UK Sponsor Licence Applications

Sponsor licence application support for employers from our Barking, east London office. We review your organisation’s documents, identify the application requirements and explain the sponsor duties relevant to your hiring plan.

Who this service is for

• UK businesses seeking to recruit workers from overseas
• Start-ups and SMEs preparing to sponsor their first overseas employee
• Employers preparing their systems for a compliance visit
• Organisations adding a worker route to an existing sponsor licence

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.

• A genuine, UK-based trading business
• HR systems adequate to meet your ongoing sponsor duties
• Suitable key personnel appointed to manage the licence
• Genuine vacancies, at the skill and salary level the route requires

Documents typically required

• Evidence of company registration and trading history
• Evidence of your business bank account and premises
• Details of your key personnel and your HR systems
• Details of the roles you intend to sponsor

Before your first discussion: Prepare your company details, the roles you intend to recruit for and the proposed key personnel. Bring an outline of how you keep staff records, perform right-to-work checks and report changes, so we can assess your application readiness.

How the process works

What the Home Office is actually assessing

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.

The licence is where the duties start, not where they finish

This is the part that costs employers money, and it is the part nobody mentions at the application stage.

• Reporting. Changes to a sponsored worker's circumstances must be reported through the sponsor management system within strict deadlines, usually ten or twenty working days. Non-attendance, early termination, a change of role, a change of work location. The clock starts when the change happens, not when somebody gets round to telling HR.
• Record-keeping. You must keep specified documents for every sponsored worker, including right-to-work checks, contact details and recruitment records. An incomplete right-to-work check also costs you the statutory excuse that protects your organisation from a civil penalty for illegal working.
• Genuine roles only. You cannot assign a Certificate of Sponsorship for a job that does not really exist, or that does not meet the requirements of the route. Choosing an occupation code because it makes a salary threshold work is treated as exactly what it is.
• Cooperation. Home Office officers can visit your premises, and not every visit is announced.

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.

What it costs

Our professional fee for a sponsor licence application is £500–£1,000, depending on case complexity. This is per organisation’s sponsor licence application. We confirm your exact fee and service scope in writing before engagement and payment. A sponsor licence and each worker application are separate matters; individual worker applications have their own professional fee and government charges.

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 during the agreed professional review, and our own pricing is set out in full on the fees page.

Where the licence fits with the rest of your hiring

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. A review can identify compliance gaps before they need urgent attention. 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.

Choose your next step

The licence and the employee’s application are separate steps. See Skilled Worker visa support for candidates, or business immigration support for a wider recruitment plan.

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 sponsor licence guidance, organise your questions and understand the separate charges before deciding how to proceed. A guide or tool result does not establish eligibility.

Sponsor licence guidesOrganise route questions

Frequently asked questions