Neither the UK's Graduate visa nor Ireland's Stamp 1G requires a job offer to get started, covered in our comparison of the two -- but that ease is specifically about getting onto the permission, not staying past it. Both countries require a real, separate, sponsored work visa to remain long-term, and both attach a genuine salary requirement to it.
The UK: transitioning to a Skilled Worker visa
To stay in the UK beyond the Graduate visa, you generally need an employer to sponsor you for a Skilled Worker visa -- a fundamentally different mechanism than the Graduate visa, which requires no sponsor at all. Per gov.uk's own Skilled Worker visa page, the standard salary threshold is £41,700 per year, or the specific "going rate" for your occupation, whichever is higher. Gov.uk's own page also confirms a genuine reduced threshold of £33,400 per year applies in certain circumstances (excluding healthcare and education roles) -- though the exact eligibility rules for that lower figure sit on a separate gov.uk page ("When you can be paid less") and are worth confirming directly against your own occupation and circumstances before assuming you qualify, rather than trusting a third-party summary.
The practical point: your employer has to be a licensed sponsor, has to offer you a job that clears the relevant salary bar, and has to be willing to go through that sponsorship process before your Graduate visa runs out -- none of which the Graduate visa itself requires or guarantees you'll find in time, especially under the new 18-month version of the Graduate visa.
Ireland: transitioning to an employment permit
Ireland's equivalent step, per the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment's own Critical Skills Employment Permit guidance, runs on three salary tiers:
- €40,904 per year for restricted, strategically important occupations on Ireland's Critical Skills Occupations List, generally requiring a relevant degree.
- €36,848 per year -- a real, official, specifically graduate-focused reduced threshold that applies when you received your qualification within the 12 months before your application.
- €68,911 per year for other eligible occupations not requiring a specific degree, if you have the relevant experience.
Ireland also offers a General Employment Permit for job offers under 2 years' duration (Critical Skills Permits generally require a job offer of at least 2 years), though its own minimum salary figure isn't specified on the same page as the Critical Skills thresholds above.
The €36,848 recent-graduate threshold is a real, meaningfully lower bar than Ireland's general €40,904 figure -- a more concretely documented "give recent graduates a break" mechanism than the UK's own reduced-threshold system, at least based on what each government's own page states plainly.
The shared lesson
In both countries, the visa you land on right after graduation (Graduate visa, Stamp 1G) is deliberately easy to get and completely unsponsored. The visa you need to actually stay is the opposite: it requires an employer, a real salary floor, and (in the UK's case) a formal sponsor license on your employer's side. Treat the post-graduation window as a search period for that second, harder visa -- not as a status you can quietly extend indefinitely.
What this means for you
- Start your sponsored-job search well before your Graduate visa or Stamp 1G expires -- the follow-on visa in both countries requires a real employer commitment that doesn't happen instantly.
- Check whether your specific job and salary clear the relevant bar -- the UK's general £41,700 (or occupation-specific going rate) and Ireland's tiered €36,848/€40,904/€68,911 figures are all real, published numbers worth confirming against your actual offer, not assumed.
- Ireland's recent-graduate discount is more clearly documented than the UK's -- if your Irish job offer is close to the general Critical Skills threshold, check whether the 12-months-since-qualifying reduced rate applies to you specifically.
- A shorter Graduate visa (the UK's new 18-month rule) makes this search timeline tighter, not longer -- plan your sponsored-visa search assuming less runway than the old 2-year figure gave previous graduates.