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Country-wide policy

The Queue Is Written Into Law: Each Embassy Has a Yearly Allowance Spread Across the Months, and at Dresden It Is Zero

Czechia does not only decide who qualifies. It decides how many may ask. Section 181b of Act No. 326/1999 Sb. empowers the government to set, by regulation, the maximum number of applications that may be lodged at a given embassy within a year, spread evenly over the calendar months, for three things: a long-stay visa for business, a long-term residence permit for investment, and an employee card. Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb. does it embassy by embassy. The annual allowances for employee cards run from 60 at Dakar and Damascus to 11,500 at Lviv and 11,400 at Manila, with separate columns reserving part of each for named government programmes. Pyongyang is zero. Dresden is zero for both business visas and employee cards unless the applicant is visa-exempt under Regulation (EU) 2018/1806, is on a list in a Czech decree, or is in one of the government programmes - among them a digital nomad programme the regulation names and nowhere defines. An embassy not listed at all has no limit. The sanction is not refusal. Under section 169h(4) and (5) of the Act an application lodged after the month's allowance is gone is inadmissible: the proceedings are never opened, the application is treated as never made, and the forms, the documents and the fee are returned. Only the investment permit escapes: section 1(4) of the regulation lets those be lodged without limit.

Verified with official sourceMonitor - can change2026-10-10

Topics it changes

What it requires

  • Check the allowance at the embassy you will use before booking an appointment
  • Expect the yearly figure to be divided across the twelve months, so a full month means waiting for the next
  • Expect a reserved sub-allocation where you are applying inside a government programme

At a glance

What is rationed
Business long-stay visas, investment permits and employee cards

Section 181b(1) of Act No. 326/1999 Sb.

Investment permits
Not rationed: may be lodged without limit

Section 1(4) of Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb.

How the yearly figure is spread
Evenly over the calendar months

Section 181b(1) of Act No. 326/1999 Sb., which is why an allowance can be exhausted in January and reopen in February.

Dresden
Zero for business visas and for employee cards, subject to carve-outs

Section 2a(1) and (2) of Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb., which excepts the visa-exempt and the government programmes.

Largest employee-card allowance
11,500 a year at Lviv

Column 2 of Annex 2 to Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb., of which 11,000 is reserved for the qualified employee programme.

What happens when the month is full
The application is inadmissible and is treated as never made

Section 169h(4) and (5) of Act No. 326/1999 Sb., which also returns the forms, the documents and the fee.

An embassy that is not listed
No limit

Section 2 of Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb.

What the law says

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZákon č. 326/1999 Sb., o pobytu cizinců na území České republiky a o změně některých zákonů · § 181b odst. 1 · consolidated to 2026-06-12
«Vláda nařízením stanoví maximální počet žádostí, které lze podat v rámci období 1 roku rozvrženého rovnoměrně na jednotlivé kalendářní měsíce na příslušném zastupitelském úřadu, jde-li o žádosti o a) vízum k pobytu nad 90 dnů za účelem podnikání, b) povolení k dlouhodobému pobytu za účelem investování, nebo»

Our translation - not official

The government shall by regulation set the maximum number of applications that may be lodged within a period of 1 year, spread evenly over the individual calendar months at the embassy concerned, where the applications are for (a) a visa for a stay of over 90 days for the purpose of business, (b) a long-term residence permit for the purpose of investment, or

The enabling power. The third item is the employee card.

