UK Business Immigration
Build your business with a clear plan.
UK business immigration support for employers and founders. Understand your options, prepare the evidence and plan the next steps.
Individual visa applications £500 / applicationPer person. Sponsor licence applications: £500–£1,000 depending on complexity. Exact scope and fees agreed in writing. Government charges separate.
Good business decisions need clear information. We help employers and founders understand the immigration options relevant to their plans, identify supporting evidence and prepare the agreed application work. Scope and fees are confirmed before proceeding.
Business immigration support from advisers based in Barking, east London. We help employers plan the application sequence, gather business evidence and coordinate the licence and worker applications within the agreed scope.
Who this service is for
- You run, or are starting, a business
- You are planning employer sponsorship or worker applications
- Your company is expanding into the UK
- You are applying on a business or expansion route
Basic eligibility
This is a general guide only. A professional case review is needed to assess your circumstances; a free next-step call explains how to begin.
- You meet the requirements of the business route that applies to you
- You can evidence funds, endorsement or expansion, where the route requires it
- Your business plans meet the criteria of the route
- You meet the English language and maintenance requirements, where relevant
Documents typically required
- Your business plan and financial evidence
- Endorsement or sponsorship documents, where relevant
- Your passport and immigration documents
- Evidence specific to the route you have chosen
Before your first discussion: Outline your business structure, UK operations, intended roles and hiring dates. Tell us which workers already have UK permission and whether your organisation holds a sponsor licence, so the initial review addresses the steps you actually need.
How the process works
An initial case review to identify the appropriate business route; we confirm the agreed service scope before professional work begins
A document and evidence checklist tailored to your route
Preparation of your application, with an internal review
Your approval before we submit
Updates through to the decision
How we work with employers
Most businesses need the same three things in the same order: the right route, a licence, and then a process that does not fall apart six months later.
We start by working out what you are actually trying to do, because the route follows the commercial objective and not the other way round. Hiring one specialist is a different problem from opening a UK office, and both are different again from moving existing staff across from an overseas parent company.
Then we prepare the licence application, and we get the underlying HR systems into shape while we do it, because those systems are part of what is being assessed. After that we support the assignment of Certificates of Sponsorship and the worker applications that follow, so the two halves match.
We also work with employers who already hold a licence and want it stress-tested before somebody else tests it for them. If your records have never been reviewed, or the person who set the whole thing up has left, a compliance visit is not the moment to discover what is missing.
What employers most often get wrong
None of these are exotic. They are ordinary administrative failures, and they are what enforcement action is usually built on.
- Treating the licence as the finish line. It is the starting line. The duties begin the day it is granted, and enforcement commonly follows compliance failures rather than errors in the original application.
- Assigning an occupation code that flatters the job. Usually done to make a salary requirement work. It puts the worker's application and your licence at risk in the same move.
- Missing reporting deadlines. Somebody leaves, changes role or stops turning up, and it is not reported inside the window because no one person owned the duty.
- Incomplete right-to-work checks. A check done the wrong way, or not repeated when it should have been, forfeits the statutory excuse that protects you from a civil penalty.
- Recovering charges from workers that cannot lawfully be recovered. The Immigration Skills Charge is the clearest example. A clawback clause in the contract does not make it lawful.
- Assuming a licence is needed at all. Some candidates already hold permission with unrestricted work rights. A proper right-to-work check tells you; an assumption does not.
Revocation is the outcome to plan against, because it does more than stop future hiring — it curtails the permission of every worker you currently sponsor. Our sponsor licence page sets out the duties in full.
What it costs
Our professional fee for a sponsor licence application is £500–£1,000 per organisation’s application, depending on complexity. Individual worker applications have a separate standard professional fee of £500 per application, per person. We set out the applications included, exact professional fees and separate government charges in writing before engagement and payment.
The government charges are separate: the licence fee, a fee for each Certificate of Sponsorship you assign, the Immigration Skills Charge, and the application fee and health surcharge the worker pays. The Immigration Skills Charge cannot lawfully be passed on to the worker — not by agreement, not by deduction, not through a repayment clause. Some costs can be shared between employer and worker; that one is a compliance line rather than a negotiation.
All of these figures are set by government and are revised, so we do not publish numbers here that could be out of date by the time you read them. You get a written breakdown built around your actual hiring plan, covering the whole lifecycle rather than the first step. You can model it yourself with our cost calculator, or choose a detailed consultation to discuss your plans. The free next-step call explains our service; it is not a full hiring-cost assessment.
Expanding into the UK from overseas
If your organisation does not yet have a UK presence, the order of operations decides your timeline. A licence is granted to an entity that exists and can evidence lawful UK trading, so incorporation, a business bank account, premises and any regulatory registrations generally have to come first. Plenty of businesses plan the visa timeline without the corporate timeline underneath it, and lose a quarter to it.
Where a senior person needs to come over to establish or run the UK operation, there are routes designed for exactly that, and they carry their own evidence requirements about the overseas business and the role being filled here. Which one fits depends on your structure, your ownership and what that person will genuinely be doing.
We will map a realistic sequence against the start date you have in mind, and tell you honestly if that date is not achievable. A timeline you can plan around is worth considerably more than an optimistic one. The worker-side requirements your candidates will face are set out on our Skilled Worker visa page.
Choose your next step
For the employer’s application, see sponsor licence support. Share our Skilled Worker visa page with candidates who need help preparing their own application.
Our preliminary eligibility checker can help you organise your questions; it does not replace an adviser’s assessment. Read our professional fees and use the visa cost calculator for an estimate of separate government charges. When you are ready, start your application and save your details securely for review.
Prepare your next conversation
Explore business immigration guidance, organise your questions and understand the separate charges before deciding how to proceed. A guide or tool result does not establish eligibility.
Frequently asked questions
For most employers hiring from overseas it is sponsorship under the Skilled Worker route, which means obtaining a licence first. Expansion routes, senior transfers and founder-led routes exist and work differently. The right answer depends on the roles, the salaries, your ownership structure and your timescales.
In this order: obtain a sponsor licence, assign a Certificate of Sponsorship for a genuine role that meets the skill and salary requirements, and then the worker makes their own application. Each stage has its own timeline, and they overlap less than people hope.
Yes, though the sequencing matters. The entity generally needs to exist and be able to evidence lawful UK trading before a licence will be granted, so the corporate work comes before the immigration work rather than alongside it.
Reporting relevant changes within the Home Office deadlines, keeping the specified records for every sponsored worker, carrying out right-to-work checks correctly, only sponsoring roles that genuinely exist, and cooperating with audits. One named person in your organisation should own all of it.
Some costs can be shared by agreement. The Immigration Skills Charge cannot. It cannot lawfully be recovered from the worker by deduction, by clawback or by consent. Getting this wrong is a compliance breach, not just a contractual dispute.
It depends on the licence timeline, the Certificate assignment and the worker's own application, and on whether priority services are available and worth using. We map a realistic sequence against the start date you want, and tell you plainly if it does not work.
Yes. We check your records, your reporting history and your right-to-work files against what a compliance officer would ask to see, and tell you what needs fixing. A review can identify compliance gaps before they need urgent attention.
Then we say so. Sometimes the candidate already has the right to work. Sometimes the role can be filled without sponsorship. Sometimes the timeline simply does not work and you need a different plan. We explain concerns identified in the agreed professional review before recommending how to proceed. A free next-step call is a way to ask about our service, rather than a full business assessment.
Explore your business immigration options
Start your application securely, or book a free 10-minute next-step call to ask about our service first.