North Macedonia D visa for work: the order an employer has to follow

The D visa covers a stay longer than 90 days, and it is the fourth step rather than the first. Under the procedure published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, a diplomatic or consular mission issues it only after the Ministry of Interior has approved temporary residence. The fee for the application is 75 euros.

Which authority decides what

Three institutions are involved and each owns one piece. The Employment Agency of the Republic of North Macedonia handles the labour side of the file in Skopje, meaning the opinion and the work permit under the Law on Employment and Work of Foreigners. The Ministry of Interior decides on temporary residence and later prints the biometric residence card carrying the personal identification number. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, through its consular missions, places the D visa in the passport once the Interior decision exists.

Employers who read these three steps as one stack of paperwork lose the most time. The Employment Agency file and the Interior decision run on two separate clocks, and the second does not start until the first has finished. The consulate has no discretion to shorten the sequence, because its trigger is the residence decision itself.

The consular fees published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for 2026 are 75 euros for a visa application covering a stay over 90 days, which is the D visa, 60 euros for a short stay or transit visa, and 35 euros for children aged six to twelve. The fee is paid at submission and is not refunded if the application is refused, which is reason enough to audit the file before booking the appointment.

EU citizens enter without a visa, so the D visa step drops out for them. It does not remove the obligation to regulate residence and work under the Law on Foreigners and the Law on Employment and Work of Foreigners, so the employer still files the same case with the Employment Agency and the Ministry of Interior.

The sequence step by step

The employer drives this order, not the worker. The worker appears in person only at step 3 and step 5. Everything before that is a file the employer assembles and defends, and the labour half of it is set out in the work and residence permit procedure.

Foreign documents and the mistake that repeats

Documents issued outside North Macedonia, including the diploma, the birth certificate and the certificate of no criminal record, are submitted with an apostille from the issuing country and a translation by an authorised court translator whose signature is certified by a notary. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs document list requires this, and it is the most common reason a file comes back.

The costliest version of the error is doing the apostille and the translation in the wrong order. If the document is translated first and apostilled afterwards, the apostille itself is untranslated and the consulate asks for a new translation. For a file coming from Kathmandu or Manila that means shipping the originals again and losing two to three weeks, usually after the flight has been booked. Apostille first, translation second, notary last.

The second recurring error is a timing one. The D visa carries its own entry validity, and if the worker does not enter inside that window the sequence restarts at the consulate with another 75 euro fee. After entry, address registration and card collection have deadlines of their own, covered in accommodation and address registration, while the filing with the Employment Agency happens before the first working day, as described in registering the start of work.

A realistic plan for one third country worker runs backwards from the first working day: the card, then the entry, then the consular appointment, then the Interior decision, and at the front of it the Employment Agency file. Employers who plan forwards from the date they need someone on site tend to drop one of the five steps. Each of the five steps counts its own time, and none of them starts running until the file at the step before it is closed.