Relocation Packages: Which Visa Costs the Employer Must Pay, and Which You Can Negotiate

Employers pay for work visa sponsorship in part, and in several countries the law decides which part. The bill splits into three buckets. Bucket one is costs an employer is forbidden from recovering from the worker: in the UK the Home Office sponsor guidance prohibits a sponsor from passing on the Immigration Skills Charge or the sponsor licence fee, in Canada the Labour Market Impact Assessment fee charged by Employment and Social Development Canada must be paid by the employer and cannot be recouped from the worker, in Australia the Skilling Australians Fund levy sits with the sponsoring business, and in New Zealand employer accreditation and job check fees under the Accredited Employer Work Visa are the employer's to carry. Bucket two is costs customarily paid by the employer without a law compelling it: the certificate of sponsorship or nomination fee, agency and recruitment fees, and sometimes the visa application fee itself. Bucket three is costs that almost always land on you: dependant visa fees, the UK Immigration Health Surcharge in many packages, flights, rental deposits, document translation, medicals and police certificates.

Everything below is a dated planning figure checked in August 2026. Fee schedules from UK Visas and Immigration, Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the Australian Department of Home Affairs, Immigration New Zealand and the Irish Department of Enterprise are revised on published cycles, usually annually. Reconfirm every number on the issuing authority's own fee page before you budget, negotiate or sign. This is general information. A licensed or registered adviser, or an employment lawyer in the destination country, should confirm your own case.

Who this article is for

You have a job offer abroad, or you are close to one, and the offer letter mentions "visa support" or "relocation assistance" without saying what that covers. Or you are looking at a repayment clause saying you owe the company several thousand pounds if you resign within two years. Or a recruiter has asked you to pay something up front and you want to know whether that is normal or illegal.

This is written for skilled workers, nurses, engineers and families moving from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East into Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, New Zealand, Ireland and the Gulf. The three-bucket structure holds across all of them. The rules and the amounts change by country, which is exactly why the split matters.

Bucket one: costs the employer is not allowed to recover from you

These are worth knowing by name, because an employer who bills you for them is breaking a rule its own sponsorship licence depends on. That gives you leverage independent of negotiating skill.

The UK Immigration Skills Charge

The Immigration Skills Charge is a levy the Home Office charges a sponsor for each sponsored Skilled Worker, per year of sponsorship, at a lower rate for small and charitable sponsors. As published it has sat in a band of roughly £364 to £480 per year for small or charitable sponsors and roughly £1,000 to £1,320 per year for medium and large sponsors, following an uplift announced in 2025. Confirm the current rate on the UK government's sponsorship fees page, because this is one of the fastest-moving numbers in UK immigration.

The critical point is the recovery rule, and it is unambiguous in Home Office sponsor guidance: a sponsor must not pass the Immigration Skills Charge on to the worker, in whole or in part, by any means. That includes deducting it from salary, invoicing it, or writing it into a clawback agreement that becomes payable if you leave early. Doing so is a licence compliance failure for the employer.

For a five-year Skilled Worker sponsorship with a large employer, the charge across five years runs into several thousand pounds at the upper published band. If a contract asks you to repay it, raise that clause first, in writing.

The UK sponsor licence fee and related sponsor costs

Applying for and holding a sponsor licence costs the employer a fee set by UKVI, banded by organisation size. Home Office guidance introduced from late 2024 also prohibits sponsors from passing on the sponsor licence fee and associated administrative costs, and the prohibition has widened since. Because the boundary of "associated costs" has moved, and now touches the certificate of sponsorship for Skilled Worker sponsorships assigned after certain dates, read the current version of the sponsor guidance itself. It is versioned and dated on the government's own page.

If a UK employer's relocation agreement asks you to repay anything described as a licence cost, a sponsorship administration cost or a certificate of sponsorship cost, treat it as a question for a UK employment or immigration solicitor before you sign.

Canada's LMIA fee and the employer compliance fee

Where a Canadian employer hires through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, it applies to Employment and Social Development Canada for a Labour Market Impact Assessment. The processing fee has been published by ESDC at CA$1,000 per position requested. Treat that as a planning figure and check the current amount, and any exemption that applies to your occupation or wage level, on the ESDC page for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. ESDC rules require the employer to pay it and prohibit recovering it from the worker, and the same principle bars employers and third-party recruiters from charging the worker for recruitment tied to an LMIA-based hire.

