Sponsor Licence: How to Apply

Key Takeaways

• A sponsor licence is what allows you to employ someone who is not a settled worker. Any genuine UK organisation can hold one, whatever its size, including a sole trader sponsoring someone in their own business.
• Once granted, a Worker or Temporary Worker licence is valid indefinitely. There is no expiry date, no renewal application and no renewal fee. Scale-up and UK Expansion Worker licences are the only exceptions, and run for a maximum of four years.
• The application fee is £611 for a small or charitable sponsor and £1,682 for a medium or large sponsor. Most decisions arrive in under eight weeks, and a priority service is available on most routes for £750.
• You must nominate an Authorising Officer and at least one Level 1 User who meet the Home Office tests. Failing either one is an automatic refusal, whatever else your application shows.
• Your supporting documents must reach the Home Office within five working days of submitting the online form. A missing mandatory document makes the whole application invalid.
• A rejected application is returned without being read and your fee comes back. A refused application costs you the fee and normally blocks you for at least six months. The two words mean very different things.
• WorkPermitCloud prepares and submits sponsor licence applications, and builds the HR systems the Home Office assesses before it grants one. See our sponsor licence application service.

Introduction

This page is for any UK employer applying for a sponsor licence for the first time, and for anyone whose application has already been rejected or refused and who needs to know what happens next. It covers the eligibility tests, the people you have to appoint, the documents you have to send, what it costs, how the Home Office decides, and what you can do when the decision goes against you. If you want us to handle the application itself, that is what our sponsor licence service is for.

What a Sponsor Licence Is and Who Needs One

A sponsor licence is authorisation from the Home Office to employ people who need permission to work in the UK. Employers who hold one are called sponsors, and a sponsor confirms a job offer by assigning a Certificate of Sponsorship to the worker, who then uses it to apply for their visa. GOV.UK's UK visa sponsorship for employers guide is the official overview, and the detailed rules sit in Part 1 of the sponsor guidance.

Two ideas run through the whole sponsorship system, and both come straight from the Home Office's own guidance. The first is that sponsorship is a privilege rather than a right, and that the employers who benefit from hiring overseas workers have to play their part in keeping the immigration system honest. The second follows from it: a licence "creates no property or other enforceable right", and granting one is at the Home Office's discretion. That is why so much of the application is about whether the Home Office trusts you, rather than about paperwork.

When You Need a Licence, and When You Do Not

You need a licence if you want to employ or engage someone who is not a settled worker and who does not already have permission that allows them to work for you.

You do not need one to employ Irish citizens, with very limited exceptions, people granted settled or pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme, or anyone with indefinite leave to enter or remain. That list is not exhaustive, and it is worth checking a candidate's status before assuming you need to sponsor them.

One point catches employers out more than any other. EU, EEA and Swiss citizens who did not obtain status under the EU Settlement Scheme need sponsorship in exactly the same way as any other overseas national. There is no residual free movement right to fall back on.

Worker and Temporary Worker Licences

When you apply, you choose which immigration routes you want to be licensed on. You can apply for as many as genuinely suit your organisation, and if your application succeeds those are the only routes on which you can sponsor. Routes are grouped into two licence types.

Most employers reading this page want a Worker licence on the Skilled Worker route. You can hold both licence types at once, and you can add routes later.

Student and Child Student sponsorship is a separate licensing system with its own guidance and its own application, so it is not covered here.

Who Can Hold a Licence

Any genuine organisation operating or trading lawfully in the UK can apply, and size is not a barrier. Small businesses are licensed every week. Our guide to whether a takeaway business can apply for a sponsor licence works through the same question for one of the smallest kinds of employer there is.

There are, however, three situations where the answer is no.

An individual person cannot be a sponsor, unless they are a sole trader sponsoring someone to work in their business. You also cannot use a licence to sponsor a worker in a personal capacity, which means either an individual or household employing someone for their own benefit while not otherwise running a business in the UK, or a worker engaged for the personal benefit of one of your staff, or that person's close relative or partner, in a role unrelated to what your organisation actually does. Sponsoring in a personal capacity after your licence has been granted normally means revocation. The only exception in the whole system is a private servant in a diplomatic household, sponsored by the mission itself on the International Agreement route.

An employment agency or employment business can be licensed, but only to sponsor workers it employs directly in connection with running its own business. You cannot sponsor a worker and then supply them as labour to a client, no matter how genuine the contract between you. If the Home Office finds that this is what has happened, it revokes the licence.

Going the other way, if you want to sponsor someone who was supplied to you by an agency, you can assign them a Certificate of Sponsorship only if you have genuine responsibility for deciding all the duties, functions and outputs of the job, and you are the one agreeing and paying the salary.

If You Have Multiple Branches or Franchises

If you operate from several offices, sites or UK subsidiaries, you can apply for a single licence covering your head office and all UK branches, have each branch apply separately, or group branches together, for example by region. The Home Office may ask for evidence that the branches are linked by common ownership or control.

Being licensed as a head office with all UK branches means that a revocation or a downgrade applies to every branch at once. Where branches hold separate licences, action against one does not automatically affect the others, although the Home Office will investigate them.

You cannot add a branch to your licence if that branch has been downgraded to a B-rating, is suspended, or has had its own licence revoked within the past twelve months, or twenty-four months if it has been revoked more than once.

Franchises under your control can be grouped under one licence or licensed individually. Franchises that are separate businesses outside your control need their own licence if they want to sponsor.

Are You Eligible? The Two Tests the Home Office Applies

The Home Office assesses every application against two sets of criteria: eligibility, which is about whether your organisation genuinely exists and operates here, and suitability, which is about whether you can be trusted with a licence. Most refusals turn on one or the other, and the difference matters because they are proved in different ways. Our sponsor licence eligibility check is a quick way to see where you stand before you spend anything.

Eligibility: Operating or Trading Lawfully in the UK

To be eligible you must be a genuine organisation operating or trading lawfully in the UK, and you prove it with the documents in Appendix A to the sponsor guidance. If you have no operating or trading presence here, the application is refused. If the Home Office discovers the same thing after granting a licence, it revokes it.

The definition of operating or trading is wider than many employers expect. Trading means operations of a commercial kind, providing goods or services to customers for reward. Operating also covers charities and other not-for-profit organisations providing a service to clients, customers or service users, and businesses engaged in pre-trade activities with a view to starting commercial trading in the foreseeable future. A young business that has not yet invoiced anyone is not automatically excluded.

