Universities in Ireland, Every Institution With Its NFQ Levels and Non-EU Fees

The count of universities in Ireland depends entirely on who is counting. Ranking sites say eight. The Irish Universities Association has eight members. Some directories list thirty. The number this page uses is eighteen, because that is what sits on the Higher Education Authority’s list, and it breaks down into seven traditional universities, five technological universities that did not exist before 2019, two institutes of technology, one private university, two specialist colleges and one learned academy that teaches nobody. The private colleges sit outside the list altogether.

Everything below is the Republic of Ireland. Queen’s Belfast and Ulster are UK institutions on UK visas, and none of this reaches them.

One thing before the list, because it changes how you read everything after it. What decides your immigration outcome in Ireland is not which of these names you pick. It is the NFQ level of the specific award you enrol on, since that sets how long you can stay and work afterwards, and it is usually invisible in the course title.

Which universities and colleges does Ireland actually have?

Eighteen, by the state’s count. The Higher Education Authority publishes the list of “the higher education institutions (HEIs) with whom the HEA works under statute or who are in receipt of core public funding”, and that is the only inclusion rule on this page. Read both halves of it, because RCSI is a private university and gets on the list under statute rather than by taking state money. The Royal Irish Academy is on it too, which leaves seventeen you can apply to.

Ireland’s public information service splits the sector into a university sector, a technological sector, colleges of education, and “a number of independent private colleges”. That last group takes no state money and so never appears on the HEA list, though several of its colleges recruit heavily in India. Where the categories matter, the Department of Further and Higher Education files all five technological universities under a single heading called “Publicly-funded universities”, alongside Trinity, UCD and the rest.

Below is every institution, what kind it is, the NFQ levels it can award, and whose name goes on the degree at the end.

At UCD, Cork, Galway and Maynooth your parchment carries the name of the National University of Ireland, not the campus you studied on. UCD’s own history page puts it flatly, that its students “are awarded degrees of the National University of Ireland”, and the same holds at the other three. RCSI goes further. It has held its own degree-awarding powers since 2012 and chooses not to use them, saying in its quality framework that it “places considerable value on its graduates being graduates of the NUI and, as a result, does not invoke its independent degree powers in most circumstances”. So an RCSI medical graduate holds an NUI degree, which is also the wording that appears in India’s own schedule of recognised medical qualifications.

Every institution above is state funded except RCSI, which Ireland’s public information service describes plainly as “a private university”. Public or private makes no difference to what an Indian student is charged. The Free Fees Initiative that covers Irish tuition is limited to EEA, Swiss and UK nationals with three of the previous five years’ residence, and somebody on Stamp 2 permission fails both halves of that test.

Alongside it the HEA keeps an archive of fifteen institutions that no longer exist, Waterford Institute of Technology and NUI Galway among them. Shortlists still carrying those names predate 2022, and so do their fees.

What does “college” mean in Ireland, and which ones cannot take you on a student visa?

In Irish speech “college” means any third level institution at all, so an Irish student says they are “in college” whether they are at Trinity or at a small private school of business. Trinity College Dublin is a university and Griffith College is not, and you cannot tell that from either name.

The word covers three quite different arrangements.

• Linked and recognised colleges teach their own students while a university confers the award. Mary Immaculate College degrees are made by the University of Limerick, which calls itself “the designated awarding body (DAB) for all higher education programmes (NFQ Levels 6-10) at MIC”. Marino programmes are accredited by Trinity, and Shannon College of Hotel Management now sits inside the University of Galway.
• Private colleges take no state funding and their awards come from Quality and Qualifications Ireland, the state awarding body, rather than from a university. Dublin Business School, Griffith College, the National College of Ireland and Hibernia College all award this way. A QQI award sits on the same National Framework of Qualifications as a Trinity degree at the same level, and Irish immigration treats it the same, but the name on the parchment is QQI’s.
• Bodies that are not entry routes at all. Two of them appear on the department’s wider funding list without being places anyone can apply to. The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies has no taught students, no prospectus and no tuition fee, and its doctoral candidates register at Trinity, Maynooth or DCU. The Institute of Public Administration teaches part-time and online, mostly to serving Irish public servants.

A single immigration rule then removes a whole category of them. An eligible course has to run “on a full-time, daytime, face-to-face basis, which is defined as students attending between the hours of 8am and 6pm on at least three days between Monday and Friday each week”, and students “will not be granted visas or immigration permission in respect of a part-time or online course”. An online or evening programme advertised by an Irish college is, in practice, aimed at people already living there.

