Here’s a number that should reframe how Irish employers think about benefits: almost two-thirds of those in employment in Ireland, that’s 1,865,600 people, never work from home, a rate which now exceeds the pre-pandemic level. That’s according to the latest Labour Force Survey from the CSO, published this week (February 2026).
So, while the post-pandemic conversation about employee benefits has been dominated almost entirely by remote and hybrid working, the reality is that for the majority of the Irish workforce, people in construction, healthcare, retail, hospitality, manufacturing, and education, working from home was never really an option for them.
So, with remote working off the table for most roles, and unemployment sitting at a low 4.4%, meaning a tight labour market, what else can companies offer to attract and of course keep good people?
Let’s start, as all the best HR conversations do, with the slightly of the cuff benefits, because the global market for employee perks has produced some genuinely creative ideas in the last couple of years alongside a few that raise more questions than they answer. I’ll then go into what Irish companies, from small SMEs to large enterprises, should actually be doing in 2026.
Part 1: The Weird, the Wonderful, and the Genuinely Brilliant, Standout Perks From Around the World
Not all of these are ridiculous. Some are genuinely thoughtful.
🌲 You Can Harvest Wood From Company Land
This might be the most uniquely Irish-adjacent perk we’ve come across, even though it originated in the US. A thread on Reddit’s HR community surfaced a brilliant one: a company that owns woodland gives employees the right to harvest a set amount of firewood from company-owned land each year. Yes that’s actual timber. You show up, you chop, you take it home. For anyone with a stove or an open fire, it’s genuinely more useful than a gym membership. It also builds a real connection between employees and the land the company owns.
🐾 “Pawternity” Leave
Several companies now offer paid time off when you adopt a new pet. mParticle offers employees such a perk which covers up to two weeks of paid leave when they rescue a dog. The logic is sound, a new dog needs time to settle, much like a new baby, and the effect on employee morale is reportedly significant.
💀 Death Benefits — Google Style (US)
This one is truly amazing. Google offers the surviving spouse or partner of a deceased employee 50% of their salary every year for the next ten years after death, plus stock options continue to vest for the family. It says a lot about a company that it plans for what happens to the people who depend on its employees even after they’re gone. This is genuinely progressive thinking about financial security.
🧊 Cryogenic Freezing
At the other end of the spectrum: US hedge fund Numerai offers to pay for employees to be cryogenically frozen when they die, in the hope that future technology might bring them back. The founder is a member of cryonics provider Alcor himself. Whether this counts as a death benefit or an extremely optimistic retention strategy probably depends on your own outlook.
🏄 Surf When the Waves Are Good
Patagonia offers “Let My People Go Surfing” which is flexitime that allows employees to leave the office when the surf is up or the snow is fresh. It’s not just a quirky perk; it’s embedded in the company’s identity and values. The key is that it works because it’s genuine to the brand and the company.
💒 We’ll Pay for Your Wedding
When the CEO of the bulk shopping company Boxed, heard that an employee’s wedding savings had been decimated by a family medical emergency he decided to pay for the wedding himself and then extended the offer to all employees. It’s not a scalable perk for most businesses, but the principle that the company shows up for people at major life moments is one any employer can aspire to.
🍦 Three Pints of Ice Cream. Per Day.
Ben & Jerry’s employees receive three pints of ice cream every single day as a job benefit. It’s wonderful and completely on-brand.
🍾 A Bottle of Bourbon at the End of the Month
On a visit to the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, I discovered one of the most pleasingly straightforward employee perks going. On the final Friday of every month, every employee receives a bottle of Old №7 to take home, and they’ve been doing it for decades. No fanfare, no portal to log into, no wellness app to download. Just a bottle. Whether you’ve had a brilliant month or a difficult one, you always have a small tipple waiting for you at the weekend.
💅 Botox Leave
A London-based advertising agency, Fox Kalomaski, introduced a paid day off in December specifically for pre-Christmas beauty treatments. They called it “Botox Leave” after discovering that a significant portion of employees were using it for exactly that. It’s unusual, but the underlying idea giving employees time for personal care without burning through sick days isn’t entirely daft.
🛏️ A Mattress, If You Work for a Mattress Company
US remote company Resident, which sells direct-to-consumer home goods including beds, gives every employee a free mattress. It’s one of those perks that sounds too good to be true until you remember that a mattress costs them a fraction of what it costs the employee, and every employee is now a walking endorsement of the product. Smart, brand-aligned, and genuinely useful.