What does exclude you is the absence of real commercial activity, and the guidance gives two examples of where the Home Office is unlikely to be satisfied.

The first is no significant trade activity. If, once you set aside payments to HMRC and utility, leasing and insurance bills, there is no evidence of money moving between your organisation and any customer, client or service user, and the money funding you is coming from a related company or private investors rather than from trade, the Home Office is unlikely to accept that you are actively trading for the purpose of holding a licence.

The second is circular trading. If your invoices and contracts are wholly or mainly between entities linked to you by common ownership or control, or entities that share the people running them, with little evidence of services going to anyone outside that group, the Home Office treats it as money being moved through linked businesses in order to acquire a licence.

Suitability: Honesty, Convictions and the Public Good

Suitability is assessed against you, your owners, directors, Authorising Officer, Key Contact, Level 1 User, anyone recorded at Companies House as a person with significant control, and anyone involved in your day-to-day running. The guidance calls this group "you or your", and it is deliberately broad.

Some things mean an automatic refusal. An unspent conviction for a relevant offence, which is a long list running from immigration offences through dishonesty, fraud, money laundering, tax or excise duty avoidance, bribery and proceeds of crime to serious violent and sexual offences, means the application is refused. So does knowingly sending a false document, a civil penalty for illegal working or certain other penalties where the cooling-off period has not run, and being legally prohibited from acting as a company director unless a court has given permission.

Other things mean refusal in normal circumstances: providing false information, an unspent conviction the Home Office considers relevant even though it is not on the list, having been named as key personnel at an organisation whose licence was refused in the last six months or revoked in the last twelve, unpaid costs owed to the Home Office from legal proceedings, UK or United Nations sanctions, and behaviour that is not conducive to the public good.

That last phrase has content. The guidance names fostering hatred or inter-community division, fomenting, justifying or glorifying terrorism, and rejecting the rights of or discriminating against people on the basis of sex, age, disability, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital or civil partnership status, race, or religion or belief. The Home Office says it will not license organisations whose actions and behaviour are not conducive to the public good, and that this applies whether the behaviour is current or historic.

Two further suitability points are easy to miss. The Home Office must be satisfied that it can carry out compliance checks on an immediate, unannounced basis, including at any physical address where your sponsored workers would be working, and that where access to a third party's site would be needed it can see evidence of an arrangement guaranteeing that third party's co-operation. And if you will sponsor or supervise anyone under eighteen, you must have suitable arrangements for their travel to the UK, their reception on arrival, their care while here, and parental consent to all of it. Failing that means refusal.

The Eligible Role Test

This is the requirement that has changed most, and the one that now decides the largest share of small business applications. The Home Office must be satisfied that you are able and intend to offer work that meets the definition of an eligible role. All four limbs have to be met, and they have to go on being met for as long as you sponsor the worker.

The role must exist at the point you assign the Certificate of Sponsorship, or you must be able to reasonably anticipate that it will exist by then. It must require the jobholder to perform the specific duties, responsibilities and weekly hours set out on the Certificate. It must meet every requirement of the route, including skill level and salary, and comply at all times with the National Minimum Wage Act and the Working Time Regulations. And it must be appropriate to your business in light of your business model, business plan and scale.

That last limb is the one that refuses people, and the guidance gives three examples of where the Home Office is likely to be unsatisfied.

The first is where you do not currently employ, and have never employed, anyone in a role that meets the Skilled Worker requirements. A small retail outlet whose entire staff are shop assistants is the example given.

The second is where the role does not look necessary for the business. A small fast food outlet telling the Home Office it needs a full-time business development manager, HR manager or publicity manager is the example, and the reasoning is that there is no credible need for those roles in that business.

The third is where the salary does not look commensurate with your turnover or your financial position, and you cannot satisfactorily explain how it will be funded sustainably.

The Home Office also makes regular checks with HMRC to confirm that sponsored workers are being paid what the Certificate says. Our guide to Home Office salary checks for sponsor licences explains how those checks work in practice, and what triggers them.

One related suitability ground is worth stating plainly because it is aimed squarely at arrangements that look like self-sponsorship done badly. The Home Office considers whether your organisation has been established, or exists, mainly to facilitate the entry or residence of someone who would not otherwise have permission to work here. The worked example is a foreign national who registers a company at Companies House while living abroad, employs a UK-based worker, appoints that worker as the Level 1 User, and then assigns a Certificate of Sponsorship to themselves.

If You Are Regulated or Licensed

If you need to be registered with, inspected by or monitored by a regulator, or licensed by a licensing authority, in order to operate lawfully, you must be registered or licensed as required. Saying you are not regulated when you are is likely to mean refusal, or revocation if the Home Office finds out later.

This covers adult social care providers, who must be registered with the Care Quality Commission in England, the Care Inspectorate in Scotland, Care Inspectorate Wales, or the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority in Northern Ireland. It covers anyone selling or supplying alcohol, who needs a licence from the relevant licensing authority, and alcohol wholesalers, who need HMRC authorisation. It covers banks, building societies, credit unions, electronic money institutions and other financial services firms, who must be regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority, or both. It covers food businesses, who must register with their local authority. And it covers schools.

Optional membership of a professional body is different. It does not fall under this requirement, although you can send evidence of it as one of your supporting documents.

Appointing Your Key Personnel

The people you name in the application are not an administrative detail. Nominating an Authorising Officer or a Level 1 User who does not meet the requirements is one of the few things that refuses an application outright, and it happens often enough that it is worth getting settled before you open the form. This page covers who you must nominate and the tests that decide the application. For how the roles work day to day once you are licensed, how to change them, and how the Sponsorship Management System is run, see our guidance on Sponsor Licence: SMS and Key Personnel.

The Three Roles You Must Nominate

Your application form asks you to name people for three roles.

The Authorising Officer is the senior person with overall responsibility for your activity as a licensed sponsor. The Key Contact is your main point of contact with UK Visas and Immigration. The Level 1 User is the person who runs the licence day to day on the Sponsorship Management System, which includes assigning Certificates of Sponsorship and reporting changes.

One person can hold all three, or you can split them. You can have only one Authorising Officer and only one Key Contact at any time. You can name more than one Level 1 User in the application and add others later.

Every one of them must be based in the UK for the period they fill the role, hold a valid National Insurance number unless they are exempt from needing one, and come from within your organisation unless one of the exceptions below applies. If someone is exempt from needing a National Insurance number you must explain why, and you may be asked to evidence it. None of them can be a contractor or consultant contracted to you for a specific purpose.