For employer-specific work permits issued under the International Mobility Program, where no LMIA is required, the employer instead pays an employer compliance fee published by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada at CA$230 as last published and submits an offer of employment through the employer portal. That is also the employer's cost.

Several Canadian provinces add protections through recruiter registration regimes that prohibit charging recruitment fees to workers. If a recruiter asks you for money to place you with a Canadian employer, check the destination province's rules on its own government website before paying anything.

Australia's Skilling Australians Fund levy and the payment-for-visas prohibition

Australian employers sponsoring a worker under the employer-sponsored program pay the Skilling Australians Fund levy at nomination. The Department of Home Affairs sets it, and the published amount varies with the sponsoring business's annual turnover and with the length and type of the nomination, so a single figure quoted to you by a recruiter means little. The sponsoring business must pay the levy and cannot pass it to the applicant. Check the current bands on the Department of Home Affairs fees and charges pages before you price a package.

Australia goes further than most destinations with a specific criminal and civil prohibition on "payment for visa sponsorship" arrangements in the Migration Act. Asking for, receiving, offering or providing a benefit in return for a sponsorship or nomination is unlawful, and the prohibition applies to the person paying as well as the person receiving. If someone offers you a sponsored Australian job in exchange for a payment, that arrangement puts your own visa at risk too. The Department of Home Affairs publishes reporting channels for it.

New Zealand accreditation and job check fees

Under the Accredited Employer Work Visa, the employer pays for accreditation and for the job check, and Immigration New Zealand's rules prohibit an accredited employer from recovering those costs from the migrant worker. Charging a worker a premium for a job offer is separately unlawful under New Zealand employment law. Check Immigration New Zealand's employer accreditation pages for the current fee amounts and the current wording of the recovery rule.

Ireland, Germany and the Gulf

Irish employment permits legislation prohibits an employer from deducting the cost of the permit from the employee's pay or otherwise recovering it from the employee. The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment publishes the current fee bands and refund rules.

Germany has no sponsorship levy of the UK or Australian kind. The main costs are the visa or residence permit fee, the qualification recognition procedure and translation, and none carry a statutory employer-pays rule for skilled worker routes. That makes Germany a negotiation country. Employers competing for engineers and healthcare staff often cover recognition and relocation costs anyway, and it is normal to ask.

Across the Gulf states, labour law generally places recruitment and work permit costs on the employer and prohibits deducting them from the worker's wages. Enforcement varies, and the gap between the written rule and common practice is wider here than in Canada or New Zealand. Get the split written into the offer letter, and keep a copy somewhere other than a company system you may lose access to.

Bucket two: costs customarily paid by the employer

Law rarely compels these. A serious employer pays them anyway, and a market-rate package includes them. If they are missing, ask.

• Certificate of sponsorship, nomination or offer-of-employment fees. The administrative charge for issuing your sponsorship document. Employers pay this as a matter of course, and in the UK it has moved into bucket one for Skilled Worker sponsorships under recent guidance.
• Recruitment and agency fees. Where a company used an agency to find you, the agency is paid by the company. The employer-pays principle promoted by the International Labour Organization holds that recruitment fees should never be borne by the worker, and many destination countries have written a version of it into law.
• Legal and adviser fees for the sponsorship itself. If the employer engaged an immigration firm, that firm is the employer's supplier.
• The principal applicant's visa application fee. Common in competitive hiring, particularly healthcare and engineering, though far from universal, and one of the most negotiable lines in the package.
• Skills or qualification recognition costs. Nursing registration through the Nursing and Midwifery Council or Ahpra, engineering assessment, trade recognition in Germany. Some employers reimburse on start, some pay up front, many pay nothing. Ask which of the three applies before you accept.

If you are still working out which recognition body sits between you and the job, our guide on how to get your qualifications recognised abroad sets out who assesses what and in what order.

Bucket three: costs that are almost always yours

Budget for these as though nobody will pay them, and treat any employer contribution as an upside.

