The Philippines 9G Work Visa: Who Actually Files It, and Which Steps Belong to Your Employer

"How do I get a 9G?" — the subject of that sentence has to change

Direct answer: you do not file it. The Philippine company employing you does. The 9(G) is issued under Section 9(g) of Commonwealth Act No. 613, the Philippine Immigration Act of 1940, read together with Sections 20(a) and 42(a). It sits in the pre-arranged employment category, and those two words carry the whole logic: there must first be a qualified Philippine employer, a defined position, and a genuine employment relationship. Without an employer, this route does not legally exist.

Once you change the subject of the sentence, several confusing things resolve at once.

• Why no agency can "get you a work visa personally." What an agency can do is run the process on behalf of a company that genuinely employs you. What is marketed as attaching yourself to a company purely to obtain a permit is something else entirely, and the consequences are set out in the risks of arranging a work visa through a company that does not really employ you.
• Why you do not hold the underlying paperwork. Corporate registration, tax filings, audited figures, the organisational chart, the job description, the employment contract — only the employer can produce these. No amount of urgency on your side fills that gap.
• Why the timeline is not yours to control. The labour permit that runs in parallel, the completeness of the corporate file, and the speed of responses to requests for additional documents all sit on the employer's side.

Before you raise it with HR, frame the question correctly: not "how do I get my work visa", but "who on the company side is filing, and which step is waiting on me?" Ask us to draft the employer-side checklist →

For the full issuing logic and the end-to-end chain, see the complete guide to the 9G work visa and the AEP. If you are reading this as the employer, the page written for your side is what a Philippine company must do to hire a foreign national.

Eligibility is assessed in three places: the company, the position, and you

Direct answer: nobody is assessing you alone. Three things have to hold at the same time — the company, the position, and the person. In practice most refusals and most rounds of additional-document requests originate in the first two, not in the applicant.

• The company. It has to be genuinely registered and subsisting, current on its tax registration and filings, and of a size that makes the position plausible. A company incorporated very recently, with little operating trace, applying for several foreign workers at once, will be asked for more and more material at exactly this point.
• The position. The role has to exist, the duties have to match what the company actually does, and there has to be a coherent explanation of why it calls for a foreign national. When the job title and the real work do not correspond, everything downstream inherits the problem — including whether the compensation looks consistent, which is discussed in how the salary expectation for a 9G is assessed.
• The person. Your qualifications and work history have to support the role, your passport and admission record have to be clean, and you should not have unresolved immigration matters outstanding.

Each of the three is evidenced by a different set of documents and examined at a different stage. The fastest way to find your own weak point is to lay three things side by side — the job description, your qualifications and employment history, and the company's evidence of operations — and ask whether they tell the same story.

One misconception worth correcting: eligibility is not a score to be passed, it is a question of internal consistency. What the reviewing offices want to see is a file whose parts corroborate one another, not a file in which every individual item looks impressive but the items contradict each other. If a petition is actually refused, the options are set out in what can be done after a 9G is refused.

Two agencies, two tracks: the employment permit and the visa are not one process

Direct answer: these are two separate matters before two separate agencies, not two steps of one matter. The Alien Employment Permit is handled by the Department of Labor and Employment. The 9(G) visa is handled by the Bureau of Immigration. Each has its own filing window, its own assessment, and its own validity period — and the two validity periods do not automatically align.

Three recurring problems all trace back to treating the two tracks as one.

• Sequencing. Which goes first, whether they can run in parallel, and what can still proceed while one side is incomplete — these have concrete answers, set out point by point in which comes first, the AEP or the 9G.
• Mismatched expiry dates. When the two documents fall out of step, you end up with one still valid and the other already expired, and renewal stalls immediately.
• Changing roles and updating only one side. After a promotion, transfer or retitling, only one of the two records gets amended — and the discrepancy surfaces at the next renewal, when it is least convenient.

There are also transitional permits that allow certain work to begin before a long-term visa is in place. They differ from the 9(G) in nature, duration and scope, and they are not a substitute for it. For how the labour side of the chain is structured, see the guide to the Alien Employment Permit.

A practical test you can apply in any conversation: whenever you hear "we will handle both together", ask where each of the two filings currently stands and what reference each one carries. An answer that cannot name both is usually an answer about only one.

It is also worth understanding why the two tracks exist at all, because it makes the sequencing memorable rather than arbitrary. One agency is answering a labour-market question — whether this role should be filled by a foreign national. The other is answering an immigration question — whether this particular person should be admitted and in what status. Those are genuinely different questions, decided against different criteria, which is why an answer on one side never guarantees an answer on the other, and why a problem that surfaces late almost always turns out to have originated in whichever track nobody was watching.