At two of these providers the international fee sits on one page and the warning sits on another. Marino Institute of Education says “none of the Level 9 Master in Education Studies (MES) programmes meet the minimum requirements for a Stamp 2 study visa”, and quotes a €7,000 international rate for that same programme elsewhere on its site. Hibernia College says outright that it “is not in a position to sponsor visa applications for the purposes of studying within Ireland”. Confirm the course carries a student permission before you pay anybody a deposit.

The approved list is mid-rename, so you may have to search for your course under two different names. Irish immigration is retiring the Interim List of Eligible Programmes in favour of the TrustEd Ireland mark, and the sector has not caught up evenly, so Griffith still writes “ILEP” while NCAD already asks for a “TrustEd Ireland Programme Reference Number” on the visa application.

Why does your stay-back in Ireland depend on the course level, not the university’s name?

Because Irish immigration reads the level of the award, and nothing else. The National Framework of Qualifications, the NFQ, is Ireland’s ten-level scale for every qualification the state recognises, and third level sits at Levels 6 to 10. Graduates at Level 8 get a 12 month extension to their permission and graduates at Level 9 or above get 24 months. Below Level 8 there is no extension at all.

Immigration Service Delivery writes the test for its Third Level Graduate Programme as being open to a graduate who “has been awarded a qualification at Level 8 or above on the National Framework of Qualifications by a recognised Irish awarding body”, and the plain-English version the state publishes for students says the same. Here is what each level covers.

An ECTS credit is the European unit of study volume, and QQI counts 60 of them as one full academic year. Notice what the framework does to the two diplomas. Both run a year, both carry 60 credits, both are entered after a degree, and they sit a level apart, which is a year of Irish work permission. The University of Galway states it in one line of its admissions FAQ, “A PDip is Level 9; a HDip is Level 8”. Very few course pages mention it at all.

At undergraduate level the same distinction has money attached to it. TU Dublin is the only Irish institution that prices international fees explicitly by NFQ level, and it charges €11,650 for a Level 6 Higher Certificate, €12,500 for a Level 7 ordinary degree and €13,500 for the Level 8 honours degree. The cheapest advertised undergraduate fee at any Irish university therefore buys a two year certificate with no stay-back at the end of it.

Plenty of students end up on those lower awards without having picked them for that reason. The Technological University of the Shannon publishes its student profile, and of its 11,951 undergraduates, 1,606 are on Level 6 programmes and another 2,535 on Level 7. Just under 35 per cent of the undergraduate body.

What happened when five institutes of technology became technological universities?

Twelve institutes of technology were dissolved between 2019 and 2022 and merged into five new universities under the Technological Universities Act 2018. An Irish shortlist written in 2018 and one written today share very few names.

Renaming was the least of it. Each merger had to clear statutory thresholds on research students, on how many academic staff held a doctorate, and on running doctoral programmes across at least three fields of study, with a plan to raise every one of those numbers over the decade that followed.

What the Act asks them to be is regional and industry facing. It says their job is to teach “having particular regard to the needs of the region in which the campuses of the technological university are located” and to run programmes reflecting “the needs of individuals, business, enterprise, the professions, the community, local interests and other stakeholders” in that region. In practice that means smaller campuses spread across counties rather than concentrated in Dublin, and courses starting at Level 6 rather than at Level 8.

One power came with the title. QQI records awarding rights across NFQ Levels 6 to 10 for universities and technological universities, and Levels 6 to 9 for institutes of technology, IADT saying of itself that it “may make awards up to Level 9 of the National Framework of Qualifications”. Becoming a technological university is what let these five confer a PhD in their own name, and it is why Dundalk and Dun Laoghaire still cannot.

Does a technological university degree change anything for your visa or an employer?

No. All five technological universities are designated awarding bodies, exactly as the seven older universities are, which QQI states as “universities, technological universities, and the institutes of technology are classed as designated awarding bodies”. A designated awarding body makes its awards directly onto the National Framework of Qualifications with nobody validating them on its behalf.

Irish immigration puts the two in one line. Its criteria for the eligible programmes list ask that the award be made by “a university or technological university in the State”, with identical conditions on level, credits and attendance either way. When QQI named the first 28 institutions authorised to use the TrustEd Ireland mark in February 2026, all seven traditional universities, all five technological universities, both institutes of technology, RCSI and a set of private colleges appeared on one undifferentiated list.

That plays out in five places an Indian applicant tends to worry about, and it is not identical in all of them.

On the employer question, no Irish state source says anything at all, so treat any confident claim about it with suspicion. What is on the record is a working guidance counsellor’s view.

“Most students want that level 8, but I don’t think employers mind too much where they got it from. They will ultimately look at what you have done in college.”

