Working at CERN

Visa: Long Term

About Long Term Working Visas for France and Switzerland

Disclaimer: These are the general rules as we understand them. Depending on nationality, the consulates where you apply for the visas and who you talk to in the CERN User's Office, individual experience may vary.

Most people coming to CERN to work long term (for more than 3 months) need both a Swiss and French visa D (this includes American nationals).

In order to facilitate applications for visas, you need official letters of invitation from CERN. These are drafted by the US CMS Project Office and sent to the authorized people in CERN who can sign such letters. They are diplomatic documents and can only be signed and stamped by a small number of people at CERN. The Swiss invitations come back to the US CMS Project Office and are faxed to the recipient and the Swiss consulate and sent by express mail to the recipient. The French invitations go directly from the Relations with the Host States office at CERN to Paris and then to the French consulate where you will apply for the visa. They will then contact you to arrange a date to apply for the visa. This procedure can take quite a long time, so you should request invitations long before your moving date and apply for the visa at the same time the invitation is sent from CERN. Once you have the required visas for both countries, the CERN User's office can request residency papers for you in the country where you plan to reside.

The information we require to draft the long term invitations can be found here. Please Email this to Yasemin.Uzunefe.Yazgan@cern.ch