JobsPlus Employer Incentive

JobsPlus pays an employer a cash incentive for recruiting a person who has been on the Live Register long term. Published rates provide a fixed quote over two years for a recruit unemployed more than 24 months, and a lower rate for shorter durations, paid monthly in arrears while the person remains employed full time. Employers about to hire who have not yet made an offer.

What this scheme funds

Up to a fixed quote over two years for hiring a long-term unemployed candidate.

  • A monthly cash incentive against the cost of an eligible full-time hire
  • Any sector, including retail and hospitality that grant schemes exclude

What it does not fund

These costs are routinely ruled ineligible under this scheme.

  • Existing employees
  • Part-time roles below the qualifying hours
  • Replacement of a worker made redundant

Who is eligible

Eligibility is decided by Department of Social Protection, not by Digital Bridge.

  • The recruit qualifies based on time on the Live Register
  • The role is full time, normally 30 hours or more per week across at least four days
  • The employer is tax compliant and the employment is additional

How to apply

Typical end-to-end timeline: Payments begin after the application is processed and continue monthly while the employment continues.

  • Check the candidate's eligibility before making the offer
  • Register as an employer on the JobsPlus system
  • Have the candidate obtain their eligibility confirmation
  • Submit the application once the employment begins

Evidence you will need

Applications are usually delayed by missing paperwork rather than by weak projects.

  • Employer tax clearance
  • Candidate eligibility confirmation
  • Payroll records

Why applications get rejected

The recurring reasons assessors give under this scheme.

  • Candidate not on the Live Register long enough
  • Role below qualifying hours

What Digital Bridge delivers under this scheme

Illustrative net cost applies the published rate (Cash incentive paid monthly in arrears over two years) to our published engagement bands. It is arithmetic, not an offer of funding.

  • Careers page and application capture so hires are documented properly — list from €1,200, illustrative net cost Not covered — JobsPlus is a cash payment against payroll, not a cost-share grant

Who decides this grant, and what we are responsible for

Department of Social Protection decides eligibility, approval and payment under this scheme. Digital Bridge supplies the work and the documentation an assessor asks for from the supplier side.

  • Digital Bridge does not administer, assess, approve, pay or appeal any grant. Every decision is made by the funding body named on the scheme, under its own published rules.
  • This section is general information, not financial, tax, legal or grant-writing advice. It is not an application, a pre-approval, or any form of assurance that you will be funded.
  • Scheme rates, ceilings and eligibility change without notice and several supports are administered locally, so your Local Enterprise Office or agency may apply different rules to the ones published here. Confirm everything with the funder in writing before you commit.
  • Our questionnaire is a deterministic guide based only on the answers you give. It cannot see your accounts, your sector classification, your state-aid position or your previous awards, so it can suggest a scheme you are ultimately found ineligible for.
  • If an application is refused, delayed, reduced or clawed back, our fees for work you have instructed remain payable. We recommend you do not instruct chargeable work until your funder confirms in writing what it will support.
  • Costs incurred before a funder receives your application are almost always ineligible. Timing is your responsibility, and we will always tell you when we think you should wait.

How the JobsPlus works in practice

JobsPlus is an employment incentive rather than a business development grant. An employer recruiting someone who has been unemployed for a qualifying period receives regular payments over two years, paid monthly in arrears, with the amount depending on the duration of the person's unemployment. It is administered by the Department of Social Protection and eligibility attaches to the candidate as much as to the employer — the jobseeker's status determines whether the role qualifies. Registration must be in place before employment begins, which is the single most common reason employers miss out: they hire first and discover the incentive afterwards, when it is too late to register.

What we do as the supplier on the quote

This scheme is outside our supply entirely; we mention it because clients hiring their first digital or administrative staff frequently do not know it exists. The relevant practical point from our side is that hiring changes what software a business needs. A single-owner business can run on informal process; two or three staff cannot, and the systems that felt like overhead become necessary. If a company is planning a JobsPlus hire, that is a sensible moment to look at how work is recorded and handed over, before habits form around whatever spreadsheet is nearest.

What should an employer check before relying on JobsPlus?

