Sponsor licence cost

As a rule, the Home Office counts you as a small sponsor when at least 2 of these 3 conditions apply:

• £15 million or less in turnover
• £7.5 million or less in assets
• no more than 50 employees

If only one of these applies to you, or none, you'll usually pay the medium or large rate. Turnover is the money your business takes in over a year, and assets are what it owns, such as property, equipment and cash. The GOV.UK licence page sets out the checks.

Your business has to pay the licence fee itself. Asking the worker to pay it could cost you the licence, as GOV.UK explains.

For £750 more you can get a decision inside 10 working days. Places are limited each day and go to the first applicants.

With a licence in place, each worker gets a certificate of sponsorship from you. This is an online record with a reference number, which the worker quotes in their visa application. Each certificate costs £525 for Skilled Worker and Senior or Specialist Worker sponsorship. On Temporary Worker routes it's £55. Temporary Worker routes are for shorter or special kinds of work, such as seasonal, charity or creative jobs, and the Senior or Specialist Worker visa is for moving an existing employee from an overseas branch.

Here's roughly what you'd pay the Home Office to sponsor one Skilled Worker, adding up the licence fee, the £525 certificate and the immigration skills charge, a fee for each worker based on how long you sponsor them. They don't include the optional faster decision.

For each additional Skilled Worker, you pay £525 for a certificate, plus the skills charge if it applies. You won't pay the licence fee twice.

You may also need to pay an immigration skills charge for each sponsored worker, based on the length of sponsorship. These are the current rates:

When a visa is refused or withdrawn, or the worker never takes up the job, the full charge comes back to you. Workers switching from a study visa don't trigger it. Some research and higher education jobs are also exempt, with occupation codes 2111 to 2115, 2119, 2161, 2162 or 2311. Those codes cover scientists, researchers and university lecturers; you can look any job up in our list of job codes.

The worker covers their own visa fee. It varies by where they apply and the length of the visa, as GOV.UK shows.

The immigration salary list is the government's list of jobs where the worker pays a cheaper visa fee.

The worker also pays the immigration health surcharge. It pays for their use of the NHS while they live in the UK. It works out at £1,035 per adult per year. For an adult applying from outside the UK in a job not on the immigration salary list, the visa fee and health surcharge total £1,854 for one year, £3,924 for three years or £6,793 for five years.

There's also a savings rule: the worker needs to have held £1,270 for 28 days. That rule doesn't apply when your business states on the certificate that it will support them.

On 8 April 2026, the medium and large licence fee rose to £1,682, up from £1,579. The fee for small businesses rose from £574 to £611 as well.

The skills charge has stood at today's rates since 16 December 2025.

If your licence is downgraded to a B rating, you can't issue new certificates until it's upgraded. Every licence starts with an A rating; the Home Office moves it to B when it finds problems with how you run sponsorship. Getting back up means following an action plan, which costs £1,579. That fee stayed the same when licence fees rose in April 2026.

Updating your licence details can take as long as 18 weeks to process. Paying £350 for a priority service brings that down to 5 working days.

Here are the lowest salaries for new hires in some common jobs:

The new entrant rate is a lower minimum salary that can apply to some new hires. It covers workers under 26, people switching from a UK Student or Graduate visa, and people training for a professional qualification.

Because graphic and multimedia designers sit on the immigration salary list, they also qualify for the reduced visa fees.