Read it at the source
About this source

The Czech state's own legal information system, run by the Ministry of the Interior and in service since 1 January 2024, which publishes the Sbírka zákonů a mezinárodních smluv and maintains every Act as a series of point-in-time versions. Three addresses serve the same material and they behave differently. e-sbirka.gov.cz (to which www.e-sbirka.cz redirects with HTTP 308) is an Angular single-page application: every address answers with the same 1,040-byte shell, and the text only appears once JavaScript has run, so it is readable by the extraction service and by nothing else. e-sbirka.gov.cz/sbr-externi is the JSON API the application calls; /dokumenty-sbirky/{staleUrl}/obsah returns the table of contents for a version, where staleUrl is the URL-encoded /sb/{year}/{number}/{YYYY-MM-DD}, and /dokumenty-sbirky/{dokumentId}/detail-zneni returns the version's title, its citation and the dates it is in force between. opendata.eselpoint.gov.cz/esel-esb serves the same corpus as linked data under ELIs of the form /eli/cz/sb/{year}/{number}, where the act's page lists every version it has ever had, which is how the version in force on a given day is found rather than guessed. Each version is also generated as a clean PDF and DOCX: POST-free GET to /sbr-externi/stahni/informativni-zneni/{dokumentId}/PDF returns a JSON body carrying a file id that is stable across calls, and /souborove-sluzby/soubory/{id} then serves the document itself.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: **The PDF and the web page are two manifestations of one document and neither is quotable throughout.** The generated PDF is typeset with soft hyphens at every line break - 2,055 of them in the 781,000 characters of Act No. 326/1999 Sb. - so a sentence that crosses a line comes out as 'na úze[soft hyphen] mí', and a quotation spanning one is unreadable even though it verifies. The web page has no hyphenation but doubles every term the CzechVoc dictionary links: 3,200 occurrences in the same Act, where 'cizince' renders as 'cizincecizince' and 'zaměstnanecké karty' as 'zaměstnanecké kartyzaměstnanecké karty'. A quotation therefore has to be taken from whichever manifestation the sentence survives in, and some sentences survive in neither, so the quotation is cut short rather than tidied. The versions it serves are **informativní znění**, informative consolidations: the Collection as promulgated is what has legal force. A version carries no cut-off date inside the document - the date is in the file name, in the address and on the page that serves it, and that is where the consolidation dates recorded here come from. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the central register of vacancies open to employee-card holders is kept administratively, the government-approved migration programmes that Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb. relies on by name - the qualified employee programme, the highly qualified employee programme, the key and scientific personnel programme and a digital nomad programme - are approved by the government and published nowhere in it, and the per-embassy allowance actually remaining is published by each embassy under section 181b(3) rather than here. Section headings for repealed sections are omitted from a version entirely, so a gap in the numbering is a repeal and not a dropped page.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZákon č. 326/1999 Sb., o pobytu cizinců na území České republiky a o změně některých zákonů · § 169h odst. 4 · consolidated to 2026-06-12
«je žádost rovněž nepřijatelná, pokud byl v příslušném kalendářním měsíci na příslušném zastupitelském úřadu podán maximální počet žádostí stanovený nařízením vlády vydaným podle § 181b odst. 2 pro jednotlivé vládou schválené»

Our translation - not official

the application is likewise inadmissible where the maximum number of applications set by the government regulation issued under section 181b(2) has been lodged in the calendar month concerned at the embassy concerned, for the individual government-approved

The sentence ends programmes or for other applications. Inadmissible is not the same as refused.