Who Can Be the Authorising Officer

Your Authorising Officer must be a paid member of staff or an office holder within your organisation, and must be the most senior person responsible for recruiting the workers you sponsor. If you do not recruit them yourself, it is the most senior person responsible for your activity as a sponsor.

You cannot appoint a representative or anyone from another organisation to this role. The single exception is that if you go into administration after your licence is granted, an insolvency practitioner must take the role for as long as that lasts.

The Authorising Officer decides how many of your staff have access to the Sponsorship Management System and at what level, and is responsible for everything every one of those users does. They do not get access to the system automatically. If they want it, they have to be appointed as a Level 1 User as well, either in the application or afterwards. The Home Office recommends they check the Certificates of Sponsorship assigned to workers at least once a month.

You must have an eligible Authorising Officer in place for the whole life of the licence. Not nominating one means refusal. Not having one, or failing to tell the Home Office when yours changes, normally means revocation. Our Authorising Officer guide for UK sponsor licence compliance goes through the role in more detail, including what the Home Office expects the person to actually do.

Who Can Be the Level 1 User

At least one Level 1 User, described as your primary Level 1 User, must meet two requirements at once. They must be an employee, a director or a partner within your organisation, and they must be a settled worker. Failing to nominate someone who meets both means the application is refused, and losing that person later without replacing them means revocation.

There are two exceptions to the settled worker part. It does not apply if you are a diplomatic mission, a consular post or an international organisation licensed on the International Agreement route. And it does not apply where your Authorising Officer holds permission as a Representative of an Overseas Business, a Tier 1 Graduate Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur or Exceptional Talent migrant, a Start-up migrant, an Innovator or Innovator Founder, a Global Talent migrant, or a UK Expansion Worker. Even where an exception applies, you still need a Level 1 User who is an employee, director or partner within your organisation.

A transitional arrangement applies to sponsors who applied successfully before 1 January 2025 and have held a licence continuously since. They can meet the two requirements across two separate Level 1 Users rather than one. The Home Office has said it is likely to require a single person to meet both in future, and recommends appointing one now as a matter of good practice.

You can name more than one Level 1 User in the application, but any additional ones must also be a paid member of staff or office holder within your organisation. You cannot nominate a representative or someone from another organisation at application stage. Once the licence is granted you can add Level 1 Users who are employees of an organisation delivering your HR function, or a UK-based representative, provided they are not your only one.

If you are applying on the UK Expansion Worker route and your Authorising Officer is overseas at the time of application, that same person must be named as your Level 1 User.

Who Cannot Hold a Key Personnel Role

Nobody can hold a key personnel role if they are not based in the UK, are a contractor or consultant contracted to you for a specific purpose, are subject to a bankruptcy restriction order or undertaking or a debt relief restriction order or undertaking, are legally prohibited from being a company director, or have a history of non-compliance with sponsor requirements.

A representative based outside the UK cannot hold any key personnel role at all. A UK-based representative can be your Key Contact, and can be an additional Level 1 User once your licence is granted, but can never be your Authorising Officer. If you use a representative who gives immigration advice or services, they must be authorised to do so, which means regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority, or a regulated member of a designated professional body or qualifying regulator, or working under the supervision of such a person.

Where you appoint anyone from outside your organisation as a system user, you are responsible for everything they do. If the Home Office is considering action against you, anything done on your behalf by an outsider is treated as though you did it.

From 9 September 2026 you cannot appoint workers supplied to you by an employment business to any key personnel role.

Checks the Home Office Makes on Your People

The Home Office always checks the people you nominate, against its own records and against the Police National Computer. It makes those checks when it considers your application and can repeat them at any point while you hold a licence, and it runs them again whenever you name someone new.

It does not routinely check people who are not key personnel and do not fall within the definition of "you or your", but it reserves the right to. That can include employees in positions of responsibility who are not directors, and individual financiers involved in running the organisation. You may be asked for information about those people as part of the application, and their conduct can be taken into account.

Level 2 Users and Multi-Factor Authentication

Two changes to the Sponsorship Management System affect how you plan your key personnel.

The Level 2 User role, a restricted system user who could create and assign Certificates of Sponsorship but little else, is being withdrawn. Level 2 Users cannot be appointed on or after 9 September 2026. Anyone still holding the role must be converted to a Level 1 User, where they qualify, or have their account deactivated, by 8 March 2027, after which the Home Office deactivates the remainder itself. Staff supplied by an employment business are not eligible to be converted.

Multi-factor authentication is mandatory for system users. It has been rolled out to existing sponsors on a phased basis since 3 September 2026, and any licence granted on or after 9 September 2026 has it enabled from the outset. It means a one-time passcode on every login, sent by text message to a Level 1 User with a valid mobile number and otherwise by email, so the date of birth, mobile number and email address you record for each user need to be correct from the start.

One more rule is worth knowing before you apply, because it can cost you the licence later. An account that has not been used for twelve months is treated as inactive. The Home Office contacts the Authorising Officer and gives three months to put it right. If you end up with no active Level 1 User, the licence is suspended and you get twenty-eight days to nominate one, and if you do not it is normally revoked. The one piece of good news is that a revocation for this reason alone carries no cooling-off period, so you can apply again straight away.

The Documents You Have to Send

Supporting documents are governed by Appendix A to the sponsor guidance, and the rules are more structured than most summaries suggest. Getting a mandatory document wrong is fatal to the application in a way that getting an optional one wrong is not.

How Many Documents You Need

Most organisations send a minimum of four documents, made up of any that are mandatory for their type of organisation, any that are mandatory for the route they are applying on, and free choices to bring the total up to four.

Some organisations need more than four, because there are more than four mandatory items for them. Some need fewer, or none. And Skilled Worker and Minister of Religion applicants have to send extra information about the organisation and the jobs, which sits on top of the four and does not count towards them.

A document does not always mean a piece of paper. The result of an online check counts, and so does information you give in a covering email or in the application form itself. Where the Home Office can verify something on a public register, it will, and you simply tell it where to look and give any reference number.

Mandatory Documents for Your Type of Organisation

The bank account requirement is the one that trips up new businesses. The test is the regulatory status of the institution, not its name or how familiar it is, so check the Financial Services Register or the Prudential Regulation Authority's own list before you submit rather than after.

