QQI, NFQ Levels and Getting an Indian Degree Recognised in Ireland

QQI is Quality and Qualifications Ireland, the State body that runs Ireland’s qualifications system. It maintains the ten NFQ levels, quality assures the colleges, makes awards of its own, and hosts the free service that tells you how an Indian degree compares to an Irish one. Those are four separate jobs inside one organisation, which is where most of the confusion starts.

This page is about the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, and a qualification question about Belfast or Derry goes to UK ENIC, a completely different organisation. Ireland is in the European Union but not in the Schengen Area.

Ireland does not issue you a personal recognition certificate. The comparability statement you have probably been told to get is free, generic and written in advance, it says plainly that it is advice rather than a legal document, and for a taught masters the admitting university assesses your degree itself. A lot of applicants spend weeks chasing a document that nobody in their application chain has asked for.

What is QQI, and what does it actually do in Ireland?

QQI was set up in November 2012 by the Qualifications and Quality Assurance (Education and Training) Act 2012, and it does four things that matter to you. It maintains the National Framework of Qualifications. It quality assures education and training providers. It is itself an awarding body for public further education and training. And it hosts NARIC Ireland, the office that publishes comparisons of foreign qualifications.

What QQI does not do is decide whether you get in anywhere. Its own published policy is unusually blunt about this.

QQI does not make recognition decisions. Formal recognition decisions are made by others including education institutions, professional recognition bodies and employers.

Quality and Qualifications Ireland, Policy and Criteria for Facilitating the Academic Recognition of Foreign Qualifications (QP.14, June 2015)

The same policy says QQI “has no role in authenticating qualifications”, so it won’t check whether your marksheet is genuine, and it won’t tell an Irish university to admit you.

What are the NFQ levels, and which level is a degree?

The NFQ is a ten-level ladder that describes every qualification made in Ireland, from basic literacy certificates at Level 1 to doctorates at Level 10. Levels 1 to 5 cover school and early further education, so a graduate applicant can move past them quickly. The levels that decide a postgraduate application are 6 to 10.

Credit is measured in ECTS, the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System. QQI puts one ECTS credit at 25 to 30 hours of work, and 60 ECTS at one full-time academic year.

Note the wording QQI uses at Level 8. An Irish honours bachelor degree is “normally awarded following completion of a programme of three or four years’ duration (180-240 ECTS credits)”. Ireland runs plenty of three-year Level 8 degrees itself, so length alone is not what decides how your degree is read.

Level 8 and Level 9 also hold a pair of one-year awards that are easy to mix up. A Higher Diploma is Level 8 and a Postgraduate Diploma is Level 9, though both run one year and both carry 60 ECTS. What separates them is the Bologna cycle. A Higher Diploma sits at the same point as the end of the first cycle and is usually taken in a subject different from your degree, while a Postgraduate Diploma is an intermediate qualification inside the second cycle. Check which one a course is before you apply, because the level follows you into the Stamp 1G stay-back rules.

What NFQ level does an Indian bachelor’s or master’s compare to?

NARIC Ireland publishes a searchable database of foreign qualifications, and India currently has 54 entries in it. Each entry names an Indian award and says which Irish award class and NFQ level it is compared to. These are the degree-level entries an Indian applicant is most likely to need, read from the database on 27 July 2026.

Award class and level are two different fields on every record, which is why the MBA row looks alarming and is not. Level 9 is Level 9 whichever class name sits beside it.

The level itself can move, though. QQI’s policy allows it to revise comparability advice when a qualifications system changes, and the Indian Doctor of Pharmacy has already been through that, carrying a Level 8 comparison in a 2017 record and a Level 9 comparison in one published in August 2025. Always check the live entry, not a PDF someone downloaded years ago.

Why does NFQ Level 7 versus Level 8 decide a masters application?

Because Irish masters entry is written around the Level 8 honours bachelor, and QQI says so in both directions. Its description of the Level 9 taught masters states that entry “is typically for holders of Honours Bachelor Degrees”. Its description of the Level 7 Ordinary Bachelor Degree states that holders “do not generally gain immediate access to programmes leading to Second Cycle awards in Ireland”.

The database compares a three-year BA, BSc or BCom to exactly that Ordinary Bachelor Degree. Your degree is not being marked down for running three years. It has been matched to the one Irish award that does not carry automatic entry to a master’s.

The same QQI text supplies the way through. Entry to a taught masters “can be permitted for those with Ordinary Bachelor Degrees or equivalent who have some relevant work experience“. Two or three years in a relevant job is therefore doing real work in an Irish application, which is also why two Irish universities can look at the same three-year BCom and answer differently. Which ones accept it, and on what conditions, is set out course by course in the masters in Ireland for Indian students.

What does QQI do, and what does Irish NARIC do?

QQI hosts NARIC Ireland as its recognition office, and naric.ie now redirects straight to a QQI page. So the useful question is not which organisation to write to, it is which of these three outputs you are actually being asked for.

QQI states that “a comparability statement only provides advice and is not a legal document”, that the statements “are generic and non-personalised”, and that “decisions on recognising your qualification for employment, training or educational purposes will be made by the individual employer, competent authority or education and training admissions staff”.