Read it at the source
About this source

The Czech state's own legal information system, run by the Ministry of the Interior and in service since 1 January 2024, which publishes the Sbírka zákonů a mezinárodních smluv and maintains every Act as a series of point-in-time versions. Three addresses serve the same material and they behave differently. e-sbirka.gov.cz (to which www.e-sbirka.cz redirects with HTTP 308) is an Angular single-page application: every address answers with the same 1,040-byte shell, and the text only appears once JavaScript has run, so it is readable by the extraction service and by nothing else. e-sbirka.gov.cz/sbr-externi is the JSON API the application calls; /dokumenty-sbirky/{staleUrl}/obsah returns the table of contents for a version, where staleUrl is the URL-encoded /sb/{year}/{number}/{YYYY-MM-DD}, and /dokumenty-sbirky/{dokumentId}/detail-zneni returns the version's title, its citation and the dates it is in force between. opendata.eselpoint.gov.cz/esel-esb serves the same corpus as linked data under ELIs of the form /eli/cz/sb/{year}/{number}, where the act's page lists every version it has ever had, which is how the version in force on a given day is found rather than guessed. Each version is also generated as a clean PDF and DOCX: POST-free GET to /sbr-externi/stahni/informativni-zneni/{dokumentId}/PDF returns a JSON body carrying a file id that is stable across calls, and /souborove-sluzby/soubory/{id} then serves the document itself.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: **The PDF and the web page are two manifestations of one document and neither is quotable throughout.** The generated PDF is typeset with soft hyphens at every line break - 2,055 of them in the 781,000 characters of Act No. 326/1999 Sb. - so a sentence that crosses a line comes out as 'na úze[soft hyphen] mí', and a quotation spanning one is unreadable even though it verifies. The web page has no hyphenation but doubles every term the CzechVoc dictionary links: 3,200 occurrences in the same Act, where 'cizince' renders as 'cizincecizince' and 'zaměstnanecké karty' as 'zaměstnanecké kartyzaměstnanecké karty'. A quotation therefore has to be taken from whichever manifestation the sentence survives in, and some sentences survive in neither, so the quotation is cut short rather than tidied. The versions it serves are **informativní znění**, informative consolidations: the Collection as promulgated is what has legal force. A version carries no cut-off date inside the document - the date is in the file name, in the address and on the page that serves it, and that is where the consolidation dates recorded here come from. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the central register of vacancies open to employee-card holders is kept administratively, the government-approved migration programmes that Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb. relies on by name - the qualified employee programme, the highly qualified employee programme, the key and scientific personnel programme and a digital nomad programme - are approved by the government and published nowhere in it, and the per-embassy allowance actually remaining is published by each embassy under section 181b(3) rather than here. Section headings for repealed sections are omitted from a version entirely, so a gap in the numbering is a repeal and not a dropped page.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZákon č. 326/1999 Sb., o pobytu cizinců na území České republiky a o změně některých zákonů · § 169h odst. 5 · consolidated to 2026-06-12
«Je-li žádost nepřijatelná, řízení není zahájeno a na»

Our translation - not official

Where an application is inadmissible, no proceedings are opened and the application

The sentence continues is regarded as though it had not been made, and goes on to require the forms, all documents produced and the administrative fee to be returned.

Read it at the source
About this source

The Czech state's own legal information system, run by the Ministry of the Interior and in service since 1 January 2024, which publishes the Sbírka zákonů a mezinárodních smluv and maintains every Act as a series of point-in-time versions. Three addresses serve the same material and they behave differently. e-sbirka.gov.cz (to which www.e-sbirka.cz redirects with HTTP 308) is an Angular single-page application: every address answers with the same 1,040-byte shell, and the text only appears once JavaScript has run, so it is readable by the extraction service and by nothing else. e-sbirka.gov.cz/sbr-externi is the JSON API the application calls; /dokumenty-sbirky/{staleUrl}/obsah returns the table of contents for a version, where staleUrl is the URL-encoded /sb/{year}/{number}/{YYYY-MM-DD}, and /dokumenty-sbirky/{dokumentId}/detail-zneni returns the version's title, its citation and the dates it is in force between. opendata.eselpoint.gov.cz/esel-esb serves the same corpus as linked data under ELIs of the form /eli/cz/sb/{year}/{number}, where the act's page lists every version it has ever had, which is how the version in force on a given day is found rather than guessed. Each version is also generated as a clean PDF and DOCX: POST-free GET to /sbr-externi/stahni/informativni-zneni/{dokumentId}/PDF returns a JSON body carrying a file id that is stable across calls, and /souborove-sluzby/soubory/{id} then serves the document itself.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: **The PDF and the web page are two manifestations of one document and neither is quotable throughout.** The generated PDF is typeset with soft hyphens at every line break - 2,055 of them in the 781,000 characters of Act No. 326/1999 Sb. - so a sentence that crosses a line comes out as 'na úze[soft hyphen] mí', and a quotation spanning one is unreadable even though it verifies. The web page has no hyphenation but doubles every term the CzechVoc dictionary links: 3,200 occurrences in the same Act, where 'cizince' renders as 'cizincecizince' and 'zaměstnanecké karty' as 'zaměstnanecké kartyzaměstnanecké karty'. A quotation therefore has to be taken from whichever manifestation the sentence survives in, and some sentences survive in neither, so the quotation is cut short rather than tidied. The versions it serves are **informativní znění**, informative consolidations: the Collection as promulgated is what has legal force. A version carries no cut-off date inside the document - the date is in the file name, in the address and on the page that serves it, and that is where the consolidation dates recorded here come from. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the central register of vacancies open to employee-card holders is kept administratively, the government-approved migration programmes that Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb. relies on by name - the qualified employee programme, the highly qualified employee programme, the key and scientific personnel programme and a digital nomad programme - are approved by the government and published nowhere in it, and the per-embassy allowance actually remaining is published by each embassy under section 181b(3) rather than here. Section headings for repealed sections are omitted from a version entirely, so a gap in the numbering is a repeal and not a dropped page.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedNařízení vlády č. 220/2019 Sb., o maximálním počtu žádostí o vízum k pobytu nad 90 dnů za účelem podnikání, žádostí o povolení k dlouhodobému pobytu za účelem investování a žádostí o zaměstnaneckou kartu, které lze podat na zastupitelském úřadu · § 1 odst. 4 · consolidated to 2026-07-01
«Žádosti o povolení k dlouhodobému pobytu za účelem investování lze podávat bez omezení.»

