The 31 March 2028 Person in Charge Deadline: Level 8 and Level 9 Under S.I. 98/2025

Every person in charge of a designated centre for older people in Ireland has until 31 March 2028 to hold a qualification at NFQ Level 8 or Level 9. Not Level 5, not Level 6, and not a further education award at all.

The obligation came in with S.I. No. 98 of 2025, which substantially rewrote Regulation 14 of the 2013 regulations with effect from 31 March 2025. If your guidance on the person in charge role predates that, it is describing the old position.

What Regulation 14 now requires

Four things changed, and three of them bite immediately rather than in 2028.

A deputy is now required. The centre must have both a person in charge and a person who is able to deputise. That is a structural requirement, not a contingency plan.

A cap on how many centres one person can hold. A person in charge may cover up to two designated centres. Groups running a single named individual across three or more locations are outside the regulation as it now stands.

Three years in a nurse management role. The experience requirement is not less than three years in a nurse management role in the health and social care area. Read the wording: it is narrower than management experience generally, and narrower than health and social care management. It points at a registered nurse who has managed.

And the qualification deadline. Regulation 14(7) requires a person employed to be a person in charge before 31 March 2028 to hold, in addition to the other requirements, a post-registration management qualification in health or a related field — and then, not later than 31 March 2028, either:

• a post-registration management or leadership certificate in health or a related field at a minimum of Level 8 on the National Framework of Qualifications; or
• a nursing postgraduate qualification at a minimum of Level 9 which includes a management or leadership module.

Note the second route has a content condition attached. A Level 9 nursing postgraduate qualification without a management or leadership module does not satisfy it.

The exemption, and who it covers

Regulation 14(7)(c) exempts a person who was already named on the Chief Inspector register as person in charge, or who was on statutory leave, on or before 31 March 2025.

That is a meaningful carve-out and it is worth checking carefully against your own records rather than assuming. Two consequences follow from it. An incumbent who was registered before that date carries no new qualification obligation. But anyone appointed since — including an internal promotion, and including someone stepping up from the deputy role — is inside the requirement and has until March 2028.

So the practical risk is not the long-serving person in charge. It is succession. If your deputy is the person who will take over, and they were not on the register by 31 March 2025, they need a Level 8 or Level 9 qualification before they can be appointed after the deadline.

This points at higher education, not further education

This is the part that most needs saying plainly, because the sector buying habit runs the other way.

A great deal of care-sector management training sits in further education, at NFQ Levels 5 and 6 — including the QQI Level 6 major award in Health Services Supervisory Management Skills, which is a genuinely useful qualification and a natural step up from Level 5. It does not satisfy Regulation 14(7). The regulation names Level 8 and Level 9, which are higher education awards.

If you are planning for this deadline, a Level 6 supervisory management programme is not the answer to it, however good the programme. The answer is a Level 8 certificate in health or health services management, or a Level 9 nursing postgraduate award that includes a management or leadership module.

There is State funding against it

The Government announced a Nursing Homes Leadership and Management Education Initiative with 2.4 million euro allocated, approximately 550 places, around 180 a year, starting in the 2026/27 academic year, delivered through a Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland postgraduate certificate with Skillnet involvement.

Two honest caveats. The published announcement does not state the NFQ level of that postgraduate certificate, and it does not state whether it is free to participants. Both matter if you are planning around it, so confirm them directly before relying on either. The existence of 550 funded places against a 2028 deadline is, however, a strong signal of how many people the Department expects to need this.

The disability side is worded differently, and more loosely

Providers running both older persons and disability services should not assume one standard.

Regulation 14(3) of the 2013 disability regulations requires a person in charge appointed after the three-year point to have a minimum of three years of experience in a management or supervisory role in the area of health or social care, and an appropriate qualification in health or social care management at an appropriate level.

Three differences follow. The experience requirement is management or supervisory, not nurse management — so it is broader. The qualification requirement names no NFQ level at all. And there is no 2028 deadline attached to it.

That is the reverse of the pattern elsewhere in the two regimes, where the disability regulations are the stricter of the two on staffing generally. On the person in charge qualification specifically, the older-people regulations are now far more prescriptive. We could not confirm from a published consolidation that the disability regulations are unamended, so check the current text before relying on the looser wording.

What to do with this now

The deadline is sixteen months away and the qualifications involved take an academic year or more, so the planning window is roughly this one.

Check first whether your current person in charge falls inside the 14(7)(c) exemption, which turns on whether they were named on the register, or on statutory leave, on or before 31 March 2025. Then check your deputy, because that is where the succession exposure sits. Then confirm whether any management qualification you are already funding is at Level 8 or above, since a Level 6 award will not discharge the obligation however relevant its content.

And review your own records against the three immediate requirements rather than only the 2028 one — the deputy requirement, the two-centre cap and the nurse management experience condition have been live since March 2025. For the wider fitness, vetting and training requirements attaching to the role, see our guides to the person in charge fitness and training requirements and to the person in charge and registered provider roles. And for what the regulations do and do not require of care staff more generally, which is a different and much looser standard, see our guide to whether Irish law requires care assistants to hold QQI Level 5.