How to Read the UK Register of Licensed Sponsors Before You Apply for a Job

The way to check whether a UK company can sponsor a visa is to look it up in the register of licensed sponsors, which the Home Office publishes on GOV.UK as a downloadable file anyone can open. Search the page for "register of licensed sponsors: workers" and download the current version. If the employer's legal name does not appear in that file, it holds no worker sponsor licence and cannot issue you a Certificate of Sponsorship, no matter what a recruiter says. If the name does appear, you still have three things to read before you treat it as good news: the rating attached to the entry, the route or routes listed against it, and the date of the file you are holding.

Being listed clears only the first hurdle. A sponsor rated B is under a Home Office action plan and, as published, cannot assign certificates to new workers until the rating is restored. A sponsor licensed only for a Temporary Worker or Global Business Mobility route cannot hire you into an ordinary Skilled Worker job, because the licence covers the routes named against it and nothing else. And the file is a snapshot: licences are added, downgraded, surrendered and revoked between publications, so a list you built last month is dated planning data carrying no guarantee at all.

This guide is general information and it is not immigration advice. The Home Office and UK Visas and Immigration publish the register, the routes and the sponsorship rules, and every figure, rule and restriction below should be reconfirmed on GOV.UK before you act on it. An adviser registered with the Immigration Advice Authority, or a practising solicitor or barrister, should confirm how any of it applies to your own case.

Who should be reading the register

The register is worth the effort for anyone whose UK plan runs through an employer:

• A nurse, engineer, developer, accountant or care professional applying to UK jobs from abroad, who needs to know which of the fifty companies on their list can legally hire them.
• Someone already holding a UK offer who wants to verify the licence independently, before resigning a job at home or paying anyone a fee.
• Someone weighing whether a sponsored route is realistic at all, against an alternative that needs no employer. If that is you, read the UK route for engineers with no job offer alongside this.

Student sponsors are published in a separate register, so a university listed there tells you nothing about whether it can sponsor you as an employee.

What you need before you start

Very little, and that is the point. Nobody has to grant you access to this information.

• The employer's exact legal name. This is the single biggest source of false negatives. Companies trade under a brand and hold the licence under a registered entity: a hospital group, a holding company, a franchise operator, a limited company with "Group", "Holdings" or "UK" in the title. Take the registered name from Companies House first.
• A spreadsheet tool that opens the published file. The worker register carries a very large number of rows, enough that a browser find-in-page on a preview page will not do the job. The exact size changes with each publication and is visible in the file you download.
• Your occupation code, or your best guess at it. The register alone will not tell you whether a specific job meets the skill level and salary rules, and pairing the two is what makes the exercise useful.
• A date stamp habit. Write the download date on every list you build.

What the columns actually mean

As published, the worker register is a flat table with a small number of columns: the organisation name, the town or city, the county, the type and rating held, and the route. Headings and file formats have changed over the years, so read the headings on the file you downloaded instead of a description in any article, this one included.

Read all five, because each can end the enquiry on its own.

A-rating and B-rating

Sponsors are rated by the Home Office. As published, an A-rating is the normal state of a compliant licence, and a B-rating means the sponsor has been found short of its duties and placed on a time-limited action plan, with a fee to pay and conditions to meet. The restriction is what matters to a job applicant: as published, a B-rated sponsor may continue supporting workers it already sponsors but cannot assign certificates of sponsorship to new workers until it is returned to A-rating.

In practice, a B-rating against the employer you are applying to means your application is on hold whether anyone tells you so or not.

If you are still building a target list, keep B-rated entries in a separate tab to recheck later. If you already have an offer from one, do not resign anything and do not pay anyone. Ask the employer in writing whether they can currently assign a certificate of sponsorship for your role.

An A-rating records compliance standing and nothing else. It says the licence stood in good order on the publication date, and it says nothing about whether the employer pays well or has ever sponsored anyone.

The route column decides whether they can hire you at all

This is the column most people skim and the one that most often changes the answer. A sponsor licence is granted for specific routes, and the entry lists the ones the employer holds. Three families of route appear most often, and they are not interchangeable.

Skilled Worker. The mainstream route for a UK employer hiring into an ordinary job. If you are applying to advertised vacancies from overseas, this is almost certainly the route you need listed. The rules on skill level, salary and English are set by the Home Office and have tightened repeatedly since 2024, so read our UK Skilled Worker visa guide and then check GOV.UK itself before relying on any threshold.

Global Business Mobility. Routes for moving staff into the UK inside an existing corporate relationship: senior or specialist workers transferring from an overseas branch, graduate trainees, teams sent to establish a UK presence, service suppliers, secondments. Across most of these you generally need a qualifying link to the overseas business, commonly a period of employment with it, and they have historically not led to settlement the way the Skilled Worker route can. An employer holding only a Global Business Mobility licence cannot hire you off the open market. Check the current conditions and qualifying periods on GOV.UK.

Temporary Worker. A family covering fixed-term, purpose-limited work: creative, charity and religious workers, government authorised exchange schemes, seasonal work in specified sectors, international agreement roles. These are time-limited by design and carry their own conditions on switching and on dependants. They are legitimate and suit some people well. They are the wrong thing to accept while believing you have accepted something else.

