Employment office to stop handling work-based residence permit

The Employment Office (TE Office) will not handle the work-based residence permit application any more from the beginning of next year.

Starting on 1 January 2025, the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) will be fully responsible for processing residence permits for employed persons, said Migri in a press release on Wednesday.

The change is part of the overall reform of TE Services, which involves transferring employment and economic development services from the central government to the municipalities’ employment areas on 1 January 2025.

At the same time, matters concerning residence permits for employed persons that were previously the responsibility of the TE Office will be transferred to the Migri.

“Until now, the processing of residence permit applications for employed persons and residence permit applications for seasonal work lasting more than six months has been carried out in two phases. First, the TE Office has made a partial decision, after which the processing has been transferred to us. In the future, the partial decision feature will be removed, and we will be responsible for processing these permits as a whole,” said Tuuli Huhtilainen, of Migri.

“In the future, the Finnish Immigration Service will be responsible for the discretion related to the partial decision-making phase, which includes the assessment of the terms of employment, the inspection of employer obligations, the consideration of income and labour market testing,” Huhtilainen added.

Labour market testing is used to examine whether there are suitable employees available for an employer’s vacancy on the Finnish or EU and EEA labour market within a reasonable time.

If suitable workforce is available, there are no grounds for the issuing of a residence permit for an employed person.

In addition, the Migri will process employee announcements on employees hired from outside the EU and EEA countries.

“Employers are obliged to report a foreign national they have hired who already has a valid residence permit and right to work. However, the announcement obligation does not apply to hiring EU citizens or their family members,” said the Migri official.

Employee announcements are submitted in the Enter Finland service.

Employees transferring from the TE Office and already in the agency will be introduced to new processing methods and tasks at the beginning of the year. The reform also requires extensive system and automation development.

“As a result, the processing of applications may temporarily slow down for a while at the beginning of 2025. There will also be a short break in decision-making between 1 and 8 January 2025 due to an update of Enter Finland and automated systems. The expected processing time for a positive decision will be two months at the beginning of the year, but we will quickly restore it to the target level of one month,” said Huhtilainen.