June the 10th, 2025 – The number of work permits issued in Croatia is continuing to fall following tighter controls applied to the Law on Foreigners.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Brnic writes, the intensity of the import of foreign workers that has marked the Croatian labour market over recent years is slowly declining. This seemed to be the case even before the new, stricter legal rules for the employment of foreigners began to take effect in practice. The number of issued work permits in Croatia is continuing to fall. According to the latest data from the Interior Ministry (MUP) for the first five months of 2025, their number been lower for the second month in a row than it was last year.
A total of 83.3 thousand work permits in Croatia were issued, equal to about 11 percent less than in the first five months of last year. This interesting decline is evident in all economic sectors with the exception of trade. When viewed on a county by county basis, fewer permits were issued in all of them, except for Osijek-Baranja and Virovitica-Podravina counties. Petar Lovrić, a Croatian businessman with the longest experience in employment mediation, says this trend isn’t unexpected in any way.
“First and foremost, it turns out that the estimates made two years ago that Croatia would need half a million workers were unrealistic and exaggerated. For an economy like Croatia’s and with the type of growth dynamics it has, the market objectively needs to employ around 120,000 to 130,000 foreign workers,” explained Lovrić. It will only be possible to talk seriously about the numbers themselves and the analysis of the current situation in autumn, when the effects of the new law on foreign workers will begin to be fully felt in practice.
In his opinion and in general, there are three reasons why the number of work permits issued in Croatia is starting to fall. Firstly, structural renovation in some old buildings, which has greatly contributed to the trend of increasing demand for foreign, primarily unskilled workers, has already covered the shortage on the domestic market. Second, the increase in wages that is noticeable in Croatia has helped make certain jobs that were previously only taken up by foreigners attractive and acceptable to local people, and the third reason is the new Law on Foreigners.
“Those amendments have greatly contributed to introducing more order in employment, both among the agencies themselves and among employers. In more recent years, they’ve taken advantage and very greedily created complete anarchy in employment,” Lovrić pointed out. There’s still a lot of room left to improve the system, because some regulations are missing, police departments and users interpret certain provisions differently, the standard for providing accommodation has yet to be defined in more detail. On top of all of that, the issue of verifying these work permits, for example for taxi drivers, is being resolved on the fly, he added.
One of the important issues that Lovrić pointed out is the problem of health insurance. “We’re receiving warnings about a silent boycott by GPs in taking on patients from third countries. That’s partly a consequence of the insufficiently defined method of health examination and the validity of the documentation reviewed before these people arrive in Croatia,” Lovrić explained.
It is unlikely that the trend of less work permits being issued in Croatia will cease. Their duration will also therefore be extended, to three years. After all, it’s already noticeable that among the approved work permits, only the number of those that have been extended is growing. The number of permits for new and seasonal workers is very much decreasing. By the end of May this year, out of a total of 83.3 thousand work permits in Croatia had been issued, 48.9 thousand were new, 26.9 thousand existing permits were extended, and 7.5 thousand seasonal workers were approved for employment.
At the same time last year, 63.2 thousand new work permits in Croatia were issued, 22.2 thousand of those already issued were extended, and 8.4 thousand were issued for seasonal workers. As for the country of origin of these workers, this year, the Nepalese have taken first place, with 17.1 thousand permits issued to them. Their number is increasing, which isn’t the case for people from Croatia’s neighbouring countries. Until very recently, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia were the main pool for plugging the Croatian labour market’s gaps. For workers from these countries the number of work permits issued in Croatia is also falling.