Our translation - not official

Applications for a long-term residence permit for the purpose of investment may be lodged without limit.

The one route the quota leaves alone.

Read it at the source
About this source

The Czech state's own legal information system, run by the Ministry of the Interior and in service since 1 January 2024, which publishes the Sbírka zákonů a mezinárodních smluv and maintains every Act as a series of point-in-time versions. Three addresses serve the same material and they behave differently. e-sbirka.gov.cz (to which www.e-sbirka.cz redirects with HTTP 308) is an Angular single-page application: every address answers with the same 1,040-byte shell, and the text only appears once JavaScript has run, so it is readable by the extraction service and by nothing else. e-sbirka.gov.cz/sbr-externi is the JSON API the application calls; /dokumenty-sbirky/{staleUrl}/obsah returns the table of contents for a version, where staleUrl is the URL-encoded /sb/{year}/{number}/{YYYY-MM-DD}, and /dokumenty-sbirky/{dokumentId}/detail-zneni returns the version's title, its citation and the dates it is in force between. opendata.eselpoint.gov.cz/esel-esb serves the same corpus as linked data under ELIs of the form /eli/cz/sb/{year}/{number}, where the act's page lists every version it has ever had, which is how the version in force on a given day is found rather than guessed. Each version is also generated as a clean PDF and DOCX: POST-free GET to /sbr-externi/stahni/informativni-zneni/{dokumentId}/PDF returns a JSON body carrying a file id that is stable across calls, and /souborove-sluzby/soubory/{id} then serves the document itself.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: **The PDF and the web page are two manifestations of one document and neither is quotable throughout.** The generated PDF is typeset with soft hyphens at every line break - 2,055 of them in the 781,000 characters of Act No. 326/1999 Sb. - so a sentence that crosses a line comes out as 'na úze[soft hyphen] mí', and a quotation spanning one is unreadable even though it verifies. The web page has no hyphenation but doubles every term the CzechVoc dictionary links: 3,200 occurrences in the same Act, where 'cizince' renders as 'cizincecizince' and 'zaměstnanecké karty' as 'zaměstnanecké kartyzaměstnanecké karty'. A quotation therefore has to be taken from whichever manifestation the sentence survives in, and some sentences survive in neither, so the quotation is cut short rather than tidied. The versions it serves are **informativní znění**, informative consolidations: the Collection as promulgated is what has legal force. A version carries no cut-off date inside the document - the date is in the file name, in the address and on the page that serves it, and that is where the consolidation dates recorded here come from. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the central register of vacancies open to employee-card holders is kept administratively, the government-approved migration programmes that Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb. relies on by name - the qualified employee programme, the highly qualified employee programme, the key and scientific personnel programme and a digital nomad programme - are approved by the government and published nowhere in it, and the per-embassy allowance actually remaining is published by each embassy under section 181b(3) rather than here. Section headings for repealed sections are omitted from a version entirely, so a gap in the numbering is a repeal and not a dropped page.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedNařízení vlády č. 220/2019 Sb., o maximálním počtu žádostí o vízum k pobytu nad 90 dnů za účelem podnikání, žádostí o povolení k dlouhodobému pobytu za účelem investování a žádostí o zaměstnaneckou kartu, které lze podat na zastupitelském úřadu · § 2a odst. 1 · consolidated to 2026-07-01
«období 1 roku podat na zastupitelském úřadu v Drážďanech, je roven nule;»