🎓 Curing the Student Loan Hangover
Professional services firm PwC offers US employees a programme that contributes toward student loan repayments. In the US context, where graduates can carry tens of thousands of dollars of debt, this is significant. In an Irish context where third-level fees are structured differently but postgraduate debt and rising cost of living are very real the principle of helping employees manage the financial burden of their education is worth thinking about.
🏢 A Sabbatical After Five Years
Several companies including US firms like Formstack and Pangea offer a multi-week paid sabbatical to employees who reach the five-year mark. Formstack gives four weeks; Pangea gives 30 days. The message it sends is that we value longevity, and we think people who’ve given us five years deserve a real rest.
🤝 100% Employee Ownership
Some companies such as Atomic Object is 100% employee-owned and certified as a B Corporation. Employees benefit from profit sharing, open-book finances, and transparent leadership alongside a sustainable working pace. The perk here isn’t one specific thing it’s the entire model. When employees genuinely own a share of the company, their relationship to the work changes fundamentally.
🎟️ Sports Tickets and Event Access, More Common Than You’d Think
A growing number of companies, both as a direct perk and through team sponsorship, offer employees access to sports events, concerts, and live entertainment at discounted rates or for free. This works in several ways. Companies that sponsor local sports teams, a GAA club, a League of Ireland side, a rugby or football team, often receive a block of tickets as part of the deal, which then get distributed to staff. It’s a genuinely popular benefit, particularly in Ireland where sports culture is so embedded in community life. Separately, corporate discount platforms allow companies of any size to offer employees reduced-price tickets to sporting events, concerts, and attractions as part of a broader company perks package. For employers who want to add genuine lifestyle value without a huge budget, this is one of the most underused options available and helps with a companies Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
Part 2: What Should Irish Companies Actually Be Offering?
Now for the practical part and the part that matters most if you’re an Irish employer trying to hire or retain good people right now.
The context is important. The total number of people in employment in Ireland stood at 2,833,100 in Q4 2025, up 2% year on year. With low unemployment and steady jobs growth across construction, industry, and education, the competition for people is real. And for the two-thirds of workers who can’t work from home, the benefits conversation has to be about something other than Zoom backgrounds and home office stipends.
The Legal Baseline: What Every Irish Employer Must Provide
Before getting creative, you need to get the statutory basics right. Every Irish employer is legally required to provide the following.
· Annual leave of at least 20 working days (four weeks) plus 10 public holidays per year for full-time employees.
· Sick pay of at least five days per year at 70% of normal pay, capped at €110 per day, for employees with at least 13 weeks of continuous service — rising to seven days in 2025 and ten days by 2026.
· Maternity leave of 26 weeks, with an additional 16 weeks unpaid available.
· Paternity leave of two weeks in the first six months following birth or adoption.
· Parental leave of 26 weeks unpaid for parents of children under 12.
· Access to a Personal Retirement Savings Account (PRSA) facility even if the employer doesn’t contribute to it.
· And adherence to working time rules: no more than 48 hours per week on average, with statutory rest breaks.
That’s the floor. Now let’s talk about building something above it.
Small SMEs — Under 50 Employees
Small Irish businesses can’t match the benefits budget of a multinational, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. But they can compete on things a large organisation genuinely struggles to deliver: flexibility, meaningful work, the sense that you matter as an individual, and a direct relationship with leadership.
The good news is that some of the most impactful tools available to small employers cost very little.
The Small Benefit Exemption is the most underused tool in Irish employment. Employers can provide up to €1,500 per year per employee in non-cash, tax-free benefits. This typically is gift cards or vouchers — with no employer PRSI implications. At a higher tax rate, that €1,500 gift card is worth the equivalent of more than €3,000 in gross salary to the employee. Use it, every year, without fail. Split it into a Christmas and a summer gesture, or give it in one hit. It costs less than you think and is remembered far longer than a salary tweak.
Beyond that, what peers at this scale are typically offering includes health insurance (subsidised or fully paid), employer contributions to a pension (even modest ones matter enormously right now ahead of auto-enrolment), paid sick leave above the statutory minimum, flexible hours where the role allows, team lunches and social events, and birthday leave, one extra day off on your birthday costs almost nothing and creates goodwill.
What would make a small Irish employer stand out? A learning and development budget, even €500 per person per year for courses, books, or professional conferences signals genuine investment in your team’s future. An Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), which provides employees access to counselling and mental health support, costs surprisingly little and is more valued than most employers realise. A contribution to home office equipment for any remote-capable roles. Sports or event tickets through a sponsorship deal with a local club or through a corporate discount platform. And transparent, predictable salary reviews. With a tight market, the fear of being undervalued is a bigger driver of exits than the salary itself.