Adult social care providers have an additional requirement. If you are applying for a Skilled Worker licence and intend to sponsor care workers or senior care workers working anywhere in England, you must also tell the Home Office the working locations of those roles, which regulated activities you carry out, and your Care Quality Commission registration number, confirming the registration is active.

Mandatory Documents for Your Route

Several routes have their own mandatory documents. Government Authorised Exchange sponsors send scheme approval evidence, Graduate Trainee sponsors send information about the training programme and proof of a qualifying link to an overseas business, International Sportsperson sponsors send a governing body endorsement, Minister of Religion and Religious Worker sponsors send proof of charitable status and evidence that they are an eligible religious organisation, Seasonal Worker sponsors send an endorsement letter from Defra, Secondment Worker sponsors send evidence of a contract worth at least £10 million a year and at least £50 million in total, Senior or Specialist Worker sponsors send proof of a qualifying link to an overseas business, Service Supplier sponsors send evidence of a contract under an eligible trade agreement, and UK Expansion Worker sponsors send a substantial package covering their UK footprint, their overseas trading presence and their expansion plan.

If a route is not listed in Appendix A, it has no route-specific mandatory documents and you choose all of yours from the general list.

The Extra Information Skilled Worker Sponsors Must Send

This is the part most first-time Skilled Worker applicants underestimate, and it is mandatory. It is not counted among your four documents, and it normally goes in a covering email or letter.

About your organisation, you must say why you are applying for a licence, which sectors you operate in and what your normal opening or operating hours are. You must provide a current hierarchy chart showing any owner, director, partner and board members. If you have fifty employees or fewer, you must also list every employee by name and job title.

About the jobs, you must tell the Home Office about any current vacancy or job you intend to fill, including any you plan to assign a Certificate of Sponsorship for. For each one: the job title, the occupation code, the main duties, where the job sits on that hierarchy chart, the normal weekly hours, how much you will pay, and the skills, experience and qualifications the job requires.

If you have already identified the worker, you must explain and evidence how you found them, and give their full name, date of birth, nationality and current immigration status if they are already in the UK. If they already work for you, you must also give their current job title and duties and copies of their last three months of payslips, or all of them if they have been with you for less time.

Read that list against the eligible role test earlier on this page and the connection is obvious. The hierarchy chart, the employee list, the duties and the salary are how the Home Office decides whether the role is appropriate to the scale of your business.

Choosing Your Remaining Documents

Where you still need documents to reach four, you can choose from a general list. Proof of HMRC registration is the most common starting point, whether that is registration as an employer for PAYE, for Corporation Tax, or for VAT. Sole traders and partnerships can send their own HMRC registration evidence instead.

Beyond that you can send your most recent financial report, audited annual report or annual accounts, corporate or business bank statements or a letter from your bank setting out its dealings with you, proof of a listing on a recognised international stock exchange, evidence of employer's liability insurance with cover of at least £5 million from an insurer authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, proof that you own or lease your business premises, evidence of recent business activity such as client invoices or contracts, planning permission for your type of business, and evidence of any voluntary professional accreditation.

One trap: if you send both a bank statement and a letter from your bank they count as a single document, unless you have been trading for under eighteen months, in which case they count as two.

Organisations That Do Not Need Four Documents

The minimum of four does not apply if you are a UK or devolved government department, agency or public body, a local council, a diplomatic mission or consular post, a recognised international organisation, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange Main Market, or an applicant on the Scale-up route. You still send anything mandatory for charities or regulated organisations and anything mandatory for your route, but if none of that applies you may not need to send documents at all.

Format, Certification and Translation

Send your submission sheet and your documents by email to the address on the submission sheet. Do not post anything unless you are asked to.

Files should be PDF where possible, or JPEG or PNG. Give them descriptive names of twenty-five characters or fewer, with no accented characters and no special characters. Scan in black and white or greyscale, and save phone photographs at small or medium size, so the files stay readable without being large.

The Home Office reserves the right to ask for originals or certified copies. If it does, the person certifying must be independent of your organisation and must be employed by the organisation that issued the document, or be a practising barrister, solicitor, chartered legal executive or notary, or a chartered accountant for financial documents only. They must not be related to you, live at the same address as you, be in a personal relationship with you, or be employed by you. They must write "Certified to be a true copy of the original seen by me" on the document, sign and date it, print their name, and add their occupation, address and telephone number. If a certifier's details cannot be verified, the documents are rejected.

Anything not in English or Welsh needs a certified translation confirming in writing that it is a true and accurate translation, with the date and the translator's full name and contact details.

Your HR Systems: What the Home Office Is Assessing

Every guide to sponsor licences tells employers they need a robust HR system. Few explain what the Home Office actually looks at, which is a narrower and more practical thing than the phrase suggests.

The underlying requirement is that you must be capable of carrying out your sponsor duties and of evidencing that you have done so, within the timeframes the guidance sets. The Home Office judges that by looking at your current human resources and recruitment practices, and it may run a compliance check before it decides your application.

The Four Things a Compliance Officer Rates

Where a compliance check happens, you are assessed against one or more of four criteria, each rated met or not met.

Meeting all the criteria assessed, with nothing else counting against you, means the licence is granted. Significant doubts about your ability to fulfil sponsor duties after a check mean refusal is likely.

Our free HR compliance audit is built around those four criteria, and is the quickest way to see whether your current systems would pass.

What Belongs in Each Worker's File

Appendix D to the sponsor guidance sets out your record-keeping duties in full, and our Appendix D guide to UKVI sponsor record keeping rules works through them. For the purposes of the application, the Home Office wants to see that the framework already exists.

For each employee that means identity and immigration documents, evidence of their right to work, their current contact details including a UK residential address, personal email and mobile number, next of kin details, their contract of employment, and evidence of the recruitment process that led to them being hired. Where the worker is sponsored, you also need a record of their absences, their working pattern and any change in their circumstances.

One note on documents that have dated. Biometric residence permits were issued only to people granted permission on or before 31 October 2024 and have all now expired. Immigration status is held digitally, so the right to work record for most workers is an online check carried out using a share code rather than a copy of a card.

What Belongs in Your Organisation-Level Records

Alongside the individual files, you need the organisational records that let you answer a compliance officer's questions on the day: a full staff list showing everyone on the payroll, attendance and absence records, holiday and sick leave records, and your payroll itself.