Our translation - not official

within a period of 1 year at the embassy in Dresden, is equal to zero;

The semicolon is followed by the carve-outs, which include the visa-exempt, a list in Decree No. 429/2010 Sb., the qualified employee programme and a digital nomad programme.

Read it at the source
About this source

The Czech state's own legal information system, run by the Ministry of the Interior and in service since 1 January 2024, which publishes the Sbírka zákonů a mezinárodních smluv and maintains every Act as a series of point-in-time versions. Three addresses serve the same material and they behave differently. e-sbirka.gov.cz (to which www.e-sbirka.cz redirects with HTTP 308) is an Angular single-page application: every address answers with the same 1,040-byte shell, and the text only appears once JavaScript has run, so it is readable by the extraction service and by nothing else. e-sbirka.gov.cz/sbr-externi is the JSON API the application calls; /dokumenty-sbirky/{staleUrl}/obsah returns the table of contents for a version, where staleUrl is the URL-encoded /sb/{year}/{number}/{YYYY-MM-DD}, and /dokumenty-sbirky/{dokumentId}/detail-zneni returns the version's title, its citation and the dates it is in force between. opendata.eselpoint.gov.cz/esel-esb serves the same corpus as linked data under ELIs of the form /eli/cz/sb/{year}/{number}, where the act's page lists every version it has ever had, which is how the version in force on a given day is found rather than guessed. Each version is also generated as a clean PDF and DOCX: POST-free GET to /sbr-externi/stahni/informativni-zneni/{dokumentId}/PDF returns a JSON body carrying a file id that is stable across calls, and /souborove-sluzby/soubory/{id} then serves the document itself.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: **The PDF and the web page are two manifestations of one document and neither is quotable throughout.** The generated PDF is typeset with soft hyphens at every line break - 2,055 of them in the 781,000 characters of Act No. 326/1999 Sb. - so a sentence that crosses a line comes out as 'na úze[soft hyphen] mí', and a quotation spanning one is unreadable even though it verifies. The web page has no hyphenation but doubles every term the CzechVoc dictionary links: 3,200 occurrences in the same Act, where 'cizince' renders as 'cizincecizince' and 'zaměstnanecké karty' as 'zaměstnanecké kartyzaměstnanecké karty'. A quotation therefore has to be taken from whichever manifestation the sentence survives in, and some sentences survive in neither, so the quotation is cut short rather than tidied. The versions it serves are **informativní znění**, informative consolidations: the Collection as promulgated is what has legal force. A version carries no cut-off date inside the document - the date is in the file name, in the address and on the page that serves it, and that is where the consolidation dates recorded here come from. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the central register of vacancies open to employee-card holders is kept administratively, the government-approved migration programmes that Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb. relies on by name - the qualified employee programme, the highly qualified employee programme, the key and scientific personnel programme and a digital nomad programme - are approved by the government and published nowhere in it, and the per-embassy allowance actually remaining is published by each embassy under section 181b(3) rather than here. Section headings for repealed sections are omitted from a version entirely, so a gap in the numbering is a repeal and not a dropped page.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZákon č. 326/1999 Sb., o pobytu cizinců na území České republiky a o změně některých zákonů · § 181b odst. 3 · consolidated to 2026-06-12
«Příslušný zastupitelský úřad zveřejňuje na své úřední desce a svých internetových stránkách infor»

Our translation - not official

The embassy concerned publishes on its official board and on its website information

The sentence continues about the maximum number of applications that may be lodged for each type of residence authorisation. The current state of a particular embassy's allowance is therefore on that embassy's own page and not in the regulation.

