If you want to hire a developer from India, a data engineer from Brazil or a SAP consultant from Morocco, the bottleneck is rarely the candidate. It is the permit, and specifically the four months the authorities are allowed to take.
Belgium's single permit combines work authorisation and residence authorisation into one procedure. It has been mandatory since 3 January 2019 for any third-country national who wants to work in Belgium for more than 90 days.
Here is how it actually works, what it does to your hiring timeline, and what changed in Flanders on 1 January 2026.
What a single permit is, and who needs one
A single permit is one document covering two authorisations: the right to work and the right to stay.
It applies to third-country nationals, meaning anyone who is not a citizen of the EU, the EEA or Switzerland, who will work in Belgium for more than 90 days. Below 90 days, a different and lighter track applies.
The residence permit issued at the end is limited to five years. Longer-term and unlimited status exist, but they come later and under separate conditions (source: Immigration Office).
The employer files the application, not the candidate
This is the single most common misunderstanding, and it costs weeks.
The application is submitted by the employer based in Belgium, or by a natural person with a main residence in Belgium acting in the employer's name. A candidate abroad cannot start the procedure on their own initiative.
Practically, that means the hiring decision has to come first. You cannot ask a candidate to "sort out their papers" and come back to you when it is done.
Which region handles it
The competent authority is the region where the worker's principal place of work will be: Flanders, Wallonia, the Brussels-Capital Region, or the German-speaking Community.
This matters more than it sounds. The three regions have different conditions, different salary thresholds and, since 2026, meaningfully different appetites for economic migration. The same candidate in the same job can be straightforward in one region and difficult in another.
The region assesses the work component. The Immigration Office assesses the residence component. The two run in parallel, and the region forwards the residence file automatically, so you file once.
How long it takes, and the four-month rule
Plan for four months, and treat anything faster as a bonus.
The sequence is defined: the region has 15 days to confirm receipt and check that the file is complete. If something is missing, you get 15 days to supply it. From the moment the file is declared complete, the region and the Immigration Office have four months to reach a joint decision, extendable for complex cases.
There is one detail worth knowing: if no negative decision is issued within those four months, the authorisations are considered as being granted. Silence works in your favour, which is unusual in immigration procedure.
For a recruitment process, the practical consequence is blunt. A candidate who accepts in October is realistically operational in February or March, and your onboarding, project staffing and client commitments have to be built around that.
The three routes, and why the classification decides everything
Most tech hires travel one of three paths.
- Highly skilled. The usual route for developers, engineers, architects and consultants. It turns on a gross annual salary threshold and on the role genuinely being a qualified one.
- Medium-skilled shortage occupation. If the function appears on the region's migration shortage list, a presumption of shortage applies and no prior labour market test is required.
- Everything else. Here a labour market test applies: you must show the role could not be filled from the local market.
The salary thresholds are indexed every year, so any figure you read in an article from last year is already wrong. Check the current regional threshold before you build an offer around it.
What changed in Flanders on 1 January 2026
Flanders reformed its economic migration rules, and the direction is clearly towards tightening.
Three changes matter for tech recruitment. A highly educated worker occupying a role that is not genuinely highly qualified no longer qualifies as highly skilled, so the job content is assessed and not just the diploma. Structural shortage is no longer judged on vacancy volume alone, which means occupations that cannot demonstrate genuine shortage face a labour market test again, with the vacancy advertised for at least five weeks on regional job portals. And an employer fee now applies to work authorisation applications in Flanders, indexed annually.
The medium-skilled shortage list used for migration was also cut sharply, to around twenty professions. If your route depended on that list, re-check it before assuming anything.
These changes come from professional immigration practice reporting rather than from a single consolidated official page, so confirm the current position with the Flemish employment administration before you file.
What this means for how you plan a hire
Three practical consequences.
Start the permit conversation during the shortlist, not after the signature. The four-month clock only starts when the file is complete, and incomplete files are the main reason timelines slip.
Decide the region early, because it is determined by the principal place of work and it changes the conditions you have to meet. A Brussels-based client site and a Flemish head office are not interchangeable here.
And be honest with the candidate about the calendar. Most drop-outs in international hiring happen in month three, when a local offer with a January start date beats a better offer with an unclear one.
In short
A single permit is mandatory for any non-EU professional working in Belgium for more than 90 days. The employer files it, the region where the person will work decides the work component, and the Immigration Office handles residence, in parallel.
Four months is the legal decision window, and no answer within it counts as a yes.
The route your candidate takes, highly skilled or shortage occupation or standard, decides how heavy the file is. That classification is worth getting right before you make the offer, not after. If you are building a tech team and want the permit path mapped before you commit to a start date, that is part of what our search and selection team does.