You also need the employment law basics in place, because sponsor duties now expressly include worker rights and welfare. The Home Office requires you to have systems or processes that demonstrate you tell the people you sponsor about their entitlement to the National Minimum Wage, the Working Time Regulations, pension auto-enrolment, statutory leave and pay, health and safety, trade union rights, your duties under the Equality Act, and how to raise a grievance. You have to keep that evidence.

If your current systems were not built with sponsorship in mind, this is normally the part that needs work before you apply rather than after. Our UKVI compliant HR software is designed around these requirements, and our guidance on Sponsor Licence: Compliance and Duties covers what those duties become once you are licensed.

Right to Work Checks Before the Licence

Your existing workforce matters to the application, not just your future sponsored workers. The migrant compliance criterion above is assessed against everyone working for you, and a sponsor found to be employing someone without the right to work faces refusal and a possible civil penalty referral.

A right to work check has to be completed before employment begins to give you a statutory excuse, with follow-up checks where someone's permission is time-limited. Our guidance on Right to Work Checks sets out how to do one correctly, and our right to work check tool walks through it step by step.

What It Costs to Get a Licence

This section covers what it costs to obtain the licence itself. The wider cost of sponsoring a worker, which includes the Certificate of Sponsorship, the Immigration Skills Charge, the visa fee and the immigration health surcharge, is covered in our guidance on Visa Fees and Sponsorship Costs, and our cost of sponsoring a worker guide puts employer and employee costs side by side.

A Certificate of Sponsorship on the International Sportsperson route costs £525 where it is assigned for more than twelve months and £55 where it is assigned for twelve months or less. The Immigration Skills Charge applies to Skilled Worker and Senior or Specialist Worker sponsorship, and is capped in practice by the five-year maximum sponsorship period at £2,400 for a small or charitable sponsor and £6,600 for a medium or large one. Our visa fee calculator totals these for a given worker.

GOV.UK publishes the current sponsorship fees and revises them whenever the fee table changes, so check them on the day you apply.

The fee is for the Home Office considering your application. It is not refunded if your application is refused, or if you withdraw it once consideration has begun.

Are You a Small or Charitable Sponsor?

There are two different tests here, and conflating them is one of the most common errors in published guidance on this subject. They are not the same test and they do not always give the same answer.

For the licence fee, you pay the small fee if any one of the following applies. You are applying on Temporary Worker routes only. You have charitable status. You are subject to the small companies regime set out in section 381 of the Companies Act 2006. Or you are not a company for the purposes of that section and you employ no more than fifty people. In every other case you pay the large fee, and paying the wrong one makes the application invalid.

For the Immigration Skills Charge the test comes from regulation 2 of the Immigration Skills Charge Regulations, and it is met if any one of three things is true. You are a company subject to the small companies regime under section 381 of the Companies Act 2006. You are a charity within the meaning of section 1 of the Charities Act 2011. Or you are a person who employs no more than fifty employees.

The first of those three brings in a further test, and it is the one the published figures refer to. A company is within the small companies regime where it meets at least two of these: turnover of not more than £15 million, a balance sheet total of not more than £7.5 million, or not more than fifty employees. Those thresholds rose in April 2025, so anything you read quoting £10.2 million and £5.1 million is out of date.

The practical point is that a charity, or an employer that is not a company and has fifty staff or fewer, is a small sponsor for Immigration Skills Charge purposes without going near the turnover and balance sheet figures at all.

Charitable status for these purposes means a registered charity in England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, an excepted charity, an exempt charity, or an ecclesiastical corporation established for charitable purposes. A Northern Irish charity not yet invited to register needs proof of charitable tax status from HMRC instead.

If you are unsure which band you fall into, work it out before you pay rather than afterwards. An underpaid fee is not treated as a shortfall to be topped up. It makes the application invalid.

The Priority Service

If you need a faster answer, the pre-licence priority service considers your application within ten working days for £750. The ten working days start on the working day after you pay, and exclude weekends and public holidays. It buys a faster consideration, not a better outcome. The guidance is explicit that it does not guarantee your application will be approved.

It is not available on every route. Applications that include UK Expansion Worker, Service Supplier, Secondment Worker, Scale-up, Government Authorised Exchange, International Agreement or Seasonal Worker cannot use it. If your application includes any of those, the option is not offered.

It is also capped. The service runs on eligible applications submitted between 9am and 11.59pm Monday to Friday excluding public holidays, and there is a daily limit on how many requests are accepted. If the limit has been reached for the day, if your application is already in progress, or if you are outside the operating hours, the option will not appear.

You can request it when you apply, or afterwards by logging back into your sponsor application account and selecting the option to finish an incomplete application, which is a good reason to keep a note of your user ID and password. Your documents must reach the Home Office within five working days of paying the priority fee, or if you are adding priority to an application already submitted, they must already have been sent.

The fee is not refunded where the timescale is missed because your documents were late, because you did not respond to a request for further information, or because your case raises complex issues needing more time. It may be refunded where the delay is caused by something outside normal caseworking, such as a technical error.

Adding Routes to Your Licence Later

Once you hold a licence you can apply to add routes through the Sponsorship Management System. Your Level 1 User logs back into the online application form and completes a shortened version of it, with the Authorising Officer's approval, which you must keep evidence of.

A fee is payable only where all three of the following are true: you are a large company, you were originally licensed on Temporary Worker routes only, and you want to add one or more Worker routes. The fee is the difference between the two licence fees. There is nothing to pay if you are a small or charitable sponsor, if you already hold a Worker route and paid the large fee originally, or if you are adding Temporary Worker routes to a Temporary Worker licence.

You cannot add routes while your licence is suspended, while it carries a Provisional rating, or while it is downgraded to a B-rating. And if you want different people acting as Authorising Officer and Key Contact for the new route, that is not possible on one licence. You would need a separate licence and a full fee.

Costs You Must Never Pass On to a Worker

This is the single most consequential rule in the fees section, and it is the one most often missing from published guidance. You are responsible for paying sponsorship fees. If you recoup, or attempt to recoup, certain fees from a worker you sponsor, the Home Office will normally revoke your licence.

The rule covers the Skilled Worker sponsor licence fee, including the fee for adding that route to an existing licence, together with any associated administrative costs, where you recoup them on or after 31 December 2024. It covers the sponsor licence fee on any other route, again including the fee for adding it, and the associated administrative costs, where you recoup them on or after 9 April 2025. It covers the Certificate of Sponsorship fee and associated administrative costs for a Skilled Worker, where that Certificate was assigned on or after 31 December 2024. It covers the Certificate of Sponsorship fee and associated administrative costs on any Global Business Mobility route, Minister of Religion, International Sportsperson, Scale-up or Seasonal Worker, where the Certificate was assigned on or after 9 April 2025. And it covers the Immigration Skills Charge in every case where you are required to pay it.

