Belgium single permit: which region decides and how long it takes

Belgium issues one card but runs two decisions. The region of the place of employment (Flanders, Wallonia or Brussels Capital) decides the work component; the federal Immigration Office decides the residence component. The legal deadline is four months from a complete file, under the cooperation agreement in force since 1 January 2019.

Who decides what

Belgium transposed the Single Permit Directive 2011/98/EU through a cooperation agreement between the federal state and the three regions, applicable since 1 January 2019 and set out by the Federal Public Service Employment (werk.belgie.be). The agreement did not create a single national authority. It created a single application with two decision makers.

The work component belongs to the region where the workplace is located, not where the company has its registered seat. A logistics site in Ghent is assessed by the Flemish Department of Work, a plant in Charleroi by SPW Emploi in Wallonia, an office in Schaerbeek by Brussels Economy and Employment. The residence component belongs to the federal Immigration Office (dofi.ibz.be), which checks public order, documents and the right of stay. Only when both parts are positive is the single permit issued and the worker collects the card at the municipality after arrival.

The employer files, not the worker. In Flanders the file goes through the Working in Belgium portal described on vlaanderen.be; Wallonia and Brussels operate their own regional channels. The application is then forwarded internally to the Immigration Office. An employer who prepares a residence file and no regional labour file has prepared the lesser half: the regional decision is the gating one, and the federal side cannot proceed without it.

The four month deadline and what precedes it

The Federal Public Service Employment states a legal decision period of four months from the moment a file is complete. Before that clock starts there is an admissibility check: the region verifies that the mandatory documents are present and declares the file admissible or returns it. A file returned as inadmissible has not consumed a single day of the four months, which is why an employer planning against a start date should count from the admissibility notice rather than from the day the file was uploaded.

Costs sit at two levels. The regional handling fee is set per region and per permit type, and the federal contribution to the residence file is set by royal decree and paid before the file is admissible. Both figures are published on the regional portal and on dofi.ibz.be and are revised periodically, so take the amount from the page for the region of the workplace in the year of filing rather than from a previous application.

Salary thresholds work the same way. The highly skilled route and the EU Blue Card both require a gross annual salary above a threshold that is indexed every year and differs between Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. There is no single Belgian figure. For a 2026 hire, read the 2026 threshold on the page of the deciding region, and check it again if the start date slips into the following year, because an indexed threshold that rises in January can put an unchanged salary below the line.

Validity, renewal and a change of employer

A single permit is issued for a period of up to twelve months and is renewable, as the Federal Public Service Employment sets out. Renewal is filed by the employer before expiry, and the same regional plus federal split applies to the renewal as to the first application.

A change of employer is the failure mode that costs the most time. The authorisation attaches to the employer named in the decision, so moving a worker to another company, and in many cases to a workplace in another region, generally requires a new application rather than an amendment. The four month deadline restarts. Employers who reorganise sites mid permit, or who plan to transfer a worker from a Flemish site to a Walloon one, should treat the move as a fresh file and plan the transfer date accordingly.

Two comparisons are useful when Belgium sits in a wider corridor. The directive behind the Belgian card, and how the same instrument produces different documents elsewhere, is set out in the single permit explained. The Czech equivalent, which gates the hire on a public vacancy register instead of a regional authority, is described in the Czech Employee Card, and the relative processing times are collected in the timeline by country.

The practical planning rule for Belgium is to identify the region of the workplace first, read that region's threshold and fee for the current year, and count the four months from the admissibility notice. Employer duties across the three Belgian regions are collected on the employers page.