• Dependant visa fees. Partner and child applications are charged per person in every major destination. This is usually the single largest surprise in a family move, and it is the line most worth negotiating because employers rarely offer it unprompted.
• The UK Immigration Health Surcharge. Charged per person, per year of the visa, and payable up front for the full period. As published by the Home Office, the surcharge has been £1,035 per year for most adults and £776 per year for children, students and their dependants. Rates and exemptions change, so read the figure as a planning number and confirm it before you budget. A family of four on a five-year visa therefore faces a five-figure sterling payment before arrival. Confirm the current rate and the exemptions on the UK government's health surcharge page. Some employers reimburse it as a matter of policy. No rule obliges them to.
• Flights and shipping. Sometimes covered for the worker and not the family. Read the wording carefully.
• Rental deposits and temporary accommodation. Deposits of one to three months' rent are normal, and agency or guarantor fees are common in Germany and parts of Europe.
• Document translation, apostille and legalisation. Certified translation and the attestation chain in your home country. Paying for the wrong one twice is common, so confirm which form the receiving authority accepts before you order anything.
• Medicals, police certificates and biometrics. Charged per person, in every country you have lived in for the police certificates.
• English or language tests. IELTS, PTE, OET or a Goethe exam, often sat more than once.

What it costs: the three buckets by destination

The table below is a planning summary checked in August 2026. Amounts are as published by each authority and are revised on published cycles. Verify each one at the source named in the last column before you use it in a negotiation.

Before you negotiate any of this, it is worth being certain the route itself works for your occupation, your qualifications and your family, because a generous package on a route you cannot complete is worth nothing. Our free eligibility assessment matches your profile against the routes that actually fit and shows you where the real cost sits in each. If you want the whole sequence written down, which route, which assessment, in what order and at what cost, that is what NextMigrate's personal migration roadmap is for: $499, down from $999, started with a $99 deposit with the balance settled afterwards.

How repayment and clawback clauses actually work

A clawback clause says that if you leave within a defined period, you repay some or all of the relocation and immigration spend, often on a sliding scale. These are common, and a well-drafted one is legitimate. Four things determine whether a specific clause is a problem.

What it covers. A clause reaching into bucket one is the clearest issue. In the UK, an agreement requiring you to repay the Immigration Skills Charge conflicts with the sponsor guidance prohibition, and clawback attempts covering it have been challenged. A clause covering genuine bucket two and three spending sits on much firmer ground.

Whether it is a genuine pre-estimate or a penalty. In common law jurisdictions, a repayment clause requiring an amount out of proportion to the employer's actual loss can be attacked as a penalty and be unenforceable. A clause repaying real, evidenced spend on a taper is far more likely to hold.

Whether it tapers. A clause demanding full repayment on day 364 and nothing on day 366 is aggressive. A taper, for example 100 percent in the first six months, 50 percent in the second six, nothing after two years, is standard.

What triggers it. Read whether it fires on resignation only, or on any termination. A clause triggering when the employer makes you redundant, or when you resign because the employer breached the contract, is one to push back on. Ask for it to be limited to voluntary resignation and dismissal for gross misconduct.

Clawback interacts badly with a visa tied to the employer. On an employer-sponsored visa, leaving usually means finding a new sponsor within a defined grace period or leaving the country, and a large repayment liability on top turns a bad job into a trap. That combination, sponsorship dependency plus a heavy clawback, is the structural risk to price before you accept. Where the dependency runs for years the price is higher again, as it does on Korea's E-7, and our guide to the three-year route from an employer-tied E-7 to F-2-7 residence status in Korea shows what that period demands.

What to ask for in writing, and how to ask

Negotiate the package once, before you sign, in one message. Asking for six things at different times reads badly. Asking once, with a reason attached to each, reads as organised. A workable request covers five lines.

1. Confirmation of the split. "Please confirm which immigration costs the company pays directly and which I am expected to pay, itemised, including any charge the company is required by law or by sponsor guidance to bear."
2. Dependant costs. The highest-value ask for anyone moving with family. Ask for the dependant visa fees and, in the UK, the health surcharge for dependants. If the company will not cover them, ask for a one-off relocation allowance sized to them instead, which is often easier for a finance team to approve than a new policy exception.
3. A relocation allowance with a stated number. A fixed cash sum paid on or before start, which you allocate. Employers prefer this to open-ended reimbursement, and so should you: it removes the argument about receipts.
4. The clawback terms. Ask for the taper, the trigger limited to voluntary resignation, and explicit exclusion of any cost the employer is required to bear.
5. Timing. When each payment is made. Reimbursement after 90 days is very different from payment up front when you are funding visa fees for four people from a weaker currency. If cash flow is the constraint, say so and ask for the fees to be paid directly by the company instead of reimbursed.