Associated administrative costs is a defined term and is wider than employers expect. It means any cost you incur to obtain, use or maintain your sponsor licence, and the guidance names priority service fees for licence applications, change of circumstances requests and Certificates of Sponsorship, fees paid under the old premium customer service scheme, sponsorship action plan fees, legal fees for advice about applying for, using or maintaining your licence or about a Certificate of Sponsorship, and immigration advice or services provided to a sponsored worker by a third party where the worker had no genuine choice about whether or how to obtain them.

Deducting any of this from salary, invoicing the worker for it, or building it into a repayment clause all count as attempting to recoup it.

Making the Application, Step by Step

There is no paper form and no interview at the start. The whole thing is an online application followed by an email, and the deadlines are short.

• Read Part 1 of the sponsor guidance, the guidance for the route you want, and Appendix A. Decide which routes you are applying on.
• Appoint your Authorising Officer, decide who your Key Contact and Level 1 User will be, and check each of them against the tests above.
• Work out how many Certificates of Sponsorship you are likely to need in your first year, and why.
• Register online, then log in and complete the application form. With everything to hand it takes about twenty to thirty minutes. You cannot obtain a copy of your completed application afterwards, so take a note or a screenshot of your answers as you go.
• Pay the fee in full. An underpayment makes the application invalid.
• A submission sheet is generated automatically. Your Authorising Officer signs and dates the declaration on it, which is your formal agreement to meet the duties of sponsorship.
• Email all pages of the submission sheet, together with your mandatory documents, to the address printed on the sheet. This has to happen within five working days of the date you completed the online form.
• Include in the covering email anything you are required to disclose.
• If the Home Office wants more, it emails your Key Contact and gives you five working days.
• Wait. Most applications are dealt with in less than eight weeks, and the Home Office may visit your business before deciding.
• The decision is emailed to the Authorising Officer's mailbox, with a copy possibly going to the Key Contact.

Mark the homeoffice.gov.uk domain as trusted in your email settings before you apply. Decision letters and document requests both arrive by email, and a request that lands in a junk folder and goes unanswered for five working days is a refusal.

Estimating Your Certificate of Sponsorship Allocation

The application form asks how many Certificates of Sponsorship you expect to need in your first year on each route, and it asks for detailed reasons. This is not a formality. If the Home Office is not satisfied with your reasons, or has other concerns, it can give you fewer than you asked for or set your allocation to zero.

Skilled Worker applicants are asked about undefined Certificates, which are the ones used by workers applying from inside the UK. Defined Certificates, for workers applying from outside the UK, are requested separately through the Sponsorship Management System once you are licensed.

Allocations expire annually, which catches out sponsors who assumed their first-year figure rolls forward. Our post on annual CoS allocations expiring explains the timing, and our guidance on the Certificate of Sponsorship covers how Certificates work once you have them.

Why a Representative Must Not Send Your Application

You must make the application yourself. A representative can help you fill in the form, but they must not send it. If the Home Office finds that an application was sent by a representative, it refuses it and does not refund the fee.

This is narrower than it sounds and it is worth being precise about. Taking advice, having someone review your documents, having someone draft your covering letter and your job descriptions, are all fine. What is not allowed is the representative pressing submit.

There is a consolation buried in the cooling-off rules: a refusal on this ground alone carries no cooling-off period, so you can apply again immediately. It still costs you the fee and roughly two months.

At application stage the only key personnel role a representative can fill is Key Contact. They cannot be your Authorising Officer at any stage, and they cannot be a Level 1 User until after your licence is granted.

What to Disclose in Your Covering Email

Alongside your documents, you must tell the Home Office in your covering email or letter if you, or anyone within the definition of "you or your", have been suspended or removed from any sponsor register in the last five years, have any criminal prosecutions pending, or are aware that an organisation you have been involved with in a similar role has failed to pay VAT or any other form of excise duty.

You also have a general duty to act honestly, which includes disclosing anything that changes while your application is being considered. If the Home Office believes you knowingly provided false information, or withheld information you held when required to provide it, the application is refused.

What Happens After You Submit

The Five Working Day Document Deadline

The clock starts on the day you complete the online form, not the day you decide to gather your paperwork. You have five working days to send your signed submission sheet and every mandatory document.

If any mandatory item is missing, incomplete or in the wrong format, or arrives after the deadline, the application is invalid. The Home Office rejects it, returns it without considering it, and refunds your fee. You then have to complete the form again and pay again.

This is why the documents are assembled before the form is opened, not after.

Requests for Further Information

If a document that is not mandatory is missing, or the Home Office wants something extra, it emails your Key Contact, and may also email your Authorising Officer. You get five working days, and everything must arrive by the end of the deadline date. If you are posting anything, you must reply to the email within the deadline to say so, giving any tracking reference.

If you have not responded by the end of the deadline date, the Home Office assumes you are not going to, and the application is refused. Your fee is not refunded.

Both of your named contacts therefore need to be available and reading their email for the whole time your application is under consideration. A key person on leave with no cover is a real risk here, not a theoretical one.

The Pre-Licence Compliance Check

The Home Office uses risk assessment to decide where to look more closely. If it knows little about you, is concerned about your evidence, or something comes to light that causes concern, it makes further checks, which can include checks with other government departments and a compliance check on you.

A compliance check may mean a visit to your main office and to any other physical address where your sponsored workers would carry out their duties, including a home address if they would normally work from home, with interviews of you and relevant staff. It may instead be a digital check by remote video conferencing. Our guides to passing a UKVI Home Office compliance visit and to Home Office remote compliance checks cover what to expect in each case.

If you run a virtual business model, with little or no physical office space, the guidance says a compliance check with your Authorising Officer is highly likely before a decision, and that it may include a visit to their physical address. Anyone operating that way should plan for it rather than hope to avoid it.

Where what the compliance officer finds differs from what you said, the Home Office tells you whether it needs more information before deciding. Where it has significant doubts about your ability to fulfil sponsorship duties after a check, refusal is likely.

How Long a Decision Takes

Most applications are dealt with in less than eight weeks. A visit or an interview extends that, as does any request for further information or any check the Home Office needs to make with a third party. Document verification enquiries, for example, are normally given up to six weeks for an answer.

