Senior or Specialist Worker visa for employers

Only current members of your organisation qualify. You cannot bring in an outsider you have never employed, as the official visa page makes clear.

If the salary is under £73,900, the person must have spent at least 12 months working for you outside the UK before the move. If you pay £73,900 or more, there is no minimum length of service at all (eligibility rules).

The pay threshold starts at £52,500 a year, though some roles carry a higher going rate and that number takes over. Our role checker shows the lowest salary for each job, so you can see whether a role's rate sits above £52,500.

Global Business Mobility covers five visa routes: Senior or Specialist Worker, Graduate Trainee, Service Supplier, UK Expansion Worker and Secondment Worker. You can find them on the licence types page.

Senior or Specialist Worker covers existing staff coming to work for you in the UK. It runs on the Worker licence, so a licence you hold for Skilled Workers is the same licence type.

This visa took the place of the Intra-company Transfer visa. If older guides talk about intra-company transfers, this is the route they have become, as the official visa page confirms.

If you used intra-company transfers before, this is the route to use now. The pay levels, stay limits and fees on this page are the current ones.

They may stay up to 5 years within any 6-year window. Earning £73,900 or more lifts the cap to 9 years within any 10 (official visa page).

Every stay hangs on a certificate of sponsorship. That is an electronic record you set up for the worker once your licence is in place, and on this route it costs £525 (sponsorship certificates guidance).

Three Home Office charges land on your side. First, the sponsor licence: £611 if you are a small business or charity, £1,682 if you are medium or large (licence application page). This is a one-off, not a per-worker cost.

Second comes the £525 certificate for each worker. Third, there is the immigration skills charge, which depends on your size and how long the worker stays: £480 a year if you are a small business or charity, £1,320 a year if you are medium or large (skills charge page).

For one worker, licence fee included, the totals work out at:

Every further worker means one more £525 certificate plus the skills charge covering their stay, but never a second licence fee. A small business bringing over a second worker for 3 years would therefore pay the £525 certificate plus £1,440 in skills charge.

One exception applies to the skills charge. No charge is due when an EU national worker comes across for a temporary stay of no more than 3 years, provided the certificate was assigned on or after 1 January 2023 (skills charge page).

Their visa fee and the immigration health surcharge belong to the worker. The immigration health surcharge costs £1,035 per adult for each year of their stay (healthcare surcharge page).

Applying from abroad, the visa fee and surcharge combined come to:

Share these numbers with the worker early on.

Anyone charging for immigration advice must be on the register kept by the Immigration Advice Authority, or be part of an approved professional body like the Law Society. Run a check through the GOV.UK adviser finder before handing over any details.

Fill in this site's form and your details go to a single immigration solicitor firm that deals with sponsor licences. The solicitor then gets back to you at the work email you provide. Looking up a role in the official occupation tables and tallying up the Home Office fees here costs nothing, and there is nothing to sign up for.