Get every agreed point into the signed offer letter or a written addendum. A recruiter's verbal assurance is worth nothing when a finance team is deciding what to reimburse.

When this does not work

Some situations offer no negotiation at all, and recognising them saves goodwill.

Public sector and health service employers usually run fixed relocation schemes with published bands that the person hiring you cannot vary. The right question there is which published scheme you fall into.

Junior roles rarely carry a relocation budget. Where the employer is small, or the role is easily filled locally, the honest answer may be that sponsorship itself is the whole concession.

Where the employer is a labour hire or staffing intermediary instead of the end user of your work, the split is often worse and the clawback harsher, because the intermediary's margin is thin. Read those contracts with more care.

In a genuinely oversupplied occupation, asking for a large package can cost you the offer. Weigh what the route is worth to you: a permanent residence pathway you cannot otherwise access can justify absorbing costs a purely financial calculation would reject.

How to check a fee at the source in ten minutes

Every number in this article is a planning figure with a date on it. The habit worth building is checking each one yourself, on the day you use it, on the page belonging to the authority that charges it.

Start from the authority, never from a blog, a forum thread or a recruiter's spreadsheet. For the UK that means the visa fees and sponsorship fees tables published on gov.uk by the Home Office, plus the sponsor guidance documents, which carry a version number and a date on the front page. For Canada it means the fee list published by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program pages published by Employment and Social Development Canada. For Australia it means the fees and charges pages published by the Department of Home Affairs. For New Zealand it means Immigration New Zealand's own fees and levies pages. For Ireland it means the employment permits pages of the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment. For Germany it means the Federal Foreign Office for visa fees, the local immigration office for residence permit fees, and the recognition portal for qualification assessment costs.

Write four things next to every figure you copy: the amount, the currency, the date you looked, and the page you took it from. When a finance team later disputes a reimbursement, or a fee rises between your offer and your application, that short list is the whole argument.

Check the charging unit as carefully as the amount. Fees are charged per person, per year, per position or per application depending on the line, and the difference between "per adult per year" and "per application" is the difference between a manageable cost and a five-figure one for a family of four. The health surcharge is the clearest example, because it multiplies by both family size and visa length, and it falls due in a single payment.

Check whether the fee is payable in the destination currency and how it is collected. Applicants paying from a country with exchange controls or a card limit frequently discover the constraint at the payment screen, at the end of an application they cannot pause. If that is your situation, ask the employer to pay the fee directly instead of reimbursing you afterwards, and ask early enough for a finance team to set it up.

Finally, check the date the guidance itself was published. Sponsor guidance, recruitment rules and levy amounts move on their own cycles, and a rule that changed three months ago is still being quoted as current in most of what you will read online. None of this replaces advice on your own facts. Use it to form the questions you put to a registered or licensed adviser, and to sanity-check the answers you get.

Common mistakes

Paying an agent for the job offer itself. Never pay a fee to be placed in a sponsored job. It is unlawful in Australia and prohibited under the recruitment rules in Canada and New Zealand, and it is the most common shape of overseas job scam. Upfront placement fees, guaranteed visa promises and payment into a personal bank account are the signals. Our guide on how to verify an overseas job offer covers the checks that rule out most fakes, and our guide on how to read the UK sponsor licence register shows how to confirm a UK employer holds a licence at all.

Assuming "visa costs covered" means what you think. It usually means the employer's own sponsorship costs, which it was going to pay anyway. Ask specifically about your fee, your dependants' fees, and the health surcharge.

Forgetting the health surcharge is charged up front for the whole visa. Applicants budget for a five-year UK visa and then discover the family surcharge falls due in one payment at application. If you are paying from a country with currency controls, the sequencing matters as much as the amount.

Signing a clawback that includes a cost the employer must bear. Even where the clause would likely fail if challenged, challenging it means a dispute in a foreign jurisdiction while your visa depends on that same company. Fix it before signing.

