ireland taxes only what you remit, indefinitely. The catch is getting in. With the Immigrant Investor Programme closed, there is no way to buy your way into residency. You need an independent right of residence already, such as EU citizenship or Irish descent.

No, this is a persistent and costly myth. Several widely cited sources claim a EUR 200,000 deemed remittance charge hits non-doms after 15 years. No such charge exists. The claim appears to be a mix-up with the UK's former remittance-basis charge. The EUR 200,000 domicile levy applies only to Irish-domiciled individuals, and only when all three conditions are met at once: worldwide income over EUR 1m, Irish-situated property over EUR 5m, and Irish income tax paid of less than EUR 200,000. A non-domiciled resident sits outside it entirely. The levy matters for the reverse case, someone originally Irish-domiciled who moved abroad but still holds over EUR 5m of Irish property.

Not any more. The Immigrant Investor Programme once offered residence for a EUR 400,000 endowment or a EUR 1m investment. It closed to new applications on 15 February 2023, with effectively no notice, after an 11-year run. Nothing has replaced it. As of January 2026 the Department of Justice was still processing roughly 1,400 legacy files, representing about EUR 1bn, filed before closure. Some pre-2023 applicants may not receive Stamp 4 permission until late 2026. There is no successor and no credible sign of one. Firms still marketing an Ireland golden visa are farming traffic on a dead programme.

The Foreign Births Register, if you have a grandparent born on the island of Ireland. Adult registration costs roughly EUR 278, plus document sourcing and apostilles. It takes officially around 12 months, and realistically 9 to 18, from receipt of complete documents. After that, you are an Irish citizen with full EU free movement and no residence, investment or language requirement. For families with Irish ancestry, it comfortably outperforms every golden visa in Europe on every metric. Great-grandparents do not qualify unless the intervening parent was themselves registered on the FBR before your birth.

This is the single most important feature of the Foreign Births Register, and it catches families constantly. Citizenship passes down only if the parent was registered on the FBR before the child was born. If you register yourself after your children arrive, you secure your own citizenship but permanently cut off theirs. There is no reversing it. The practical rule is simple: register before, not after, having children if you want to pass the entitlement on. The documentary chain also has to be complete. You will need your Irish-born grandparent's birth certificate, your parent's birth and marriage certificates, and your own. Missing or destroyed records can end the claim.

The main option is Stamp 0, designed for persons of independent means. It requires evidence of EUR 50,000 of annual income per person, or EUR 100,000 for a couple, plus access to a lump sum for major unforeseen costs and private medical insurance. Note that this is income, not capital. A large balance sheet that produces little income will not qualify on its face. The route is deliberately unattractive. It is discretionary, renewed one year at a time, with no work rights and no access to state services. More importantly, time spent on Stamp 0 is generally not reckonable for naturalisation, so it will very likely buy you nothing toward an Irish passport. Verify this with Immigration Service Delivery before treating it as any kind of citizenship strategy.

Five years of reckonable residence out of the last nine, including one continuous year immediately before applying, gets you there. There is no language or integration test, which is unusual in Europe and a genuine advantage. Spouses of Irish citizens qualify after three years of marriage and three years of reckonable residence. The obstacle is upstream. Reckonable residence excludes student time and generally Stamp 0 time. So check your actual stamp history against the Immigration Service Delivery residency calculator before assuming the clock is running. Processing has historically been slow and unpredictable on top of the residence period.

Ireland is a shelter for offshore capital, not a low-tax country for people who earn. The top marginal rate on employment and remitted income reaches about 52%. That is income tax at 40% plus USC and PRSI. Capital gains tax is a flat 33%, unchanged since 2012. There is no wealth tax. Inheritances are caught by Capital Acquisitions Tax at 33% above group thresholds, roughly EUR 400,000 parent-to-child as of Budget 2025. Crucially, CAT is not escaped by non-domicile status. It bites on the residence of the disponer or the beneficiary. So a non-dom resident can still expose gifts and inheritances to 33%.

Yes, Ireland allows dual citizenship. That means getting an Irish passport, whether through descent via the Foreign Births Register or through naturalisation, does not require you to give up your existing nationality. The passport is among the strongest in the world, consistently ranked in the top five, and it is the only English-speaking EU passport that carries full EU free movement. Citizenship and domicile are separate concepts. An Irish passport is entirely compatible with non-Irish domicile, so the non-dom remittance basis can survive naturalisation. That said, the longer you live in Ireland and the deeper your ties become, the harder a foreign-domicile claim is to defend against Revenue.