Midwifery is one of the five EU-harmonised professions, so an EU/EEA midwifery qualification is recognised in Norway automatically. But midwifery is trained differently across Europe — as a direct three-year degree in some countries, built on a nursing qualification in others — and the regulation recognises four distinct routes. Which one your diploma follows decides what you must attach.

Last reviewed 24 July 2026. Sources: EØS-forskriften, FOR-2008-10-08-1130 — §§ 5, 6, 7, 18, 21, 24, Annex VI, and the Helse- og omsorgsdepartementet commentary; Altinn — Jordmor, Helsedirektoratet.

What automatic recognition covers

If your qualification is on the directive’s list and comes from an EEA country, Helsedirektoratet does not reassess your syllabus against a Norwegian one. Your education is accepted as meeting the agreed minimum standard, and there is no individual assessment.

This turns on where you trained, not on which passport you hold — a distinction that decides which system reads your file.

The establishment paperwork is the standard harmonised-profession set: diploma, transcript or Diploma Supplement, a Certificate of Conformity from the competent authority where you trained, and confirmation of professional status no more than three months old on the day it is sent to Helsedirektoratet. Education from a Nordic country or Poland removes the status requirement — though if you hold the right to practise in the Nordics while having trained elsewhere in the EEA, you document status from the country where you trained instead. The provisorfarmasøyt page sets out these mechanics in full, but the document list is set per profession, so check the jordmor page rather than carrying another profession’s list across.

You may also be asked for your authorisation from the country of education, and for work references with the usual formalities — the workplace’s letterhead or stamp, a manager’s signature with their name and position typed as well, and contact details.

Recognition, though, is not the same thing as permission to work — a point this page returns to at the end.

The four routes that qualify

Here is what makes midwifery different from the other four harmonised professions. A pharmacy degree is a pharmacy degree; a midwifery qualification can be built four different ways, and the regulation names all four. Your automatic recognition depends on your training matching one of them.

  • A full-time midwifery education of at least three years. This can be conditional on holding a qualification that gives access to university or higher education, or it can be followed by two years of professional practice for which a certificate has been issued.
  • A full-time midwifery education of at least two years, or 3 600 hours, built on a qualification as a nurse responsible for general care.
  • A full-time midwifery education of at least 18 months, or 3 000 hours, built on a qualification as a nurse responsible for general care, and followed by one year of professional practice for which a certificate has been issued.

The pattern is that the shorter the direct education, the more that has to sit around it — either a prior nursing qualification, a period of certified practice, or both. If your route involved a practice year, that certificate matters: it must be issued by the competent authority in the country where you qualified, and it has to confirm that after obtaining your midwifery qualification you satisfactorily carried out all aspects of midwifery work for the corresponding period at an approved hospital or health institution.

There is a fourth path worth knowing separately, because it functions as an alternative to the practice certificate: a certificate from the competent authority confirming that you have actually and lawfully worked as a midwife for at least two consecutive years within the last five. If you have the working history, it stands in for the structured practice year.

Check your own diploma against these before assuming which one applies. It is the single most useful thing you can do before you file, because it tells you which supporting documents Helsedirektoratet will be looking for.

If your qualification pre-dates the harmonisation

If your qualification is not on the directive’s list — typically because it pre-dates the reference date — you are not shut out. Two acquired-rights routes apply.

The general one: a certificate showing you have actually and lawfully practised as a midwife for at least three consecutive years within the last five, provided your qualification was issued, or your training begun, before the reference date set for your country.

Then a set of provisions specific to midwifery, in the regulation’s dedicated annex.

A qualification meeting the directive’s minimum training standards but issued before the reference date is recognised where it is accompanied by a certificate of at least two consecutive years’ practice in the last five. The same applies to qualifications completed in the former East Germany that meet the minimum standards, where training began before 3 October 1990.

Poland has its own terms. A Polish midwifery qualification issued before 1 May 2004, or for training begun before that date, that does not meet the directive’s minimum standards is recognised on defined practice conditions: for a university-level qualification (dyplom licencjata położnictwa), at least three consecutive years in the last five; for a qualification from a post-secondary medical school (dyplom położnej), at least five consecutive years in the last seven. There is also a separate route for Polish midwives who completed their education before 1 May 2004 and hold a bachelor’s diploma obtained through a special completion programme under the 2004 Polish legislation.

Romania has a single provision: a midwifery qualification (asistent medical obstetrică-ginecologie) issued before 1 January 2007 that does not meet the minimum standards is recognised where accompanied by a certificate of at least five consecutive years’ practice within the last seven.

These are narrow, date-bound routes. If your qualification post-dates accession, none of them applies to you — you are on the ordinary automatic route, and the four-routes section above is what governs.

The fee and the deadline

The fee is 1 665 NOK — the same whether you were educated in the EU/EEA, outside it, or in the UK and Northern Ireland. It is set by FOR-2023-02-09-190 § 2 and has not changed since March 2024. You pay it in Altinn when you register your application.

Helsedirektoratet confirms receipt within one month and tells you which documents, if any, are missing. The decision is due within three months of the application being complete — complete, not submitted, so a missing document means the clock has not started running.

You can appeal the decision under chapter VI of the forvaltningsloven, and you can appeal on the same basis if the directorate misses its own deadline.

Working here temporarily

If you are already lawfully established as a midwife elsewhere in the EEA or Switzerland and want to work in Norway for a period rather than settle, you notify Helsedirektoratet of the nature and duration of the service before you begin, and renew that notification for each year you want to work.

Midwives get a specific advantage here, shared with the other harmonised professions. Helsedirektoratet may check a service provider’s qualifications in advance where necessary to avoid serious harm to patients — but that power expressly does not extend to doctors, dentists, nurses, midwives and pharmacists recognised under the harmonised chapter. The notification is still required; the advance qualifications check is what is waived. Midwifery has been part of the temporary-service arrangement since long before pharmacists were added to it.

Whether work counts as temporary is judged case by case on its duration, frequency, regularity and continuity, rather than against a fixed number of weeks. First-time documentation is lighter than a full application: identity and nationality, proof of lawful establishment elsewhere in the EEA with full professional rights and no bar on practising, and your qualifications. Self-employed work adds professional liability cover valid in Norway. Midwives working temporarily may use the Norwegian professional title, which most professions in this position may not.

Where Norwegian actually fits

There is no language requirement for EU/EEA-trained applicants to obtain authorisation. That is accurate as far as it goes, and it is only half the provision.

The other half is in the regulation itself: health personnel who receive authorisation must hold the language skills necessary for sound professional practice, and the duty to ensure those skills are sufficient falls on the employer and on the practitioner. It is not something the directorate signs off on your behalf.

What the rules deliberately withhold is a test. Standardised language requirements cannot be imposed on EEA-trained personnel — the assessment has to be concrete, and different posts can reasonably demand different things. That is a genuine protection, and it is also why nobody will tell you where you stand.

The functional demand in midwifery is as specific as it gets. You support someone through labour, when they are frightened and not at their most articulate, and you have to understand them and be understood. You explain what is happening and what the choices are, in the moment, so that consent means something. You hand over to the team, and the whole point of the handover is that someone else acts on it. Patients have a statutory right to information adapted to their circumstances, and a qualification does not satisfy it.

If you want a level to aim at rather than a vague sense of “enough”, B2 is the benchmark Norway applies to safe communication in the health service — the standard midwives trained outside the EU/EEA must document, and a sensible target even when nobody demands it of you. Speaking is the hardest part to judge from the inside, because it is the only skill you cannot rehearse silently. Practising it out loud against exam-style prompts is what muntligb1.com is built for.