The failure mode is common. A candidate finds the employer's name, sees a rating of A, stops reading, and applies for months to a company whose licence covers a Temporary Worker scheme it uses for summer staff. The name was there. The route was never right.

The town column shows a trading address, and the job can sit anywhere

The town and county describe the address the sponsor registered with the Home Office. For a single-site business that is usually where you would work. For anything larger it frequently is not. A care provider registered in Croydon may operate homes across five counties. A logistics group registered in Leeds may have the vacancy in Bristol. A national employer's licence sits at head office and covers the whole organisation.

Both directions cost time. Filter to your preferred city and you delete national employers who could place you exactly where you want to be, because their entry says head office. Treat it as a weak signal about the employer's centre of gravity. The job location comes from the advert and from the employer in writing, confirmed before you accept anything.

How to spot a new, changed or lapsed licence

The Home Office republishes the file on a regular cycle and does not publish a change log for job seekers. You can produce one yourself, and it is the highest-value thing a serious applicant can do with this data.

Keep every file you download, named with its date, and compare each new one against the previous copy. Even a basic spreadsheet comparison surfaces three categories that matter:

1. Names present now and absent before. A newly licensed sponsor. These employers went through the Home Office application recently, usually because they intend to hire from overseas, and they have no established pipeline of applicants who know they sponsor. This is the most useful list you can hold.
2. Names absent now and present before. The licence has ended, by surrender, expiry or revocation. From the file alone you cannot tell which. Stop treating that employer as sponsorship-capable and, if you have an application in progress, ask directly.
3. Ratings or routes that changed. An A that became a B. A Temporary Worker entry that gained Skilled Worker. Both change what the employer can do for you, and neither is announced to candidates.

Two cautions. A name can appear to vanish because it changed after a merger or rebrand, so check for a similar entity before concluding a licence ended. And licences can be suspended or revoked between publications. Anything you build from the file stays dated planning data, useful for shortlisting and never adequate as a live status check on the day.

What this costs and how long it takes

Reading the register costs nothing. The Home Office publishes it free and it needs no account, no adviser and no agent, which is the fact scammers depend on you not knowing. The time cost is modest: an hour or two for a first pass, an evening to build a filtered target list cross-checked against your occupation code and the current salary rules.

Set against that, applying blind costs months. Sponsored hiring from overseas is slow anyway, and a rejection that arrives because the employer never held the right licence teaches you nothing.

Before you spend an evening building lists, check whether a sponsored route is viable for you at all. The free eligibility assessment takes your occupation, your qualification, your experience and your English level and returns the routes that fit, and it will say plainly when a UK employer route is the wrong target and something else is the real constraint on your file. Readers who want the whole sequence written down, with the route chosen and the occupation code named, are the reason the NextMigrate personal migration roadmap exists.

The filter routine: turning the register into a target list

Here is the routine, in the order the steps have to happen. The output is a list of employers who can lawfully sponsor someone doing your job, which is a very different artefact from a list of employers who have vacancies.

Step one: download and date it. Get the current worker register from GOV.UK and save it with the date in the filename. Never work from a third-party re-hosted version, because you cannot tell how stale it is or what has been edited.

Step two: filter the route column first. For most people applying to advertised jobs from overseas, keep Skilled Worker entries and set everything else aside. Doing this before any other filter removes exactly the entries that would waste your time.

Step three: move B-rated entries to a separate tab. Do not delete them. They are a recheck list for your next download.

Step four: narrow by sector first, and leave the town column alone. Filter the remaining names by the kind of organisation you can work for: NHS trusts and private healthcare providers, engineering consultancies, software companies, accountancy firms, care groups. Leave geography alone here. If you must narrow it, do so as a second, softer pass and keep national employers regardless of the town shown.

Step five: cross-check against your occupation code and the salary rules. This converts a long list into a real one. For each shortlisted employer, ask whether the job you would realistically be hired into sits at the skill level the Skilled Worker route currently requires, and whether the salary the employer would plausibly pay clears both the general threshold and the going rate published for that occupation code. Both are set by the Home Office and have moved since 2024, so take them from GOV.UK on the day. An employer who can sponsor but cannot pay the going rate for your code is a dead end that looks like a live one.

Step six: verify the entity against the vacancy. Confirm the licensed entity is the one hiring. A listed group holding company does not always mean a particular subsidiary or franchise can issue a certificate.

Step seven: date the output and set a recheck. Write the download date on the finished list, and recheck against a fresh file before any irreversible decision: resigning, moving city, paying a fee, turning down another offer.

Step eight: only now, look for vacancies. Search the employer's own careers page. The register tells you who may sponsor and never who is hiring.

If your occupation sits outside what the route currently allows, that is a finding worth having early. For the care sector, the rules changed sharply enough that the UK care worker route and its alternatives deserves a read before you build a list at all.

When this does not work

The register is a strong tool with clear limits. Be honest about them.