The priority service brings that down to ten working days on eligible routes, subject to the daily limit.

If Your Licence Is Granted

Your Sponsor Licence Number, CoS Allocation and SMS Access

The decision letter tells you your maximum Certificate of Sponsorship allocation and your sponsor licence number, which is unique to you and which you quote in all correspondence with the Home Office.

Your allocation will be zero if you said in the application that you were not sure whether or when you would need to recruit overseas workers. That is not a problem, but it does mean requesting an allocation before you can sponsor anyone.

Your Sponsorship Management System account is set up at the same time. The Level 1 User's username is posted to the Authorising Officer, and the password is emailed to the Level 1 User separately. Users must never share their password or their authentication passcode, and the Home Office can revoke a licence where they do. Our Sponsorship Management System guide for employers covers what the system does and how to use it.

Your A-Rating and What It Means

A sponsor licence on any route other than UK Expansion Worker is rated either A or B. You are granted an A-rating, on the basis that you have the systems to meet your duties and that the Home Office trusts you to behave as a sponsor should. There is no such thing as being granted a B-rated licence, because a licence is not granted at all unless you can achieve an A-rating.

A B-rating can only happen later, if the Home Office decides you are no longer meeting your duties. It means paying for a sponsorship action plan setting out what you have to fix. The plan runs for a fixed three-month period, you must accept it and pay the fee within ten working days of being told about the downgrade or the licence is revoked, and you cannot sponsor any new workers until you have regained your A-rating. You can be B-rated twice in any rolling four-year period, counted from the date your licence was first granted and from each four-year point after that. A third qualifying downgrade inside one of those periods means revocation. Our guidance on Sponsor Licence: Suspension and Revocation covers downgrades, suspensions and revocations in full.

If you hold more than one licence type, the rating is given per type rather than per route. A failing on one Worker route shows on the public register as a B-rating against all your Worker routes.

UK Expansion Worker sponsors are rated A or Provisional. A Provisional rating is given where the Authorising Officer is an employee of the overseas business who will assign themselves a Certificate in order to come to the UK, and it upgrades to an A-rating once they have entry clearance and have updated their details. A Provisional rating cannot be downgraded to a B-rating. If a Provisional sponsor fails to meet its duties, the licence is normally revoked outright.

How Long Your Licence Lasts

This is the point on which most published guidance, including some of our own older articles, is now out of date.

A sponsor licence is valid indefinitely, unless the Home Office revokes it or you surrender it. There is no expiry date, no renewal application and no renewal fee. If you have read elsewhere that a licence lasts four years, or ten, that reflects rules that no longer apply.

There are two exceptions. A licence on the UK Expansion Worker route or the Scale-up route lasts a maximum of four years, cannot be renewed, and cannot be replaced either. GOV.UK states that a sponsor licensed on those routes will not be able to apply for another licence to sponsor those types of worker. UK Expansion Worker sponsors must normally have established a UK trading presence within two years of the grant and have applied to add at least one other route by then, and the Home Office will review whether they still meet the route's requirements if they have not.

An indefinite licence is not an unsupervised one. The Home Office continually monitors your willingness and ability to comply, makes regular checks with HMRC to confirm sponsored workers are being paid appropriately, and can limit or zero your Certificate allocation, run a compliance check, or refer a case for civil penalty action or prosecution. Our post on the automatic HMRC check explains how that monitoring operates.

Getting Added to the Register of Licensed Sponsors

Your organisation's name goes onto the public register of licensed sponsors, which shows your licence type and rating. Candidates use it to check whether an employer can sponsor them before applying for a job, and our sponsor licence check guide and sponsor licence status check tool are built around that.

For an employer, being on the register is a recruitment advantage worth knowing about. A vacancy that attracts no applications from overseas candidates is sometimes just a vacancy at an employer those candidates cannot work for.

If Your Application Is Rejected or Refused

Rejection and Refusal Are Not the Same Thing

These two words are used interchangeably almost everywhere, including in older material on this site, and they mean very different things. The difference decides whether you get your money back and whether you can apply again next week or next year.

If you have been told your application was rejected, the practical position is far better than it feels. Nothing has been decided against you, the money is coming back, and there is no bar on reapplying as soon as the problem is fixed.

Why Applications Are Refused

The reasons fall into recognisable groups, and the Home Office sets them out in three annexes covering grounds where it will refuse, will normally refuse, and may refuse.

Documents and information. You did not send something the Home Office asked for within the time limit, or you knowingly sent a false document, which also means a referral for prosecution.

Key personnel. You failed to nominate an Authorising Officer, or a Level 1 User meeting both requirements, who meets the Home Office's tests.

No presence. You have no operating or trading presence in the UK, on any route other than UK Expansion Worker.

Regulation. You were required to be registered with a regulator or licensed by a licensing authority and were not.

The role. The Home Office is not satisfied that you are able or intend to offer work meeting the definition of an eligible role.

Systems. The Home Office is not satisfied that you intend to comply with your sponsor duties, or that you have the processes and systems to do so. The example given in the guidance is internal communications that would not tell you whether a sponsored worker had reported for work.

What the licence is for. You intend to sponsor workers in a personal capacity, or the Home Office has reason to believe you will act as an employment business and supply a sponsored worker to a third party as labour, or it has reasonable grounds to suspect your organisation exists mainly to facilitate someone's entry or residence.

History and conduct. Convictions, civil penalties, sanctions, previous revocations, previous refusals, having been key personnel somewhere that lost its licence, unpaid costs owed to the Home Office, a failure to co-operate with a compliance check, or behaviour that is not conducive to the public good.

Process. The application was sent by a representative, or you applied as an individual who is not a sole trader.

If you fully meet the requirements of some of the routes you applied for but not others, the Home Office licenses you for the ones you qualify on rather than refusing the whole application.

There Is No Right of Appeal

There is no right of appeal against the refusal of a sponsor licence application. There is no administrative review either. The only formal routes open to you are an error correction request, in the narrow circumstances below, and judicial review, which is a challenge to the lawfulness of the decision rather than a rehearing of it.

The Error Correction Request

If you believe the refusal was caused by a simple caseworking error, or by the Home Office not considering evidence you did send, you can submit an error correction request form.

The examples given in the guidance are a cooling-off period applied to you incorrectly where you can evidence that it should not have been, and a specific piece of information that you can show the Home Office received but did not consider.

