The Examination Is of Your Employer: One Croatian on the Books for a Year, a Hundred Thousand Euros Through the Account, and One Croatian for Every Five Foreigners
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Guatemala on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.
154 exceptions recorded across 56 countries · none match Guatemala to Croatia · Residency through work
Croatia abolished its annual quota and replaced it with a labour market test, and the test the applicant meets is almost trivial next to the test the employer meets. Under article 97 the Ministry issues the residence and work permit on a positive opinion from the Croatian Employment Service, and article 98 makes the employer ask for a labour market test first: the Service checks the unemployment register and tries to place a domestic worker. The real gate is article 99, and it has been rewritten twice in fourteen months. Since NN 55/2026 the Service may only give a positive opinion if the employer has had the same Croatian, EEA or Swiss worker on an indefinite full-time contract continuously for the past year; if at least 100,000 euros (a company) or 40,000 euros (a sole trader) has come through its account in the past twelve months; if the account has not been blocked for more than 30 continuous days in the past six; and if its Croatian and EEA full-time staff are at least 20 per cent of the number of third-country nationals it employs, or 10 per cent in a shortage occupation. The ratio was a quarter of all staff in 2020, 16 per cent of the third-country headcount in 2025 and 20 per cent in 2026. The one group that softens it is the Croatian diaspora: article 99(13) counts a returning emigrant or their descendant on the article 79.a permit as a Croatian worker for the purposes of the ratio.
At a glance
- Employer's Croatian staff requirement
- The same Croatian, EEA or Swiss worker on an indefinite full-time contract for the past year
Article 99(1) point 4 of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 26 of NN 55/2026. The 2020 Act asked only for one such worker in the previous six months.
- Employer's turnover test
- 100,000 euros through the account in 12 months for a company, 40,000 euros for a sole trader
Article 99(1) point 7 of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 26 of NN 55/2026. NN 40/2025 had set 10,000 euros a month and 15,000 euros over six months respectively.
- Ratio of domestic to foreign staff
- At least 20 per cent of the third-country headcount
Article 99(11) of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 26 of NN 55/2026; it was 16 per cent under NN 40/2025 and, differently measured, a quarter of all staff under the 2020 Act.
- Ratio in a shortage occupation
- At least 10 per cent
Article 99(12) of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 26 of NN 55/2026, for occupations in the decision under article 101(1).
- Blocked account
- Not more than 30 continuous days in the past 6 months
Article 99(1) point 8 of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 26 of NN 55/2026.
- Labour market test result
- Valid for 90 days
Article 98(5) of the Zakon o strancima: the employer may apply for the permit within 90 days of being told the result, and the Service answers within 15 days under article 98(4).
- Returning emigrants in the ratio
- Counted as Croatian workers
Article 99(13) of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 26 of NN 55/2026, for holders of the article 79.a permit and of permanent residence under article 156(1) point 2.
Requirements
- An employer that passes the article 99 tests, which is the binding condition
- A labour market test requested by the employer before the application, unless an exemption in article 110 applies
- An employment contract and proof that you meet what the employer asked for in the test
- A decision on recognition of a foreign professional qualification if the job is a regulated profession
- The general conditions of article 59
Country-level policy
Since 15 March 2025 a single document issued by the ministry competent for demography and emigration does four separate jobs in Croatian immigration law, and the Zakon o strancima does not say what it takes to obtain one. It proves entitlement to temporary residence for the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community under article 79.a, which carries no means test and no insurance test. It lets the holder be employed or self-employed with no residence and work permit. After three continuous years it opens permanent residence under article 156(1) point 2. And since 4 June 2026 it does something for the holder's employer as well: article 99(13) counts the holder among the employer's Croatian workers for the ratio that decides whether anybody else can be hired from outside the Union. The statute names the ministry, names the four classes of person the certificate may describe - an emigrant, a family member, a descendant, a family member of a descendant - and leaves everything else to administration.
