EU Blue Card for Chefs: Which Countries Could It Actually Work In?

The EU Blue Card almost never fits a line cook. Every member state requires either a university degree or, where national law allows it, five years of graduate-level experience, plus a salary of 1.0 to 1.6 times the national average, which runs from about €21,000 a year in Portugal to over €70,000 in the Netherlands and Luxembourg. It can work for a senior chef, such as a culinary director, if the country, the pay and the paperwork line up. Most restaurants should use a national cook route, a working holiday or a transfer instead.

1. What the Blue Card is, and who it is not for

The Blue Card is set by Directive (EU) 2021/1883, which each member state implements in its own law for "highly qualified employment": engineers, IT specialists, doctors, managers with degrees. Denmark and Ireland are not bound by it, so this page covers the other 14 Blue Card states the site has guides for, plus Greece. National permit schemes continue to run alongside it everywhere, and several suit a chef better, which is the point of this page. The contract on offer must run at least six months, or be a binding offer for that length.

A restaurant hiring a line cook, a sushi counter hand or a junior kitchen worker will not clear either test below. A restaurant appointing an executive chef or a culinary director over several sites has a real, if narrow, case.

2. The two tests: qualification and salary

The applicant needs "higher professional qualifications": a higher education qualification, or "higher professional skills" proven by experience. For a short list of IT and ICT management occupations, three years' experience is enough almost everywhere. For any other occupation, including cooking, five years "at a level comparable to higher education qualifications" counts only where the member state's own law or procedure says so. Several countries never wrote that option in; a few did.

Each state also sets a minimum salary of 1.0 to 1.6 times its average gross annual salary, with a lower figure, at least 80% of the normal one, allowed for shortage occupations or recent graduates. Average salaries differ so much across the EU that the absolute floor varies by a factor of three or more between the cheapest and priciest markets.

3. Thresholds and the experience route, market by market

Figures below are gross salary, checked in September 2026 against each country's own immigration authority or, where that page was unavailable or unclear, a specialist immigration adviser reporting the same rule. Ordered from the lowest standard threshold to the highest.

These are legal floors for the whole package the rules count, not offers to make. For what chefs actually earn market by market, see sushi chef salary by country. In most of these cities, a single-restaurant head chef is paid well under even the lowest threshold above.

4. Where a chef without a degree has a real chance

Most Japanese chefs train through apprenticeship and years in kitchens, sometimes with a culinary school diploma, not a university degree. That rules out the Blue Card everywhere the five-year experience route was never written into national law, and most of the countries above fall into that group.

Two markets state the experience route plainly and apply it to any occupation, cooking included: Finland and Poland. Neither immigration service singles out chefs, but neither excludes them either, and both ask for a salary well under the Netherlands or Luxembourg. Hungary's immigration office also describes an experience-based route in general terms; we could not confirm that it has been applied to a cook, so treat it as a possibility to raise with the office, not a settled path. Everywhere else on this list, a chef needs an actual degree, in any subject, before the salary question is even worth asking.

If your chef does hold a degree, even an unrelated one, the salary column becomes the real filter. Portugal, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland and Hungary ask far less than Germany, Austria, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Sweden or the Netherlands, where the floor already assumes an executive-level package.

5. A credible case: a culinary director for a multi-site group

Picture a group with four Japanese restaurants planning a Finnish opening, appointing one chef to set every menu, train each head chef and run supplier and quality standards across all four sites, with no rostered cooking shifts of their own.

• Title and duties on the contract: Culinary Director, Nordic Region. Menu architecture, supplier and quality control, training and standards across sites. No shift cooking listed.
• Salary: above Finland's 2026 floor of €3,937 a month, on a contract of at least six months.
• Experience file: signed employment records from named restaurants covering the full 12 to 20 years claimed, a promotion history from line cook to head chef to the role now offered, and letters from past employers describing the scope of each post, not just job titles.
• What Migri would question: whether the day-to-day role still amounts to cooking shifts under a grander title, whether the claimed experience genuinely reaches a level "comparable to higher education", and whether the post is a real, ongoing need rather than a one-off visa vehicle.

The same file, built the same way, is the difference between a Blue Card that survives scrutiny and one that reads as a workaround. A sous chef or line cook cannot build an equivalent file; there is no seniority to document.

6. What to use instead

• National specialty-cook routes. Germany runs one for specialty cooks (§11(2) of the Employment Ordinance, capped at two per restaurant). See hiring a Japanese chef in Germany.
• National skilled-worker or highly-skilled-migrant schemes with different, often lower, tests. See the Netherlands, France and Spain.
• Working holidays for chefs aged 18 to 30. Japan has arrangements with most of Europe; see working holiday rules for Japanese chefs in Europe.
• Intra-corporate transfer, if your group already employs the chef outside the EU.

General information checked against EU legislation, national immigration authorities and, where those pages were unavailable or unclear, specialist immigration advisers, in September 2026, not legal or immigration advice. Each member state implements the Blue Card differently and revises thresholds on its own schedule. Confirm current requirements with the immigration authority of the country where the chef will work.