Become a licensed UK sponsor, so your business can recruit skilled workers from overseas — a status that carries ongoing compliance duties.
You need to hire someone from outside the UK, and to do that lawfully you need a licence. What most employers are not told at the start is that getting the licence is not the hard part. Keeping it is. The Home Office is not only checking that your business is real and trading lawfully. It is checking whether it can trust you to monitor your own workforce on its behalf, because that is what sponsorship actually is. Once the licence is granted your duties start rather than stop, and enforcement action against sponsors commonly follows a compliance failure rather than a flawed application. So we build the systems into the application rather than leaving them as a problem for later. Our fee is £500 per application, fixed, and the first conversation is free.
This is a general guide only; we confirm your exact position at the free consultation.
A free consultation to assess your organisation's readiness for sponsorship
A checklist of the corporate documents the application requires
Preparation of the licence application, reviewed before submission
Guidance on sponsor duties, record-keeping and reporting obligations
Support with submission, and updates through to the decision
You apply online, pay the licence fee for your organisation's size and type, and submit documents proving three things: that your organisation genuinely exists, that it is trading lawfully in the UK, and that it is capable of carrying out sponsor duties.
You also name key personnel — an Authorising Officer, a Key Contact and at least one Level 1 User. Your Authorising Officer has to be senior enough to be genuinely accountable for recruitment and HR, must be based in the UK, and must be clean on both criminal convictions and any previous sponsor compliance failures. Appointing whoever has capacity is a false economy.
The Home Office may visit your premises before it decides. A compliance officer is looking for working systems, not a policy document in a folder. Can you show who is sponsored and what their permission allows? Can you produce a correct right-to-work check for each of them? Do you know when someone last attended, and would you notice if they stopped? If a sponsored worker changed role tomorrow, would it be reported inside the deadline, and does one named person own that duty?
If the honest answer to any of those is no, we would far rather fix it before you apply than watch you explain it during a visit.
This is the part that costs employers money, and it is the part nobody mentions at the application stage.
The consequences escalate: an action plan, a downgraded rating you then have to work your way back from, suspension, and finally revocation. Understand what revocation means before you decide how seriously to take any of this. It does not simply stop you hiring. It curtails the permission of every worker you currently sponsor. People who moved their families here to work for you lose their right to stay, and you lose the roles you spent months recruiting for. That is a commercial risk, not an HR formality.
Our fee is £500 per application. That is the price of the licence application itself. If you then sponsor three workers, that is three further applications at £500 each. We say it that plainly because £500 without the words “per application” would be misleading, and you need a number you can put in a budget and rely on.
It is fixed either way. The fee does not move because your structure is complicated, because the Home Office comes back with questions, or because the matter runs longer than expected. Hourly billing puts that risk on you. We would rather carry it ourselves.
The government charges sit on top and are entirely separate. There is the licence fee, which depends on whether you are classed as a small or charitable sponsor or a medium or large one. There is a fee each time you assign a Certificate of Sponsorship. There is the Immigration Skills Charge, which scales with your organisation's size and the length of permission you sponsor. And the worker pays their own application fee and health surcharge.
One rule is worth flagging now, because getting it wrong is a compliance breach rather than an accounting error: the Immigration Skills Charge cannot lawfully be recovered from the worker. Not by salary deduction, not by a clawback clause, not by agreement. Some other costs can be shared; that one cannot. All of these figures are set by government and change, so we do not publish numbers here that could be stale when you read them. You get a written breakdown covering the whole sponsorship lifecycle at your free consultation, and our own pricing is set out in full on the fees page.
A licence on its own does not get anybody through the door. Once it is granted you assign a Certificate of Sponsorship for a genuine role at the right skill and salary level, and your candidate then makes their own application, which carries its own requirements around English language and, in some cases, money they must hold themselves. We prepare those too. The worker's side of it is explained on our Skilled Worker visa page, which is a useful thing to send a candidate who is anxious about the process.
If you are establishing a UK presence for the first time, sequencing decides your timeline. A licence is granted to an entity that already exists and can evidence lawful UK trading, so the corporate work comes first. Businesses that plan a hiring date without that underneath it lose months. Our business immigration page covers the wider picture.
If you already hold a licence and inherited it from somebody who has since left, or have simply never had it checked, we will review your records against what a compliance officer would ask for. That is a much cheaper exercise than responding to a suspension. And if sponsorship is not the right answer for the hire you have in mind, we will say so — some candidates already hold permission that lets them work for you with no licence involved at all.
The Home Office publishes a service target, and a priority service is sometimes available for an additional fee where capacity allows. A pre-licence compliance visit will extend the timeline. We give you the current published timings at your consultation and plan your start dates against the realistic version rather than the best case.
It depends on your organisation type, but typically evidence that you are trading lawfully in the UK: bank statements, VAT or PAYE registration, employer's liability insurance and evidence of your premises. The Home Office specifies which combination it requires, and supplying the wrong set gets the application rejected rather than considered.
Yes. Newly established organisations can and do get licences. Expect closer scrutiny and a higher chance of a compliance visit. Clear evidence of genuine trading, real premises and a credible business reason for the role makes a substantial difference.
A senior person in your organisation with genuine responsibility for recruitment or HR, based in the UK. They must not have unspent relevant criminal convictions, and must not have been involved in previous sponsor compliance failures. Naming someone junior because they have the time is a common and avoidable mistake.
An officer reviews your systems and your records, sometimes without warning. They will want to see right-to-work checks, the specified records for each sponsored worker, and evidence that your reporting duties are being met. They may interview your key personnel and your sponsored staff separately.
Outcomes run from an action plan and a downgraded rating, which you then have to work your way back from, through to suspension and revocation. Revocation curtails the permission of every worker you sponsor, so the consequences land on your people as well as on your hiring plans.
It is granted for a fixed period and must be renewed before it expires. Renewal is not a formality. It revisits your compliance record, so how you have run the licence decides whether you keep it.
Not always. Some people already hold permission with unrestricted work rights, and no sponsorship is needed. A properly conducted right-to-work check tells you what their permission allows. Never rely on what a candidate believes their status permits.
Book your free 30-minute consultation for a straightforward, honest assessment of your matter.