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Job seeker visa in Europe: the four that exist

Visas8 min · 2026-10-26

A job seeker visa lets you enter a country to look for work without having a job offer first. Four European countries run one for people from outside the EU: Germany, Sweden, Austria and Norway. Portugal ran the best-known one in Europe until October 2025 and no longer does, which most pages on the subject have not caught up with.

They are not interchangeable. The length runs from six months to a year, the money you must show runs from about €1,100 a month to the equivalent of €13,000 up front, and on three of the four you are not allowed to earn anything while you search.

Which European countries have a job seeker visa

Each figure below comes from the government's own page, linked at the foot of this guide. Fees and thresholds move, so check the page for the country you are applying to in the month you apply.

On the official rules Germany is the only one of the four that lets you earn while you look, and it is also the longest and the cheapest per month. If you are choosing on paper rather than on where you want to live, that is the answer, and the rest of this guide is about the reasons the paper is misleading. Germany is also the deepest market we cover — German jobs that mention sponsorship.

Only Germany lets you work while you look

This is the difference that decides whether the visa is usable, and it is the one the comparison pages bury. Germany's Opportunity Card allows 20 hours of paid work a week during the search, plus two-week trial employments with a prospective employer. Sweden's permit does not: if you are offered a job you must apply for a work permit and may only start once you have applied, and then only for that employer in that profession. Norway's is blunter still — you cannot work at all, and you cannot start until the skilled-worker permit is in your hand.

Norway attaches three more conditions that nothing else in Europe does. The money must be your own and must normally sit in a Norwegian bank account. Your family cannot apply to join you. And the months you spend on it do not count toward permanent residence, so a six-month search costs you six months of the clock. When it ends you must leave Norway for a year before you can hold one again. Our Norwegian catalogue is correspondingly thin, and honestly so — jobs in Norway.

Portugal's job seeker visa no longer exists

Law 61/2025, published on 22 October 2025, removed the general job seeker visa from Portuguese law. Consulates and external visa centres stopped accepting applications on 23 October 2025, and appointments already booked after that date were cancelled. The law created a narrower skilled job seeker visa in its place, but that category cannot be used until a joint government order defines which professions count as qualified, and that order has not been published.

So "job seeker visa Portugal" currently describes nothing you can apply for, which is worth knowing before you pay anyone to prepare an application for it. Portugal still issues work visas on the strength of a contract, and it remains one of the easier European markets to job-hunt in without the local language: 82.3 % of the Portuguese ads we track are written in English, against a European norm far below that. Jobs in Portugal is the honest route now.

Why the money figure is quoted five different ways

Across the pages ranking for this search the German requirement appears as €947, €1,027, €1,091, €5,604 and €13,092. They are not all wrong. €1,091 is the monthly maintenance figure and €13,092 is the same requirement for a full year, which is what a blocked account has to hold. The smaller numbers are earlier years that were never updated, and €5,604 is a student figure from a different permit. If a page gives you one number without saying whether it is per month or per year, it has not read the source.

Austria's requirement works differently again: there is no published cash threshold, because eligibility is a points test rather than a bank balance. You need 70 of 100, and the weighting is unusually harsh on age — being under 35 is worth 20 points, under 40 is worth 15, under 45 is worth 10, and over 45 is worth nothing at all. Qualifications are capped at 40, language at 10. We have written the arithmetic out in full in the Red-White-Red Card guide, and the age weighting in the age limits guide.

What nobody mentions: the visa is the easy half

A job seeker visa solves a legal problem. It does not solve the language problem, and the four countries that offer one are among the least English-advertising markets in Europe. This is from our own index of 193,204 open listings across the twenty European countries we hold at least a hundred in, read ad by ad for the language it is written in.

So the visa gets you six months or a year in a country where ninety-six ads in a hundred are written in a language you may not read. That is the real constraint, and it is why Germany's twenty working hours a week matter more than the headline length: they buy you income and a reference while you learn. Austria's points table pays you for German at A1, which is a month of evening classes, and most applicants skip it.

The ads that do mention sponsorship are a small, findable set, and they are the ones worth a job seeker visa's clock. Workcamino lists only the ads that mention a visa or say the work can be done remotely — 1,772 of the 193,204 we track — and checks each one against its source every day, so a permit you fly in on is not spent chasing a listing that closed in August. Start with every ad in Europe that mentions sponsorship, or go straight to Germany, Sweden or Austria. If Germany is where you are headed, the Opportunity Card guide has the points table in full. Buen camino.

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