🇱🇻 Tax Refunds for Latvian Workers in Ireland: The Reliefs Settled Workers Never Claim

Being an EU citizen changes less than you'd think

As a Latvian citizen you don't need an employment permit, you don't have a stamp, and you can move between employers without asking anyone. Citizens Information confirms that EEA citizens can live and work in Ireland without an employment permit.

For tax, it changes almost nothing.

Irish tax residence is decided by days in the country — 183 in a tax year, or 280 across the current and previous year together, provided you were here more than 30 days in the current one. Your passport doesn't enter the test. Revenue sets this out on its tax residence page. Our tax residence checker runs the day count for you. Once resident, you get the same credits as an Irish citizen: a €2,000 Personal Tax Credit and a €2,000 Employee Tax Credit in 2026, €4,000 together, with the first €44,000 of a single person's income taxed at 20%. And you have the same obligation to claim everything else yourself.

One rule matters for the year you arrive or the year you leave. In a year you are not Irish tax resident, you still get full Irish tax credits if at least 75% of your worldwide income is taxed in Ireland; below that, Revenue gives a proportion of the credits, in the ratio of Irish income to total income. For a Latvian who arrived in September and worked here for the rest of the year, or who left in March, that is usually the difference between a refund and no refund.

The one place free movement genuinely helps is speed: you can get a PPSN and start work faster than someone waiting on a permit. Which means you are less likely to have spent months on emergency tax, and more likely to have quietly overpaid for years in a different way.

Why long-settled workers are the biggest under-claimers

Nobody at Revenue will write to you about the Rent Tax Credit. Your employer doesn't know what you spent at the GP. Your payroll department has no idea that you launder your own uniform or that your spouse's hours were cut last year.

Ireland's PAYE system taxes your salary correctly and stops there. Everything else depends on you telling Revenue, and the longer you've been here without doing that, the more has accumulated. The gaps we see most in Latvian households:

• The Rent Tax Credit, which only started in 2022: 20% of rent paid, capped at €500 for 2022 and 2023 and €1,000 from 2024, €1,000 and €2,000 for a jointly assessed couple (Revenue). Census 2016 found 86% of Latvian-headed households in Ireland renting, the highest share of the ten nationalities profiled — so this credit applies to most readers of this page. Full detail in the Rent Tax Credit guide.
• Medical expenses across the whole family, relieved at 20% and never pooled into one claim — GP visits, prescriptions, physiotherapy, non-routine dental with a Form Med 2 (Revenue).
• Remote Working Relief if you work from home some days: 30% of electricity, heating and broadband for those days (Revenue).
• Flat Rate Expenses for your occupation — a fixed annual deduction that needs no receipts and that almost nobody in a hospital, shop, hotel or on a building site has set up.
• Joint assessment never requested because Revenue was never told about the marriage, or never revisited when one spouse's income changed.

Flat rate expenses deserve a closer look, because the jobs Latvians most often hold in Ireland are exactly the ones Revenue lists. The figures below are from Revenue's flat rate expenses list and are the same for every year from 2022 to 2026. The allowance is deducted from your taxable income, so it is worth 20% of the figure to a standard-rate taxpayer and 40% to a higher-rate one.

Two honest caveats. Revenue's list has no row for warehouse operatives, HGV drivers or general logistics staff — the only general driver entry is €52 for a driver in the building industry — so if that's your job, this particular relief doesn't apply to you. And once the allowance is on your record it stays there, so a nursing assistant who sets it up for 2022 also fixes 2023 onwards. See flat rate expenses in Ireland for the full list, and if you work in care, tax for healthcare assistants in Ireland.

Four years, stacked: a concrete example

Say you arrived from Daugavpils in 2008 and work as a healthcare assistant in a Dublin hospital on €34,000, supplying and laundering your own uniform. Your husband is a warehouse operative on €30,000. You've been married since 2016, you rent a two-bedroom flat for €1,400 a month, and your household spends about €600 a year on GP visits and prescriptions. Revenue knows about your marriage and assesses you jointly. You have never filed an Income Tax Return, because nothing ever seemed wrong.

Here's what four open years look like. Both of you are standard-rate taxpayers, so each deduction is worth 20%:

Three things to notice.

The Rent Tax Credit is worth different amounts in different years, and twice as much for a couple. €500 per person for 2022 and 2023, €1,000 from 2024; a jointly assessed couple gets €1,000 and €2,000. If you've seen "€1,000 a year" quoted flatly, that's the current figure applied backwards. And the doubling only happens once Revenue has the marriage on record. If you are assessed as two single people and only one of you is on the tenancy and pays the rent, the household gets €3,000 of rent credit instead of €6,000, and €3,900.80 overall; if you both pay rent, each of you can claim your own credit on your share.

The flat rate allowance is small per year and nobody bothers. €105.20 a year is not a figure anyone chases. Four years of it is €420.80, it needs no receipts, and the same claim fixes every year going forward. A nursing assistant on the higher rate of tax would get €841.60 for the same four years.

The medical figure is the one people leave behind. €600 a year across a household is unremarkable. Each receipt looks too small to keep, which is exactly why the four-year total is never claimed. You can only claim what your insurance didn't reimburse, and non-routine dental needs a Form Med 2 signed by the dentist.

Not in the table, but worth checking: if your husband's hours were cut in any of those years, part of his unused rate band and credits could transfer to you under joint assessment. That is a return-by-return question, which is what the four-year refund guide walks through, and the Tax Refund calculator gives you a first estimate.