Mid-Sized Companies — 50 to 250 Employees
At this scale, employees expect a more structured package, and you’re competing directly with both larger Irish employers and international companies.
What peers at this level are typically offering: group health insurance, often substantially subsidised or fully employer-paid; an occupational pension with employer contributions of 3–5%, performance-related or bonus pay; life assurance of two to four times annual salary; income protection or permanent health insurance; enhanced parental leave beyond the statutory minimum; a structured learning and development programme; hybrid working embedded in policy; wellbeing programmes including, gym subsidy or access to an EAP; and access to corporate discount platforms for sporting events, concerts, and entertainment.
What would make a mid-sized Irish company stand out? Enhanced maternity and paternity pay that tops up the state benefit to full salary, this is increasingly a deciding factor for employees at this life stage. A sabbatical programme for long-serving staff. Share options or a profit-sharing arrangement. Volunteer days, even one or two paid days per year for employees to support a cause of their choosing. Clear career ladders with transparent criteria. And increasingly, a well-communicated policy on things like menopause support and fertility assistance, which signals that you’re thinking about your people across all life stages and not just at the point of hire.
Large Enterprises — 250+ Employees
At this level, you’re competing with multinationals for specialist and senior talent. Gaps in your package will be noticed and used against you in offers.
What peers at this scale are typically offering: fully paid private health insurance for employees and often their families; pension contributions of 5–10% or more; generous parental leave of six months or more of paid leave (this is now standard in tech and professional services); life assurance of four times annual salary or above; income protection covering up to 75% of salary; significant performance bonuses, restricted stock units (RSUs), or share purchase plans; comprehensive wellbeing programmes; annual leave of 25 days or more with the option to buy additional days; flexible and hybrid working embedded in policy; structured mentoring and coaching programmes; education assistance and tuition reimbursement; access to sporting events through either sponsorship relationships or corporate platforms; and full Bike to Work and Tax Saver Commuter ticket schemes.
What would make a large Irish employer stand out? Truly flexible benefits, a “menu” employees can customise to their life stage. Neurodiversity and disability inclusion support that goes beyond an HR policy. Generous family-forming benefits (fertility treatment, adoption support, surrogacy assistance). Genuine pay equity reporting with publicly available action plans. Funded sustainability commitments employees can actively participate in. And, perhaps most importantly, a management culture that actually communicates the flexibility the organisation claims to offer because the most common reason employees leave large companies isn’t the benefits package. It’s their line manager.
Part 3: The Tax-Efficient Tools Too Many Irish Companies Are Ignoring
Ireland’s tax environment gives employers access to several genuinely powerful tools that are still dramatically underutilised, particularly in smaller companies.
The Small Benefit Exemption (up to €1,500 per year per employee, tax-free) is the starting point. Use it every year.
The Bike to Work Scheme allows employees to receive a bike and accessories worth up to €1,500 (or €3,000 for an e-bike) tax-free. The employer purchases the equipment and recoups the cost via a salary sacrifice arrangement. For employees who cycle to work, this is a genuinely significant saving. For employers, there’s no employer PRSI on the benefit.
The Tax Saver Commuter Ticket Scheme allows employees to purchase monthly or annual public transport passes from pre-tax salary, saving employees up to 52% on their commuting costs depending on their tax band. For the large proportion of Irish workers who commute by bus, DART, or Luas, this is a meaningful financial benefit that costs the employer nothing beyond the administration of setting it up.
And for businesses that sponsor a local sports team a GAA club, a football club or a rugby team, the block of match tickets that often comes with the sponsorship deal represents a simple, community-based employee perk that resonates strongly in an Irish context. Distributing those tickets as a staff benefit is cost-neutral (the sponsorship is already paid) and builds exactly the kind of local connection that large employers often struggle to manufacture.
What Actually Matters: Cutting Through the Noise
The companies losing people right now are often those who’ve rolled back flexibility without offering anything in return, who’ve allowed pensions to fall below market rate, or who’ve let their health insurance offering stagnate. The companies winning the talent battle tend to be those who communicate their benefits clearly (a surprising number offer great things their employees don’t know about), structure them fairly, and most importantly deliver a management culture that matches the values they advertise on their careers page.
This post references CSO Labour Force Survey data published by RTÉ on 19 February 2026. Employment law and Revenue rules change regularly so always consult a HR professional or employment law advisor for guidance specific to your situation.