Paying a UK body for a statement to use in an Irish application buys you a real document for the wrong country, and applicants land in that position for understandable reasons. The University of Galway postgraduate admissions FAQ, answering how international qualifications are recognised in Ireland, points readers at a naric.org.uk address alongside an Irish one, and the Irish link on that page no longer resolves.

When do you actually need a recognition statement, and when do you not?

For most Indian applicants going to Ireland for a taught masters, you don’t need one, because the university does the assessment itself against its own published rule. The statement is still worth downloading for your own clarity, since it is free and takes a minute, but treat it as information for you, not as a document your application depends on.

Nurses lose the most time to this, so it is worth spelling out. NMBI runs its own two-step process of qualification recognition and then registration, entirely separately from QQI, and its published outcomes for non-EU applicants are sobering. Qualifications are recognised outright in “less than 5%” of cases. A compensation measure, meaning a period of supervised adaptation or an aptitude test, is required in “95% of applications”. Including that measure, NMBI says recognition and registration together take “on average, 18 months”.

How do you get a comparability statement, and what if your award is not listed?

Open the NARIC Ireland foreign qualifications search, choose India as the country, and find your award in the list. If it is there, open the record and download the statement as a PDF. There is no form, no fee and no waiting, because the statement was written in advance and is the same for everyone holding that award.

Three things are worth doing carefully once you are in the database.

1. Match the award title exactly. “Bachelor Degree”, “Bachelor Degree (Honours)” and “Bachelor Degree (in professional subjects)” are three separate India records, and they do not all point at the same level.
2. Read the “first published” date on the record, which tells you how current the advice is.
3. Check the award profile text under the level. That is where QQI records the duration and the entry assumptions it based the comparison on, and where you find out whether it was describing your degree at all.

If your award is not in the database, there is a request for advice on recognition of a foreign qualification form. QQI publishes no turnaround target for it, so do not build a tight application deadline around its arrival. Either way the same condition applies. QQI gives comparability advice “based on the understanding that the qualification is awarded by a nationally recognised awarding body(ies) in the country of origin”, so an award from an institution outside India’s recognised system is not something the service can place on the NFQ.

Sources

• QQI, Policy and Criteria for Facilitating the Academic Recognition of Foreign Qualifications (QP.14, June 2015) (QQI established November 2012 under the 2012 Act, the statement that QQI does not make recognition decisions, the no-role-in-authentication wording, non-personalised statements replacing personalised ones, the nationally recognised awarding body condition, and the provision allowing comparability advice to be revised)
• QQI, Recognition of foreign qualifications (comparability statements provide advice and are not a legal document, are generic and non-personalised, are not issued for professional awards or licences, and the statement that recognition decisions are made by the employer, competent authority or admissions staff)
• QQI, The National Framework of Qualifications (the honours bachelor degree at three or four years and 180-240 ECTS, the Ordinary Bachelor Degree not generally gaining immediate access to second cycle programmes, taught masters entry typically for honours bachelor holders and the ordinary-degree-with-work-experience route, and the Higher Diploma at Level 8 against the Postgraduate Diploma at Level 9)
• QQI, A Brief Guide to the Irish National Framework of Qualifications (Version 1.0, August 2024) (the major award types and credit volumes at every level, and one ECTS credit at 25 to 30 hours with 60 ECTS as a full academic year)
• NARIC Ireland, Foreign Qualifications Database (the 54 India records read on 27 July 2026, including the Level 7 comparison for the three-year BA, BSc and BCom, the Level 8 comparison for the four-year and honours bachelor degrees, the Bachelor Degree (Honours) record first published 29 August 2025, the Level 9 master’s and MBA records, the Level 8 MBBS record, and the two differently-dated Doctor of Pharmacy records)
• QQI, Qualifications Recognition Advice Queries (the advisory-in-nature wording, the nationally recognised awarding body condition, and the search-then-download procedure with the form for unlisted awards)
• QQI, NARIC Ireland statistics on the recognition of foreign qualifications for 2023-2025 (the database holding over 2,000 qualifications from more than 170 countries, available free of charge)
• ENIC-NARIC Network, Ireland and ENIC-NARIC Network, United Kingdom (NARIC Ireland at QQI as the Irish centre, and the UK centre covering the Northern Ireland education departments)
• NMBI, Recognition and Registration for Non-EU Overseas Applicants FAQs (recognition outright in less than 5% of non-EU applications, a compensation measure in 95%, non-recognition in 1%, and an average of 18 months for recognition and registration together)
• Dublin City University Registry, supporting documentation (applicants may wish to refer to the comparability service, and an assessment does not guarantee admission to DCU)
• University of Limerick, postgraduate entry requirements for international students (the India rule accepting a four-year bachelor degree or a three-year honours bachelor degree, first-division results between 55 and 70%, and full semester marks sheets rather than a consolidated sheet)
• The Teaching Council, qualified outside of the Republic of Ireland (registration routes assessed by the Council, with conditions applied where qualification shortfalls are found)

Related reading. Check the entry rules course by course in the masters in Ireland for Indian students, see each institution with its NFQ levels and non-EU fees in the universities in Ireland, compare the business route in the MBA in Ireland guide, size the budget with the cost of studying and living in Ireland, and work through the paperwork with the Ireland student visa and Stamp 2 guide and the AVATS form walkthrough.