JobsPlus is an incentive rather than a subsidy for a role you would not otherwise fill, and the eligibility test sits with the candidate, not the employer. That catches people out: an employer decides on a hire, budgets for the incentive, and then finds the preferred candidate does not meet the qualifying-period criteria. Check eligibility before making the offer, not after. The payments are made in instalments over the funded period and depend on continued employment, so the incentive should improve the economics of a role that already makes sense rather than make an unaffordable role affordable. Keep the employment records tidy: the recurring administrative problem is payroll evidence, not eligibility.

Does it apply to any sector?

Yes, which makes it unusual. Retail, hospitality and local services that are excluded from most enterprise grant aid can use JobsPlus.

Can we register for JobsPlus after making the hire?

Generally no — eligibility depends on registration and candidate verification in advance of employment commencing. Check the candidate's qualifying status and complete registration before the start date, as retrospective claims are not the norm.

Source and last review

Scheme parameters checked against JobsPlus — Department of Social Protection (https://www.gov.ie/en/service/09f281-jobsplus/) on 2026-08-21. Reviewed quarterly. Next scheduled review: November 2026. Digital Bridge is a supplier, not the awarding body. Eligibility, approval and payment are decided solely by the funding body named on each scheme. Figures below are the published scheme parameters as at the review date shown, and net costs are arithmetic illustrations of the published rate applied to our published prices. Always confirm current rules with the funder before you commit to any spend, because expenditure incurred before an application is received is almost always ineligible.

What changes in a business the week a first admin or digital hire starts?

Almost every process that survived on the owner's memory stops working, and it happens faster than people expect. A one-person business can keep quotes in a phone, jobs in a head and follow-ups in a vague sense of unease. The moment a second person is answering the phone, the information has to live somewhere both of them can see, or the new hire spends their first month asking questions and the owner concludes the hire was a mistake. Our practical advice to anyone planning a subsidised hire is to spend a small amount of time before the start date deciding where enquiries, jobs and customer records will be recorded — even if the answer is a shared spreadsheet with agreed columns rather than software. Habits formed in the first fortnight are the ones that stick, and rescuing a business from six months of undocumented handover costs more than getting it right at the outset.

Why does the registration sequence catch so many employers out?

Because hiring is urgent and paperwork is not. An owner finds a good candidate, agrees a start date, and only afterwards hears from an accountant or a peer that an incentive existed for exactly that kind of hire. By then the sequence has been broken, and schemes of this type are built around eligibility being confirmed before employment commences rather than reconstructed afterwards. The fix is unglamorous: when you decide to recruit, check the scheme before you advertise, not after you interview, and ask candidates about their qualifying status as part of the normal process rather than raising it at offer stage. Keep the registration reference with the employment file, because payments are made over an extended period and the person who set it up may not be the person handling payroll in eighteen months. This scheme sits entirely outside anything we supply — we flag it because clients keep discovering it too late.

How we decide what to quote for Jobsplus Employer Incentive

Digital Bridge delivers this work from Gorey Business Park in County Wexford on a fixed written scope — one price, one delivery date — and the client owns the finished work outright. JobsPlus pays an employer a cash incentive for recruiting a person who has been on the Live Register long term. Before a figure is given, four questions are answered in order, and a named person signs the scope off — it is never generated automatically.

  1. Is this the right job at all? We look at what you already have online, whether the domain and Google Business Profile are in your own name, and what Jobsplus Employer Incentive customers currently ask you for. If a repair or a single page would solve it, we quote that instead.
  2. What does the work have to achieve first? The scope is written around one outcome — enquiries, bookings, orders or credibility — and anything else is listed as optional so it can be dropped without renegotiating.
  3. What will it cost and when will it be live? Page count, content readiness, integrations and whether photography or copy still has to be produced set the price and the date, both fixed in writing before work starts.
  4. How will people in Jobsplus Employer Incentive find it afterwards? Local search setup is included in a build; ongoing SEO is a separate optional retainer you can start or stop with notice.

Checkable facts behind this Jobsplus Employer Incentive page

Author and reviewer: Joey Bray, founder of Digital Bridge, building and maintaining Irish business websites since 2016. Studio address: Gorey Business Park, Gorey, Co. Wexford. Phone: 085 224 1848. Every claim below can be checked before you speak to us.

  • Published starting prices, not estimates released after a sales call — see the pricing page for the full ladder.
  • Live client sites you can open and test yourself are listed in the work section.
  • One contact from first call to launch, rather than an account handler relaying messages.
  • A plain-text mirror of this page is published for AI assistants at the same path with a .md extension.