The document list splits into two piles — and your pile is the thinner one

Direct answer: separate the list into an employer pile and a personal pile, and your own turns out to be surprisingly short. Making that split stops you worrying about documents you were never going to produce, and stops you overlooking the few that genuinely depend on you.

• Only the employer can produce: proof of corporate registration and good standing, tax registration and filing records, audited financial information, the job description and organisational chart, the employment contract and payroll evidence, and the letters filed and signed in the company's name. How complete this pile is essentially sets the pace of the whole matter.
• Only you can produce: your passport, including the bio page and the most recent admission record; qualification and employment-history documents together with their authentication and translation; medical and clearance documents; photographs and personal data forms. Documents issued abroad normally have to travel through an authentication chain — either legalisation by the Philippine foreign service post with jurisdiction, or an apostille from the competent authority of the issuing country, with an English translation where the original is in another language. This is the slowest link in the chain and the one worth starting earliest.
• Requiring both sides: the steps where you must appear personally, and the steps where a company representative appears with you.

For the itemised list, the number of copies and the reasons files are commonly returned, see the 9G document checklist, item by item. For which steps cannot be delegated at all, see which Bureau of Immigration transactions require you in person.

One reliable signal: if someone is only ever asking you for documents and never asking the company for any, the matter has probably not actually started. Procedurally, the employer's pile is the substantive one.

A second signal, subtler than the first: watch whether anyone has asked for the job description. It is the single document that has to reconcile with the company's actual business, with your qualifications, and with the compensation — which makes it the document most likely to be read closely and the one most often assembled carelessly. If it was copied from an unrelated posting, or drafted to fit a title rather than the work, the inconsistency will surface later at the point where it is most expensive to fix, and it will be fixed by rewriting the file rather than by explaining it.

How long it takes and what it costs — and why a single number would be a guess

Direct answer: the timeline is made of four segments and the cost is made of four blocks. Any single figure quoted before those are known is a guess made on your behalf.

The four segments of time: first, the employer assembling its file — by far the most variable part, and the one that most often accounts for a matter taking months rather than weeks; second, the labour permit track, with its own assessment and posting requirements; third, filing, assessment and preparation of the order at the immigration side; fourth, implementation of the visa and the identity documents that follow. What usually holds things up is the first segment and the cross-border authentication of documents, not the assessment itself. The segment-by-segment picture is in how long each stage of a 9G actually takes.

The four blocks of cost: official fees, which exist as two separate published schedules, one per agency; third-party costs such as authentication, translation, notarisation, medical examinations and courier; company-side costs for producing, auditing and notarising documents; and the service fee of whoever assists. These are different in kind and belong in different columns. This article deliberately quotes no amounts — not out of evasiveness, but because official schedules are revised, brackets differ by circumstance, and third-party costs vary by case, so a "typical total" would mislead more than it helps. How to read the structure, and how to insist that a quotation be itemised, is covered in what a Philippine work visa actually costs, block by block.

Turn both questions into something verifiable. Ask "which of the four segments are we currently in?" and "which of the four blocks does this charge belong to, and is there an official receipt matching it?" Specific answers indicate real work in progress. A single lump sum and a promised approval date indicate the opposite — no one can guarantee an outcome or a precise approval date.

Four things that go wrong afterwards, and where each is covered

Direct answer: the 9(G) is tied to a specific employer, so almost every problem appears at the moment that relationship changes. Remembering these four is more useful than memorising the process.

• Renewal. How far ahead to start, who initiates it, and how it is synchronised with the labour permit are covered in how a 9G renewal actually runs. The classic mistake is starting so late that there is no room left for a request for additional documents.
• Changing employer. This is not a matter of amending a name on an existing record; it involves closing out the old relationship and establishing a new one. See what changing employers involves.
• Resignation and the gap that follows. Your status does not quietly continue after you leave. How long you may remain, and what has to be dealt with actively, is in how long you can stay after leaving the job.
• Arrangements with a company that does not really employ you. This is the hardest category to unwind, and it is treated in the risks involved.

If what you actually need is a decision about which route to take at all — work visa, or something else, or whether long-term residence is realistic — start with the overview of Philippine visa categories and come back to the specific one afterwards. If you would like both the company side and the personal side mapped in one pass, talk to the visa and HR team at YIXING; we will tell you first which steps your employer has to front, and which can be delegated.

Do not discover two weeks before expiry that your two documents expire on different dates — that single mismatch accounts for most stalled renewals. Have us check your expiry dates and renewal calendar →

One organising idea makes all four easier to manage: keep a single dated record of what you hold and when each piece expires — the visa, the labour permit, the identity card, and the passport itself. Four documents with four different expiry dates, held by two agencies and one employer, is exactly the sort of thing that fails quietly. Most of the emergencies in this category are not caused by a rule anyone disagreed with; they are caused by nobody owning the calendar. If you do nothing else after reading this page, own the calendar.