Read it at the source
About this source

The Czech state's own legal information system, run by the Ministry of the Interior and in service since 1 January 2024, which publishes the Sbírka zákonů a mezinárodních smluv and maintains every Act as a series of point-in-time versions. Three addresses serve the same material and they behave differently. e-sbirka.gov.cz (to which www.e-sbirka.cz redirects with HTTP 308) is an Angular single-page application: every address answers with the same 1,040-byte shell, and the text only appears once JavaScript has run, so it is readable by the extraction service and by nothing else. e-sbirka.gov.cz/sbr-externi is the JSON API the application calls; /dokumenty-sbirky/{staleUrl}/obsah returns the table of contents for a version, where staleUrl is the URL-encoded /sb/{year}/{number}/{YYYY-MM-DD}, and /dokumenty-sbirky/{dokumentId}/detail-zneni returns the version's title, its citation and the dates it is in force between. opendata.eselpoint.gov.cz/esel-esb serves the same corpus as linked data under ELIs of the form /eli/cz/sb/{year}/{number}, where the act's page lists every version it has ever had, which is how the version in force on a given day is found rather than guessed. Each version is also generated as a clean PDF and DOCX: POST-free GET to /sbr-externi/stahni/informativni-zneni/{dokumentId}/PDF returns a JSON body carrying a file id that is stable across calls, and /souborove-sluzby/soubory/{id} then serves the document itself.

Standing: Maintains the text in force

Cannot be cited for: **The PDF and the web page are two manifestations of one document and neither is quotable throughout.** The generated PDF is typeset with soft hyphens at every line break - 2,055 of them in the 781,000 characters of Act No. 326/1999 Sb. - so a sentence that crosses a line comes out as 'na úze[soft hyphen] mí', and a quotation spanning one is unreadable even though it verifies. The web page has no hyphenation but doubles every term the CzechVoc dictionary links: 3,200 occurrences in the same Act, where 'cizince' renders as 'cizincecizince' and 'zaměstnanecké karty' as 'zaměstnanecké kartyzaměstnanecké karty'. A quotation therefore has to be taken from whichever manifestation the sentence survives in, and some sentences survive in neither, so the quotation is cut short rather than tidied. The versions it serves are **informativní znění**, informative consolidations: the Collection as promulgated is what has legal force. A version carries no cut-off date inside the document - the date is in the file name, in the address and on the page that serves it, and that is where the consolidation dates recorded here come from. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the central register of vacancies open to employee-card holders is kept administratively, the government-approved migration programmes that Government Regulation No. 220/2019 Sb. relies on by name - the qualified employee programme, the highly qualified employee programme, the key and scientific personnel programme and a digital nomad programme - are approved by the government and published nowhere in it, and the per-embassy allowance actually remaining is published by each embassy under section 181b(3) rather than here. Section headings for repealed sections are omitted from a version entirely, so a gap in the numbering is a repeal and not a dropped page.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Practical notes

The government programmes the regulation relies on - the qualified employee programme, the highly qualified employee programme, the key and scientific personnel programme and a digital nomad programme - are approved by the government and are not published in the Collection of Laws. None of them was read, and nothing here says who may join one.

The annexes also carry footnotes reserving particular sub-quotas, such as 60 places at Tashkent for highly qualified employees in health care and 1,000 at Jakarta for a labour migration project with Indonesia.

Nothing here is a statement about waiting times. It is a statement about how many applications the law allows to exist.