Most countries have one permanent residence. Croatia has two, they sit in adjoining chapters of the Zakon o strancima, and the difference between them decides whether a person ever has to sit a Croatian examination. Dugotrajni boravak, the Union long-term residence of Directive 2003/109, is reached after five continuous years of temporary residence and asks for a travel document, means of support, health insurance, no danger to public order - and knowledge of Croatian and the Latin script. Stalni boravak, the national permanent residence, is not open to everybody: article 156(1) lists the eight classes who may ask for it, among them the spouse of a Croatian citizen after four years, a returning Croatian emigrant or their descendant after three, and a graduate after five of which three were a degree. For those people article 157(4) asks for a valid foreign travel document and that the applicant not be a danger to public order, national security or public health, and nothing else at all. The language examination has fee-paying providers and its own exemptions - preschool children, anyone schooled in Croatia, and anyone over 65 who is not in work - but the simpler fact is that the people the state most wants back never meet it.
What applies to you
Nothing changes for a citizen of Guatemala
We have no rule recorded that treats your citizenship differently here, so the general rule above is the one that applies to you. That is an answer, not a gap.
What the law says
«(1) Prije podnošenja zahtjeva za izdavanje dozvole za boravak i rad poslodavac je dužan zatražiti provedbu testa tržišta rada kod područne službe odnosno ureda Hrvatskog zavoda za zapošljavanje»Our translation - not official
(1) Before lodging an application for the issue of a residence and work permit the employer is obliged to request that a labour market test be carried out by the regional service or office of the Croatian Employment Service
The test is asked for by the employer, not the worker. The sentence continues with the exemptions, among them article 110.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«(2) Test tržišta rada iz stavka 1. ovoga članka obuhvaća provjeru stanja u evidenciji nezaposlenih osoba i postupak posredovanja u cilju zapošljavanja radnika s nacionalnog tržišta rada.»Our translation - not official
(2) The labour market test under paragraph 1 of this article comprises a check of the state of the register of unemployed persons and a procedure of mediation with the aim of employing a worker from the national labour market.
What the test is: a register check and an attempt to place somebody already here.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«poslodavac u posljednjih godinu dana ima zaposlenog u kontinuitetu najmanje jednog istog radnika državljanina Republike Hrvatske odnosno državljanina države članice EGP-a ili Švicarske Konfederacije na neodređeno i puno radno vrijeme na području Republike Hrvatske»Our translation - not official
the employer has had the same worker, a national of the Republic of Croatia or a national of an EEA member state or the Swiss Confederation, continuously employed for an indefinite period and full time on the territory of the Republic of Croatia in the past year
The same worker, continuously, for a year - not merely one such worker at some point.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«u posljednjih 12 mjeseci ima priljev po transakcijskom računu: a) poslodavac – pravna osoba u najmanjem iznosu od 100.000 eura b) poslodavac – fizička osoba u najmanjem iznosu od 40.000 eura»Our translation - not official
in the past 12 months has an inflow to the transaction account: a) an employer that is a legal person, of at least 100,000 euros; b) an employer that is a natural person, of at least 40,000 euros
Money through the account rather than declared turnover, and paragraph 4 of the same article defines the inflow as every payment made into it.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«(11) Hrvatski zavod za zapošljavanje izdat će pozitivno mišljenje ako je broj zaposlenih radnika državljana Republike Hrvatske odnosno državljana države članice EGP-a ili Švicarske Konfederacije zaposlenih na puno radno vrijeme kod poslodavca u trenutku podnošenja zahtjeva najmanje 20 % broja zaposlenih radnika državljana trećih zemalja.»Our translation - not official
(11) The Croatian Employment Service shall issue a positive opinion if the number of employed workers who are nationals of the Republic of Croatia or nationals of an EEA member state or the Swiss Confederation employed full time by the employer at the moment the application is lodged is at least 20 per cent of the number of employed workers who are third-country nationals.
