Slovenia's single permit for residence and work, the employer procedure

Slovenia's single permit is one document that gives a third-country national the right to reside and work. The administrative unit issues it, and the Employment Service of the Republic of Slovenia gives consent inside the same procedure. It must decide on that consent within 15 days of receiving the application.

Slovenia built the permit when it transposed the EU Single Permit Directive, whose logic is set out in the comparison of single permits across member states. The national implementation is what decides when a worker can actually start.

Who files and who decides

The application for issue or extension can be filed by the foreign national or by you as the employer. The worker must file the first application at a Slovenian diplomatic or consular mission in their own country. An employer may file at an administrative unit in Slovenia or at a mission abroad. Extension applications go to the administrative unit.

You do not obtain the Employment Service consent separately. The consent procedure starts ex officio, at the request of the administrative unit, on the basis of the application and the documents attached to it. That makes the quality of those attachments decisive on the day you file. If proof of the statutory conditions is missing, the Employment Service does not issue consent and the administrative unit refuses the application. There is no side procedure in which a late document is supplied without a cost to the timeline.

Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina and of Serbia follow a different route. For them the Employment Service issues a work permit under the bilateral labour agreement, and that permit counts as consent to the single permit issued by the administrative unit.

The conditions the Employment Service checks

Consent for employment is issued if the conditions in article 17 of the Employment, Self-employment and Work of Foreigners Act (ZZSDT) are met. The condition employers most often overlook is not paperwork about the worker. It is proof that the employer is actively operating.

• There is no suitable person in the register of unemployed. That is the labour market test, which you can run before you file.
• You are registered for the activity the worker will perform, and are not in liquidation or bankruptcy.
• You are actively operating. You meet this if at least one person has been employed full time and covered by compulsory social insurance with you for at least six months before filing, or if you as an individual have been covered for six months, or if you had at least 10,000 EUR of business inflows in each of the last six months into a transaction account opened in Slovenia.
• All tax obligations are settled and a signed employment contract is attached.
• In the last six months you have not dismissed workers for business reasons who meet the requirements for this post.

Employers registered for less than six months must invest at least 50,000 EUR into the activity the worker will perform before filing, and prove it. This provision stops more newly incorporated companies than any other.

Deadlines and costs to put in the plan

The start date is not set by the signature on the contract. It is set by service of the document, and the deadline that follows is short.

The Employment Service can withdraw its consent if the worker does not start or you do not register them for compulsory social insurance within the statutory deadlines. The cost is not one worker. Withdrawal means the administrative unit refuses the single permit application and the procedure restarts, fee and labour market test included.

Workers who already reside legally in Slovenia and will work in listed occupations have a shorter route, described in the guide to the fast-track hiring procedure, which allows work to begin on the consent plus the administrative unit's confirmation that the application was filed. Werklist runs these procedures for employers in Slovenia, and the scope of that work is set out on the employers page.

The most common planning error is counting forward from the date the contract was signed. A realistic calculation runs the other way, back from service of the document through the 15 days for consent, the 30 day window after the labour market test and the 5 working days for the test itself. Anyone who books flights earlier has bought a date the administration never confirmed.