Fergal Scully, guidance counsellor at Rathmines College, speaking to The Irish Times

The sector does not draw the line either. TU Dublin is a full member of the Irish Universities Association alongside Trinity, and the association describes its own membership as running from “the oldest … Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592” to “the newest … Technological University Dublin established in 2019”.

What do Irish universities charge non-EU students, in euro and rupees?

The range runs from about €10,365 to €66,360 a year, and almost all of the top end is medicine. Every figure below is the institution’s own published non-EU rate for 2026/27 unless the note says otherwise, read at source on 27 July 2026.

Fee in rupees = fee in euro × 109.8650

That is the European Central Bank reference rate for 24 July 2026. A €13,500 fee is therefore about INR 14.8 lakh, and you can redo any row below with the rate on the day you actually transfer.

Every institution treats the student levy differently, which is why two headline fees are rarely comparable. UCD, Galway and Limerick fold theirs into the quoted number. Trinity does not, and adds €314 for a one year taught postgraduate with no waivers permitted. Cork bills a €210 capitation every year. Maynooth and DCU do not say either way.

When the money is due matters more than the levy does. DCU wants the full year’s fee within four weeks of the offer and will not let you accept without it, Cork wants the whole first year before registration, and Limerick issues no visa support letter until you have paid half your tuition or €6,000, whichever is higher.

On a four year degree, budget for the fee moving. Trinity publishes its increase in advance, 2.33 per cent a year through 2026/27 and 3 per cent for students starting from 2027/28. UCD instead freezes the rate for the length of a multi-year programme, veterinary medicine excepted, which over four years is worth several lakh.

Which are the cheapest universities in Ireland at the same award level?

Dublin Business School charges €10,365 for an honours degree, which is the lowest published figure in the country, though it is a private college and your award will come from QQI rather than from a university. Among state institutions Munster Technological University lands at €10,500 to €11,000 once its automatic scholarship is applied, Dundalk Institute of Technology publishes €10,950, and Atlantic Technological University charges €12,000. All four figures buy a Level 8 honours degree.

Scholarships matter more to this ranking than the list prices do. MTU considers every approved applicant without an application and takes €2,500 to €3,000 off, and RCSI knocks €7,000 off its pharmacy and physiotherapy list price. ATU’s largest award, €6,000, goes only to first year entrants on a Level 8 programme, so a cheaper Level 6 or Level 7 course there costs you the biggest discount in the sector.

Then there is where you will be living. Our own costing puts a stripped-back month at €1,222 in Dublin against €929 in Limerick, a gap of €3,516 across the year, wider than the tuition gap between most of the institutions above.

Which Irish universities rank highest, and why are the technological universities missing?

Trinity College Dublin sits 75th in the world in the QS World University Rankings 2027 and UCD 100th. Trinity publishes both of its positions on its research pages, “Trinity is ranked 75 in the World” for QS 2027, and 173rd in the Times Higher Education rankings for 2026.

No technological university appears on it, and the reason is in the Act that created them. It set their research bar at 4 per cent of degree students, rising to 7 per cent over a decade, while a QS position is built on research volume and citations banked over a century. These five were institutes of technology until somewhere between 2019 and 2022, so the ranking is measuring a research base they were never designed to have.

Of the 278,880 students enrolled in Irish higher education in 2024/25, 44,535 were non-Irish, and India was the single largest source country at 20.6 per cent of them, ahead of the United States and China. UCD took the most international students at 7,985, then Trinity at 6,945. But two of the four largest institutions in the country are technological universities, and TU Dublin took more new entrants than anyone else, 5,315 of them.

What do Irish universities ask for, and how do you apply from India?

Most non-EU applicants apply directly to the institution rather than through the Central Applications Office. Trinity offers a “step-by-step guide for non-EU/international students to applying directly to Trinity”, and UCC, Galway and UCD run their own international application routes. The CAO is careful with the word most, saying only that if you “have at any time resided, or are at present resident, outside the EU/UK, then you may be required to apply direct to some HEIs”, which leaves the route worth checking institution by institution. Taught postgraduate applications go direct everywhere.

On the academic bar there is no national cutoff, only per-university percentage tables. Cork puts a second class honours grade two at 55 per cent, a two one at 65 per cent and a first at 75 per cent, with a five point concession for graduates of Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Calcutta. Trinity asks for “at least a 2.1 honors degree (60%)”.

The question that separates them is whether a three year Indian bachelor’s is enough for a Level 9 masters, and the answers genuinely differ. Limerick accepts “a four-year Bachelor Degree or three-year honours Bachelor Degree” outright. Maynooth accepts a three year degree on the same thresholds as a four year one where the final year included a research project, capstone, thesis, dissertation or internship. Cork judges it case by case on “the standard of the awarding institution”. Trinity, UCD and DCU publish no duration rule at all, which means you must ask.

