How to hire international workers in the UK

You apply to the Home Office for a sponsor licence covering the Skilled Worker route, showing that the organisation is genuine, trading, and has the people and systems to meet its sponsor duties. You name the staff who will run it. Once granted it is renewed periodically and can be rated down or revoked if the duties are not met.

Employers who hire this way once almost always hire again, so treat the licence as infrastructure. If you already hold one, 127,362 organisations do, you are most of the way there.

• A confirmed job offer from a UK employer that holds a Home Office sponsor licence. The employers in this directory all hold one.
• A Certificate of Sponsorship from that employer describing the role.
• A job on the Home Office list of eligible occupations, paid at least the minimum salary for that role and route.

The full requirements list, with its source and check date

The job has to sit in an occupation code that is eligible for the Skilled Worker route, and be paid at least the higher of the general salary threshold and the going rate for that code. Both the list of eligible codes and the rates are published on GOV.UK and both have been changed more than once recently, so check the current version for the exact code, not last year's.

Get the code right and the rest follows; get it wrong and the certificate is refused or, worse, granted for a job that does not match what the person does, which is a compliance problem later. We check the code and the rate against the published rules before a role is advertised.

Look in the UK first. Workers already here with the right to work, or already sponsored and eligible to switch sponsor, start sooner and cost less. We show you those before anyone overseas.

For the numbers you cannot find here, recruit overseas, and test before you offer. Every trade candidate we put forward has been assessed on the tools by a qualified assessor at our own sites in Johannesburg, Manila or Dubai or a partner centre near them, on the process and positions your job actually needs; drivers are assessed on a practical drive with the UK licence route confirmed. You interview on video, you choose.

Each source country has its own exit rules alongside the UK visa: the Philippines, South Africa, the UAE, India. Each guide covers both ends.

With the person chosen, you assign them a Certificate of Sponsorship through the sponsor management system: an electronic record of the job, the code, the pay and the start date. For a worker applying from outside the UK it is a defined certificate, requested for that role, and the details on it must match the contract and the visa application exactly.

Charges apply at this stage that the sponsor must pay and cannot pass to the worker. The Home Office publishes them; we set them out in the proposal rather than here so there is one current copy.

The worker applies for the visa from their own country using the certificate, proving their identity, their English to the required level, and any other requirement for the route. The Home Office publishes its processing times by country and they move; ask us and you get the current figure that week.

Family members can usually apply alongside, subject to the rules of the route at the time, and for most candidates that is the deciding factor. Understand it before you make the offer.

Before the first shift you carry out and record a right-to-work check in the form the Home Office currently requires. It is your statutory excuse if anything later turns out to be wrong, so do it properly and keep the record.

The first month is where placements fail, and it is rarely about the work. Accommodation, a bank account, a National Insurance number, the commute, the first payslip: we handle the arrival side with the worker, and our free settling-in guides by county and town are theirs from the day the offer is signed.

Sponsorship carries continuing duties: keeping records, reporting changes to the worker's role, pay or circumstances within set periods, reporting if they do not turn up or leave, and cooperating with compliance visits. The Home Office publishes the full list and it is enforced; licences are downgraded and revoked for failures that are usually administrative rather than deliberate.

Put one named person in charge of it and give them a calendar. We brief every sponsor we work with on the duties in plain words, and the worker's rights at work in the UK are on this site for them to read in their own language.