Treating the package as the whole financial picture. A package offsets costs. You still need a landing buffer to cover the weeks between arrival and your first pay run. Our breakdown of the true cost of migrating abroad sets out the rest.

What to do next

Do these in order.

1. Write down the destination and the exact visa route. Bucket one rules are route-specific, and a Skilled Worker sponsorship, an intra-company transfer and a Global Talent endorsement have different answers.
2. Look up each fee on the issuing authority's own page today, in the destination currency, and write the date beside it. Every figure here is a planning range and the schedules move.
3. Ask the employer for the itemised split in writing before you sign anything.
4. If the contract contains a repayment clause, have an employment lawyer in the destination country read it. That is a small fixed cost against a liability that can run into five figures.
5. Verify the employer and any intermediary on the relevant public register, and check any migration adviser against the regulator's own register: OMARA in Australia, the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants in Canada, the Immigration Advisers Authority in New Zealand, and in the UK the statutory regulator of immigration advisers, whose public register lists every regulated adviser. Confirm the regulator's current name and register address on gov.uk before you rely on a search, because the UK body has been renamed in recent years.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the employer pay for work visa sponsorship costs?

Partly, and in several countries the law decides which parts. Employers must pay the sponsorship levies and licence costs in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, and are prohibited from recovering them from the worker. Employers customarily pay sponsorship document fees and recruitment costs. The worker almost always pays their own visa fee where the employer has not agreed to cover it, plus dependant fees, health surcharges, medicals, translation and flights. Confirm the rules and amounts on the destination authority's own page before relying on this split.

Can a UK employer make me repay the Immigration Skills Charge if I leave early?

Home Office sponsor guidance prohibits a sponsor from passing the Immigration Skills Charge on to the sponsored worker by any means, which covers deductions, invoices and clawback agreements. Clauses attempting it have been challenged. If a UK contract contains one, raise it before signing and have a UK employment or immigration solicitor read the clause. Read the current version of the sponsor guidance on gov.uk, because it is revised regularly.

Is my employer required to pay the Immigration Health Surcharge?

No rule requires it. The surcharge is charged to the applicant, per person, per year of the visa, and paid at application for the whole period. As published by the Home Office it has been about £1,035 per year for most adults and £776 for children and students. Confirm the figure before you budget, because rates change. Employers in competitive sectors often reimburse it, and it is reasonable to ask, particularly for dependants. Confirm the current rate and exemptions on the UK government's health surcharge page.

Can a Canadian employer charge me for the LMIA?

No. Employment and Social Development Canada requires the employer to pay the LMIA processing fee, published at CA$1,000 per position, and prohibits recovering it from the worker. Recruitment fees connected to an LMIA-based hire are also prohibited from being charged to the worker, and several provinces add their own recruiter licensing rules. If a recruiter asks you for money for a Canadian job, treat it as a warning sign and check the province's rules on its own website.

What should a fair clawback clause look like?

It should cover only real, documented spend the employer was not obliged to bear, taper so the amount owed falls the longer you stay, trigger on voluntary resignation and gross misconduct dismissal only, and list the covered items with amounts. A clause demanding full repayment regardless of tenure, including statutory employer costs, or firing on redundancy is one to negotiate before signing.

Who pays for my family's visas?

Usually you. Dependant applications are charged per person in every major destination and are the most commonly overlooked cost in a family move. Employers rarely cover them unprompted, which makes this the highest-value single ask. If the company will not change policy, ask for a relocation allowance sized to the dependant costs instead. Our guide on whether your spouse can work on a dependant visa covers what those visas allow once you arrive, which affects how much the household can absorb.

The bottom line

Split the bill into three buckets before you negotiate. Bucket one is the employer's by law in most destination countries, and knowing those charges by name, the Immigration Skills Charge, the sponsor licence fee, the LMIA fee, the Skilling Australians Fund levy, the accreditation and job check fees, gives you a position independent of your negotiating skill. Bucket two is customary and worth asking for. Bucket three is yours, and dependant costs plus the health surcharge dominate it for families.

Get the split in writing before you sign, verify every fee on the issuing authority's own page on the day you use it, have someone qualified read any repayment clause, and never pay anyone for the job offer itself.