Ending a foreign worker's employment in Croatia: notifying the police and the permit

When a foreign worker's employment in Croatia ends, the employer must notify the competent police station within 5 working days (MUP, 2026). The stay and work permit does not fall with the job. Under the amendments to the Aliens Act (NN 40/2025), the worker may be unemployed for a maximum of 60 days inside the permit's validity.

The notification: who files, by when, and what a miss costs

The duty sits with the employer, not the worker. The clock runs from the end of the employment relationship or from the moment the conditions under which the permit was issued cease to apply, and it is 5 working days (MUP, 2026). Working days matter: a termination on the Wednesday before a public holiday leaves less calendar time than it looks, so the notification is best sent in the same week.

It goes to the police station competent for the place of work, which is normally the station that handled the permit. In practice it is filed in writing with the worker's details, the permit number, and the date and ground of termination. Employers releasing several people at once usually send one letter with a schedule, which is accepted as long as the termination date for each person is stated.

A missed notification is not a formality. Under the penal provisions of the Aliens Act it is a misdemeanour of the employer, not of the worker. The consequence rarely lands at once. It lands at the next inspection, or at the same employer's next application, when the police administration sees workers recorded as still employed by a company that released them months earlier.

What happens to the permit

Until the amendments to the Aliens Act were published on 7 March 2025 and entered into force on 15 March 2025 (NN 40/2025), losing the job in practice meant losing the legal basis of stay. Now the end of employment by itself does not revoke the stay and work permit. The permit runs to the expiry date it was issued with, subject to one limit: permitted unemployment inside that period is a maximum of 60 days, taken at once or in several stretches (NN 40/2025).

Several stretches means the days add up. A worker who spent 25 days without work after a first termination and 30 days after a second has 5 days left before crossing the line. Neither the employer nor the worker has access to an official counter, so somebody has to keep that arithmetic by hand.

Moving to a new employer

The new employer files an application with MUP to transfer the permit rather than starting the whole administrative procedure again (NN 40/2025). That is the change that matters most to companies taking on a worker already in the country: instead of a fresh labour market test and a fresh queue, the case attaches to the permit that already exists. The steps are set out in the guide to changing employer inside the permit, and the deadlines that follow later are in the note on permit renewal deadlines and fees.

Two things still break the handover. The first is the 60 day limit, which keeps running while the new employer makes up its mind. The second is a notification the previous employer never sent: if the record says the worker is still employed by company A, company B's transfer application enters the procedure with contradictory data and draws a request for clarification. The order that works is termination, notification within 5 working days, then the new employer's application.

An employer hiring foreign workers should keep two columns in one place: the termination date beside the date the notification went out, and the running total of unemployed days per worker. The entry conditions that come before any of this are set out in the note on employer conditions for a positive HZZ opinion and on the page for employers.

The rule is short. Notify the police station within 5 working days, count the 60 days, and if you are taking on somebody else's worker, check that the previous employer actually filed.