On timing, September is the main intake, and January exists at some institutions but not all and with a much smaller set of programmes. Watch the international deadline rather than the general one. SETU’s page currently says the deadline for visa-required applicants has already passed for this cycle, and every Indian applicant is visa-required.

Two things are worth putting in an email to the admissions office before you accept an offer. Ask them to confirm the NFQ level of the award, and ask them to confirm the programme reference on the approved list under whichever of the two names they are currently using.

Sources

• Higher Education Authority, Higher Education Institutions (the list of 18 funded or statutory institutions, and the archive of 15 dissolved ones) and HEA Key Facts and Figures 2024/25 (278,880 total enrolments, 44,535 non-Irish, 32,940 non-EU, India 20.6%)
• Citizens Information, Third-level education in Ireland (the sector structure, the five technological universities and the institutes they replaced, RCSI as a private university, and which body awards each institution’s degrees) and Immigration rules for full-time non-EEA students (the 12 month and 24 month extensions by NFQ level, the 7 year and 8 year limits)
• Quality and Qualifications Ireland, the National Framework of Qualifications (award types and credit volumes at Levels 6 to 10; universities and technological universities award at Levels 6 to 10, institutes of technology at Levels 6 to 9), Including awards on the NFQ (“Universities, technological universities, and the institutes of technology are classed as designated awarding bodies”), A Brief Guide to the Irish NFQ, version 1.0, August 2024 and the first 28 institutions authorised to use the TrustEd Ireland mark, 4 February 2026
• Immigration Service Delivery, Third Level Graduate Programme, immigration rules for non-EEA students (the Level 8 and Level 9 durations, the 7 and 8 year caps, the €300 fee) and the Interim List of Eligible Programmes with its higher education criteria of 21 March 2025 (“a university or technological university in the State”, NFQ Level 6 or above, at least 60 ECTS, full-time and daytime only, no part-time or online course). Both were read through Internet Archive captures of the official pages because irishimmigration.ie returns a Cloudflare challenge to every automated client and to a visible browser
• Department of Further and Higher Education, list of publicly-funded higher education institutions (the categorised list, last updated 7 November 2022) and the Central Applications Office on applicants resident outside the EU or UK
• Technological Universities Act 2018, section 28 eligibility criteria (4% research students rising to 7%, 90% of staff with a masters or doctorate, 45% with a doctorate rising to 65%) and section 9 functions
• Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, Critical Skills Employment Permit (€40,904 and €36,848 thresholds, “a relevant degree qualification or higher”)
• Fee schedules read at each institution’s own site on 27 July 2026: Trinity undergraduate and postgraduate, UCD, UCC, University of Galway, University of Limerick, DCU, TU Dublin, MTU, TUS, ATU, SETU, DkIT, IADT, RCSI, NCAD, Mary Immaculate College, Dublin Business School, Griffith College, National College of Ireland
• Establishment and awarding statements at source: TU Dublin, MTU, TUS CINNTE Institutional Profile (also the Level 6, 7 and 8 undergraduate headcounts), ATU, SETU, IADT legal status (awards up to Level 9 only), RCSI Quality Assurance Framework 2025-26, Mary Immaculate College quality office, NCAD and UCD
• Marino Institute of Education, programmes for non-EU applicants (“None of the Level 9 Master in Education Studies (MES) programmes meet the minimum requirements for a Stamp 2 study visa”) and Hibernia College (“not in a position to sponsor visa applications”)
• Trinity College Dublin, university rankings (QS 2027 position 75, Times Higher Education 2026 position 173) and The Irish Times, 18 June 2026, for the remaining Irish QS 2027 positions
• The Irish Times, “How is a technological university different and does it matter?”, 30 April 2024, for the quotation from Fergal Scully, guidance counsellor at Rathmines College
• Irish Universities Association, our universities (membership including TU Dublin) and Maynooth postgraduate entry requirements for Asia, University of Limerick international entry requirements and UCC India requirements for the three year bachelor’s rules
• European Central Bank, euro reference exchange rate for the Indian rupee (EUR 1 equals INR 109.8650 on 24 July 2026)

Related reading. Start with the guide to studying in Ireland, price a year properly with the cost of living in Ireland guide, build the application file on the Ireland student visa and Stamp 2 page, compare one year and two year degrees on the masters in Ireland guide, check work experience and GMAT rules on the MBA in Ireland guide, and see what the degree buys afterwards on the Stamp 1G and Ireland PR guide.