The ratio, measured against the foreign headcount rather than against total staff.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«(12) U slučaju zapošljavanja državljana treće zemlje u zanimanju navedenom u odluci iz članka 101. stavka 1. ovoga Zakona Hrvatski zavod za zapošljavanje izdat će pozitivno mišljenje ako je broj zaposlenih radnika državljana Republike Hrvatske odnosno državljana države članice EGP-a ili Švicarske Konfederacije zaposlenih na puno radno vrijeme kod poslodavca u trenutku podnošenja zahtjeva najmanje 10 % broja zaposlenih radnika državljana trećih zemalja.»Our translation - not official
(12) In the case of the employment of third-country nationals in an occupation named in the decision under article 101(1) of this Act, the Croatian Employment Service shall issue a positive opinion if the number of employed workers who are nationals of the Republic of Croatia or nationals of an EEA member state or the Swiss Confederation employed full time by the employer at the moment the application is lodged is at least 10 per cent of the number of employed workers who are third-country nationals.
Half the ratio for a shortage occupation, which is the only discount in the provision.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«(13) U broj zaposlenih radnika državljana Republike Hrvatske iz stavka 1. točke 4. te stavaka 2., 11. i 12. ovoga članka uračunavaju se i hrvatski iseljenici, članovi obitelji hrvatskog iseljenika, potomci hrvatskog iseljenika i članovi obitelji potomka hrvatskog iseljenika kojima je na temelju potvrde ministarstva nadležnog za demografiju i useljeništvo odobren privremeni boravak u svrhu useljavanja i povratka hrvatskog iseljeništva ili odobren stalni boravak na temelju članka 156. stavka 1. točke 2. ovoga Zakona.»Our translation - not official
(13) Croatian emigrants, family members of a Croatian emigrant, descendants of a Croatian emigrant and family members of a descendant of a Croatian emigrant who, on the basis of a certificate of the ministry competent for demography and emigration, have been granted temporary residence for the purpose of the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community or permanent residence on the basis of article 156(1) point 2 of this Act shall also be counted in the number of employed workers who are nationals of the Republic of Croatia under paragraph 1 point 4 and paragraphs 2, 11 and 12 of this article.
The diaspora route and the labour market gate are joined here: a returning descendant counts on the Croatian side of the ratio.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«(9) Hrvatski zavod za zapošljavanje izdat će pozitivno mišljenje ako je broj zaposlenih radnika državljana Republike Hrvatske odnosno državljana države članice EGP-a ili Švicarske Konfederacije zaposlenih na puno radno vrijeme kod poslodavca u trenutku podnošenja zahtjeva najmanje 16 % broja zaposlenih radnika državljana trećih zemalja.»Our translation - not official
(9) The Croatian Employment Service shall issue a positive opinion if the number of employed workers who are nationals of the Republic of Croatia or nationals of an EEA member state or the Swiss Confederation employed full time by the employer at the moment the application is lodged is at least 16 per cent of the number of employed workers who are third-country nationals.
The ratio as NN 40/2025 set it, fourteen months before it was raised. Quoted because the escalation is the fact.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
Practical notes
Narodne novine publishes acts as they were passed and does not consolidate them, so the current text of the Zakon o strancima is the 2020 Act read together with the amending acts of NN 114/2022, NN 151/2022, NN 40/2025 and NN 55/2026. Every article cited here was checked against all four.
The 2026 version of article 99 was read in NN 55/2026, which took effect on the eighth day after publication on 27 May 2026. The earlier versions in the 2020 Act and in NN 40/2025 are quoted only to show the movement.
Thirty-two categories in article 110 escape both the labour market test and the Employment Service opinion, among them key personnel, self-employment on a 51 per cent holding, holders of the EU Blue Card, professional sportspeople, researchers and teachers. The investor record reads that article.
The shortage occupation list is a decision of the Employment Service's governing council under article 101(1) and is not published in Narodne novine; it has not been read.
This record does not read the Pravilnik of the Ministry competent for labour that article 99(17) says sets the manner and procedure of issuing the opinion.
- issuesNN 55/2026, Zakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o strancima
Narodne novine
About this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
- issuesNN 133/2020, Zakon o strancima
Narodne novine
About this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
- issuesNN 40/2025, Zakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o strancima
Narodne novine
About this source
Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source