The request must be sent within fourteen calendar days of the date on the refusal decision letter. The Home Office aims to reply within twenty-eight working days.

Three limits matter. It is not a reconsideration of the decision, so no new evidence is looked at, only what was available at the time of the application. If the Home Office accepts that an error occurred, it does not simply grant the licence: it invites you to submit a fresh online application, which you pay for and which is then refunded on receipt, and there is no guarantee the new application succeeds. And a refusal decision is never reviewed twice under this process, so there is one attempt only.

If the original decision is maintained, your cooling-off period runs from the date of the original refusal, not from the date the request was decided.

How Long You Have to Wait Before Reapplying

A cooling-off period is the time that has to pass before you can make a successful further application. Applying while one is still running means an automatic refusal, even if the reasons that caused it no longer apply. Where more than one period applies to your circumstances, the longest one governs.

Two notes on that table. Where the Home Office says it may impose up to five years for multiple penalties, it weighs the number of penalties, the number of workers or disqualified adults involved, the amount of each penalty, how far you co-operated, and how promptly you paid or kept to an instalment agreement. And where the unspent conviction belongs to an individual rather than the organisation, you can apply before it is spent if that person no longer works for you, no longer falls within the definition of "you or your", or no longer has significant involvement in running or financing the business.

Applying Again After a Cooling-Off Period

The end of a cooling-off period is permission to apply, not a likelihood of success. Before you reapply you have to be sure the reasons the Home Office refused or revoked no longer apply.

A compliance officer may check you as part of the new application, to establish that the systems and procedures are genuinely there this time. If the Home Office is not satisfied, it refuses again and a further cooling-off period starts. Where a previous licence was revoked for reasons connected with dishonesty or deliberate misconduct, the guidance says the Home Office requires compelling evidence that you are now suitable.

In practice, a second application after a refusal is a different exercise from a first one. It has to answer the refusal, not repeat the original application with better paperwork.

Sponsoring a Skilled Worker: What Your Roles Must Meet

A licence is only worth having if the roles you want to fill qualify, and the Skilled Worker rules changed substantially on 22 July 2025. It is worth checking your intended roles against them before you spend anything on an application. Our guidance on Skilled Worker: Eligibility and Salary covers this in full, and our Skilled Worker visa service handles the worker's side of it.

The skill threshold is Regulated Qualifications Framework level 6, which is broadly degree level, for applications from 22 July 2025 onwards. The general salary threshold is £41,700 a year or the going rate for the occupation code, whichever is higher, with lower thresholds available for applicants holding a relevant PhD, applicants in occupations on the Immigration Salary List, and new entrants.

Roles below RQF level 6 can only be sponsored through a small number of narrow openings, and each has its own limit. The Temporary Shortage List and the Immigration Salary List both work this way, and both carry the same cut-off: the Certificate of Sponsorship has to be issued before 31 December 2026. A transitional arrangement covers a worker who already held Skilled Worker permission before 22 July 2025 and has held it continuously since. Prison service officers below principal officer have a route of their own, on an application for permission to stay with a Certificate issued before 1 January 2027.

Where a worker is sponsored in one of these lower-skilled roles and does not fall within an exception, they cannot bring dependants.

Care workers and senior care workers, occupation codes 6135 and 6136, cannot be sponsored for entry clearance from outside the UK. Two in-country routes remain, and they are not the same thing.

Someone in the UK who does not already hold Skilled Worker permission in one of those codes can switch, but only where they have been legally working for that sponsor in one of those roles for at least three months ending on the date the Certificate is issued, and only where the date of application falls before 22 July 2028.

Someone who already holds Skilled Worker permission in one of those codes, or in the old SOC 2010 codes 6145 or 6146, can continue to be sponsored in them. That second route carries no three-month requirement and no 2028 end date, so an existing care worker's position does not close in 2028.

Sponsors of these roles in England must hold active Care Quality Commission registration.

If the role you have in mind sits below RQF level 6 and none of those openings applies, a sponsor licence will not let you fill it, and the application fee will not come back.

Detailed Guides on This Topic

These posts go deeper on particular parts of the subject.

• Can a takeaway business apply for a sponsor licence, for small businesses wondering whether size is a barrier
• Authorising Officer guide for UK sponsor licence compliance, on what the role involves in practice
• UK Sponsorship Management System guide for employers, on running the licence once you have it
• Cost of sponsoring a worker in the UK, on what sponsorship costs beyond the licence
• The ultimate guide to passing a UKVI Home Office compliance visit, on what happens when an officer arrives
• Home Office remote compliance checks, on the digital version of the same thing
• Home Office salary checks for sponsor licences, on how pay is monitored
• The automatic HMRC check that is revoking sponsor licences, on what HMRC data tells the Home Office
• Appendix D guide to UKVI sponsor record keeping rules, on the records you have to keep
• Annual CoS allocations expire in a month, on allocation timing
• Sponsor licence check UK, on the public register and how to search it

How Can WorkPermitCloud Help?

Most sponsor licence refusals are avoidable, and they are rarely caused by the thing the employer was worried about. They come from a fee band worked out on the wrong test, a Level 1 User who does not meet both requirements, a bank account at an institution that does not hold the right regulatory permissions, a job description that does not survive the eligible role test, or an email request that arrived while the Key Contact was away.

We prepare and submit sponsor licence applications for employers of every size, from single-site restaurants to multi-site care groups. That means assessing whether you are eligible before you spend anything, choosing the right routes, reviewing your key personnel against the tests that refuse applications, assembling your Appendix A documents, writing the organisation and job information that Skilled Worker applicants have to provide, and responding to Home Office queries while your application is live. Where your HR systems would not survive a compliance check, we rebuild them first.

If your application has already been rejected or refused, we can tell you which of the two it was, whether an error correction request is available to you, how long your cooling-off period actually runs, and what has to change before the next application.

Conclusion

A sponsor licence application is not difficult to submit. It is difficult to submit well, because almost everything that decides it happens before you open the form: whether your organisation can be shown to be operating or trading, whether the people you have in mind can lawfully hold the roles, whether the job you want to fill is one the Home Office will accept as an eligible role, and whether your HR systems would stand up to an officer turning up unannounced.

Get those four things right and the rest is administration. Get any of them wrong and you lose the fee, wait six months, and reapply into a Home Office that has already refused you once. Prepare thoroughly, keep your named contacts reachable for the whole eight weeks, and treat the five working day document deadline as the real deadline it is.

Glossary