Czech employee card quotas by consulate in 2026: where applications can still be filed

How many employee card applications each Czech mission may accept in a year is set by Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Coll., as amended by Regulation No. 520/2025 Coll. The quota belongs to the mission, not to the employer. Once it is used up the mission releases no further appointments, even if the vacancy is registered and the worker is ready.

How the quota is built and who administers it

The quotas are administered by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs under that regulation, while the residence decision itself sits with the Czech Ministry of the Interior. The regulation splits the allocation by individual mission and by application type, separating highly qualified from qualified workers and handling long-term business visas on their own line.

The annual figure is released month by month. For an employer that means the yearly number says nothing about appointment availability in a given week: what decides is the mission's monthly tranche. The Philippines carry an annual allocation of 848 employee cards for 2026, spread evenly across the months, which works out at roughly 70 filings a month. Moving seventy people through the Manila lane in a single month does not work, however clean the files are.

The second rule employers underestimate concerns unused capacity. For the special work visa, the annual capacity of the Czech consulate general in Lviv is 1,500 applications, or 125 a month, and unused capacity does not roll into the next month. A month in which nobody files is lost. Planning is therefore a question of steady flow, not of the annual total.

The figures by mission, in force from 1 July 2026

The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the following annual quotas with effect from 1 July 2026. The columns follow the two categories the regulation distinguishes.

Minsk and Moscow are suspended according to the Foreign Ministry, and their quotas go unused. An employer counting on a Belarusian or Russian worker has to file at another mission under the territorial competence rules, and that is a conversation held with the specific mission in advance, not on the day the filing was planned.

For the long-term business visa the standard annual quota is 12 applications per mission. There are two large exceptions: Belgrade holds 100 and Kyiv 24. Twelve a year is one filing a month, a figure that supports individual cases rather than any expansion plan.

How a quota breaks an otherwise clean hiring plan

The usual sequence runs like this. The employer registers the vacancy with the Czech Labour Office, clears placement in an economic migration programme, and signs employment contracts for fifteen people starting in November. The agency then finds the mission's monthly tranche exhausted and the first free appointments falling in February. Nothing in the file was wrong, yet the start date moves by three months and the offer and the medical clearances expire.

The order of steps that prevents this is the opposite of the intuitive one. Appointment availability at the mission is checked first, and only then is a contract signed with a start date. Availability is checked with the specific mission, because the quota is the mission's and not the employer's. Inside an economic migration programme the priority appointment is reserved as part of placement; the placement conditions are set out in the Qualified Employee Programme in 2026.

The cost the quota moves is of two kinds. The administrative fee for an employee card application filed at a Czech mission is CZK 5,000 and falls due at filing, so a delay does not raise the fee itself. What does get more expensive are the documents with limited validity: criminal record extracts, medical examinations and legalised education certificates are often reissued across a three month slip, and for a group of fifteen that is a line item in the tens of thousands of crowns.

The statutory decision period for an employee card is 60 days, or 90 days in more complex cases, running from a complete application. The quota sits before that clock, not inside it. The consular appointment is therefore the first item in the schedule, not the last.

Once the worker starts, the reporting rhythm set by the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the Labour Office takes over; the procedure from 1 April 2026 is described in JMHZ and reporting a foreign national's start date. The vacancy register that precedes the quota is covered in the Czech employee card and the vacancy register.

Quotas change by government regulation rather than by local practice, so the regulation in force is the only reliable source and is worth checking before each hiring cycle. The employer side of the chain is collected on the employers page.