Property and income still in Latvia

Ireland and Latvia have a Double Taxation Convention, signed in Riga on 13 November 1997. Revenue's table of treaty dates gives it effect for income tax and capital gains tax from 6 April 1999, and the synthesised text shows how the Multilateral Instrument has modified it since 2020–21. So the treaty is real and in force — but it does not operate by itself. The two situations that come up most:

You kept a flat in Riga, Daugavpils or Liepāja and rent it out. Under Article 6 of the convention, income from property can be taxed in the country where the property is. Once you are Irish tax resident it can also be within the Irish net. The overlap is resolved by Article 23: Ireland allows Latvian tax paid as a credit against the Irish tax on the same income. But you have to claim that credit on your Irish return, evidence the Latvian tax, and the credit is capped at the Irish tax attributable to that income. A tenant's bank transfer is not evidence of tax paid; a VID confirmation is. The mechanics are in foreign rental income tax in Ireland.

You are not Irish-domiciled, which is most Latvians here. Moving to Ireland doesn't by itself change your domicile. For someone who is Irish resident but not domiciled, Revenue's remittance basis means foreign investment income — including Latvian rent — is taxed in Ireland only on the amounts actually brought into the State. Leave the rent in a Latvian account and it generally stays outside Irish tax; transfer it to your Irish account and that transfer is taxable here, with the treaty credit then doing its work. The same logic applies to the gain if you sell the flat, and under Article 13 Latvia may tax that gain too. Get the position checked before you sell, not after. See the remittance basis in Ireland.

On the Latvian side, two things VID itself confirms. A private individual who lets property must notify VID within five days of signing the lease as unregistered economic activity; VID's rate table applies a 10% rate to receipts from economic activity where that right not to register has been used, and treats rental income with no notification as ordinary income at the standard 25.5% rate. And VID's own guidance defines a Latvian tax resident as someone whose declared place of residence is in Latvia or who spends 183 days or more there in a 12-month period — which is why a Latvian who has lived in Ireland for years but never updated their declared address can still look like a Latvian resident on paper (VID, Nerezidentu ienākumi un attālinātais darbs, 2023). Sorting that out is a job for a Latvian adviser; the Irish side is ours.

Your VSAA years and your PRSI years

One thing worth knowing even though it isn't a refund: the years you paid social insurance in Latvia before you left, recorded with the VSAA, and the years of PRSI you've paid here are not lost by having moved.

Under EU social security coordination, contributions from each EU state may be added to your Irish contributions to help you qualify for the State Pension (Contributory). You give the Department of Social Protection the country, employer and dates, and it requests your Latvian record directly. That matters for someone who worked in Latvia until 2006 and in Ireland since.

Two practical points: PRSI isn't refundable through the process in this guide — it's income tax and USC that get reviewed — and your PRSI record is worth checking for gaps now rather than at 66.

Emergency tax and your PPSN

Most settled Latvians left emergency tax behind a decade ago, but it still catches people in two moments: a second job, and a return to Ireland after a few years back home. Revenue's emergency tax rules are blunt. If you've given your employer your PPSN, you get a single person's rate band for four weeks — income above it taxed at 40% — and from week five everything is taxed at 40%. If you haven't given a PPSN at all, all pay is taxed at 40% with USC at a flat 8%.

The fix is to apply for a PPSN on MyWelfare.ie if you don't have one, and register the job in myAccount so your employer gets a Revenue Payroll Notification. The overpayment then comes back through payroll in the same year, or through a return afterwards. Step by step in emergency tax in Ireland.

What you need before you claim

• Your PPSN.
• myAccount access — registration needs your PPSN, date of birth and contact details, or sign in with MyGovID.
• Your IBAN, entered in your Revenue profile. Refunds go to the account on your record; without one, Revenue posts a cheque, which is slower.
• Your Employment Detail Summary for each year, downloadable from myAccount. It's built from what employers reported directly, so you don't need old payslips and it doesn't matter if a former employer has closed.
• Your occupation and uniform arrangement, so the right flat rate allowance goes on your record.
• Medical receipts for the whole household, plus Form Med 2 for any non-routine dental work.
• Your RT number and landlord details if you rent.
• Documentation of Latvian tax paid, if you're claiming a foreign tax credit — from VID rather than from a tenant or payer.
• Your spouse's income details, if you're looking at joint assessment.

If you'd rather not reconstruct four years of household paperwork yourself, our Tax Back service reviews every open year and every relief. No refund, no fee.

One deadline that actually matters

You can claim four years at a time. Revenue's four year rule is explicit: claims for 2022 must be made by 31 December 2026, and claims made after that cannot be repaid. As of 2026 the open years are 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 — each needing its own return.

If you've been here since 2005 and never filed a return, don't start with last year. Start with 2022, because it's the only one with a clock on it. And if you're thinking about moving back to Latvia, do the whole review before you go — while you still have an Irish bank account and active myAccount access. See leaving Ireland and the refund you might be owed.

Where to start

If you've been working in Ireland since 2022 or earlier and have never filed an Income Tax Return, open myAccount and start with 2022: request the Preliminary End of Year Statement and complete the return. That's the year with a deadline. Then check your flat rate allowance is on your record for 2026, so the years ahead fix themselves.

Related reading

• Nodokļu atmaksa Īrijā — this guide in Latvian
• Rent Tax Credit Ireland guide
• Flat rate expenses in Ireland
• Claiming PAYE tax back for the first time
• Foreign rental income tax in Ireland

Questions we get asked