Compliance calendar for Irish employers
Reviewed by Mellow Editorial Team, HR & payroll content team
Every Irish employer has payroll, tax, and employment-law deadlines that recur throughout the year. Miss one and you can face Revenue surcharges, PRSI underpayments, or disputes with employees — so knowing what falls due, and when, matters.
Real-time payroll: every pay run
The most frequent obligation is also the one with the least flexibility. Under Revenue's PAYE Modernisation rules, you must submit a payroll submission (PSR) to Revenue via ROS on or before each payday — not monthly, not after the fact. This applies every time you pay an employee, whether that is weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
The submission captures each employee's gross pay, income tax (20% up to the standard rate cut-off, 40% above it), USC (at 0.5%, 2%, 3% or 8% depending on earnings bands), and PRSI. For Class A employees — the most common class for private-sector workers — the employee contributes approximately 4.1% in PRSI and you as the employer contribute approximately 11.15%.
Ireland does not use a personal allowance system. Instead, employees receive tax credits that reduce their liability directly, so your payroll software must be pulling current tax credit certificates (P2Cs) from Revenue before each run.
Late or inaccurate submissions attract interest and potential surcharges, so building the ROS submission into your payroll workflow — not as an afterthought — is essential.
Monthly and quarterly remittances
Even though you report in real time, the actual payment of PAYE, USC and PRSI to Revenue follows a different schedule.
Most employers pay monthly. The deadline is the 14th of the month following the liability period if you pay by cheque, or the 23rd if you pay electronically through ROS. Missing these dates triggers interest charges that accrue daily.
Small employers whose total annual liability is below a certain threshold may be eligible to remit quarterly rather than monthly. Revenue assigns this status — you do not self-select — so check your ROS account to confirm which schedule applies to you.
Annual returns and year-end tasks
The Irish tax year runs from 1 January to 31 December. By 15 February each year, employers must file the annual P35-equivalent data (now largely automated through PAYE Modernisation, but the year-end reconciliation still requires attention). You should also:
- Reconcile each employee's cumulative payroll figures against your ROS submissions for the year and correct any errors before Revenue's deadline.
- Issue updated tax credit certificates for the new year once Revenue generates them — employees may need to prompt you if their credits change.
- Confirm benefit-in-kind (BIK) values for any non-cash benefits provided, such as company cars or employer-paid health insurance, because these need to be reported through payroll.
Employment-law obligations that recur annually
Beyond Revenue, employment legislation creates its own calendar of obligations.
Annual leave accrues continuously. Every employee is entitled to 4 working weeks of paid annual leave per year (pro-rated for part-time or part-year workers). You are required to pay this at the employee's normal rate of pay and, where possible, to give reasonable notice of leave dates. Many employers carry out a leave audit at year-end or mid-year to ensure no one is accruing excessive untaken leave, which becomes a liability on your balance sheet.
Bank holidays (public holidays) are a separate entitlement from annual leave. Ireland has ten public holidays. Employees who qualify are entitled either to a paid day off, an additional day's pay, or a paid day off within a month — the choice generally sitting with the employer.
Contracts and policies should be reviewed at least annually. The Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act requires that employees receive a written statement of core terms within five days of starting, and a fuller contract within one month.
Pension auto-enrolment from 2026
From 2026, Ireland's new automatic enrolment pension scheme — My Future Fund — is being phased in for eligible employees who are not already in an occupational pension scheme. Employers will be required to make contributions on behalf of enrolled employees, with rates stepping up over several years.
If you do not already have a pension scheme in place for your workforce, My Future Fund will apply to you. Now is the time to review your current arrangements, identify which employees will be auto-enrolled, and factor the employer contribution into your payroll cost modelling. The administrative process will run through a central authority, but the payroll deduction and employer top-up will need to be built into your pay run from the point of enrolment.
Staying ahead of the calendar
The practical approach is to map each obligation against your payroll frequency at the start of the year: real-time submissions every payday, tax remittances by the 14th or 23rd of each following month, annual reconciliation in January and February, leave audits mid-year, and pension enrolment checks as My Future Fund rolls out. How Mellow runs payroll across six countries shows how a single workflow can handle multi-jurisdiction complexity — but even for a single-country employer, the same principle applies: systematise it, and the deadlines take care of themselves.
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