It does not tell you who is hiring. A very large number of organisations hold licences, and holding one creates no obligation to use it. Presence on the register records permission alone. Employers weigh cost, timing and compliance appetite before deciding any single role is worth sponsoring for.

It does not settle whether your job qualifies. Skill level, occupation code, salary threshold and going rate are separate tests applied to the job, and they live in the Home Office rules.

It is not live, and it is not complete. Suspensions and revocations happen between publications, student sponsors sit in a separate register, and routes needing no sponsor sit outside it. And a licence existing and an offer being genuine are two different questions, the second being where people lose money.

The scam pattern this register exposes

Because sponsorship is the bottleneck, it is where fraud concentrates. The pattern is consistent enough to name. Somebody contacts you with a UK job offer. A certificate of sponsorship is available, they say, and there is a fee to secure it: a placement fee, a processing fee, a certificate fee, a fee to reserve the slot. Payment is requested to a personal account, or in cryptocurrency, with pressure to move before the allocation goes to someone else.

Two facts make this checkable. A sponsor licence is held by the employer, and charging a worker for the certificate of sponsorship itself is not permitted under the sponsor rules, so a demand that you pay for a certificate is a warning sign in its own right. Verify that on GOV.UK. Separately, immigration advice in the UK is regulated: paid advisers must be regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority, the body that took over the register of regulated immigration advisers from the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner, or must be a practising solicitor or barrister regulated by their own professional body. Each of those regulators publishes a free searchable register, and confirming which body currently regulates your adviser is worth doing on the regulator's own site before you pay anything.

Checks that cost nothing: look the employer up in the register yourself using the legal name from Companies House, and refuse a screenshot from the recruiter. Refuse any payment for a job offer or a certificate of sponsorship, and any payment to a personal account. Treat "guaranteed visa" as disqualifying language, because no agent controls a Home Office decision. Contact the employer through a number you found independently, never one supplied in the offer email.

Our guides to verifying an overseas job offer and to avoiding immigration scams cover the mechanics in more detail, including who is allowed to charge you for what.

Common mistakes

1. Searching the brand instead of the legal entity. The most frequent false negative. Get the registered name from Companies House first.
2. Reading the rating and ignoring the route. An A-rated Temporary Worker licence cannot give you a Skilled Worker job.
3. Filtering by town. It deletes national employers and creates false confidence about job location.
4. Treating the file as live. It is a dated snapshot, and licences change between publications.
5. Assuming licensed means hiring. Permission and intent are separate, and most licence holders sponsor rarely.
6. Skipping the occupation code and salary check. A sponsor who cannot meet the going rate for your code cannot hire you into that role however willing they are.
7. Using a third-party copy, or paying someone to search it. Re-hosted lists are stale and sometimes edited, and the real file is free, public and takes an hour to learn.
8. Assuming a lapsed entry means wrongdoing. Licences end for ordinary commercial reasons. Ask, and do not speculate publicly about an employer.

What to do next

Download today's register from GOV.UK and save it with the date. Run the eight-step routine above to produce a dated shortlist. Take the current skill level, salary threshold and going rate for your occupation code from GOV.UK on the same day and mark each shortlisted employer plausible or not against them. Check whether your qualification will be recognised for the role you are targeting, since a licensed sponsor cannot fix a registration problem. Then re-download the register before any decision you cannot undo and compare it against your saved copy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the UK register of licensed sponsors published?

The Home Office publishes it on GOV.UK as the register of licensed sponsors for workers, as a downloadable data file. It is free and needs no account. Download it from GOV.UK itself, because copies re-hosted on job boards and agency sites are often stale and cannot be verified.

What does a B-rating mean for my application?

As published, a B-rated sponsor is on a Home Office action plan and cannot assign certificates of sponsorship to new workers until the rating is restored, though it can continue supporting existing sponsored staff. For a candidate that means a new sponsored hire is on hold. Confirm the current effect on GOV.UK and ask the employer in writing whether they can presently assign a certificate for your role.

The employer is on the register but the route says Global Business Mobility. Can they hire me?

Not as an ordinary external candidate. Global Business Mobility routes move people inside an existing corporate relationship and generally require a qualifying link to the overseas business, such as a period of employment with it. If the entry does not list Skilled Worker, the employer cannot sponsor you through that route. Check the current conditions for each Global Business Mobility route on GOV.UK.

How often is the register updated, and how do I spot changes?

The Home Office republishes the file regularly and states the current publication frequency on the GOV.UK page itself, so check there. There is no candidate-facing change log, so build your own: save each download with its date and compare a new file against your previous copy to surface newly licensed sponsors, ended licences and changed ratings or routes.

Should I pay an agent to find sponsoring employers for me?

The register is free and public, so paying purely for a list of names buys something you can get in an hour. Paid help can be legitimate when it is regulated advice on your route or application, in which case check the adviser is registered with the Immigration Advice Authority or is a practising solicitor or barrister. Never pay for a certificate of sponsorship, never pay a fee to secure a job offer, and never pay into a personal account.

If a company is A-rated and lists Skilled Worker, am I safe to apply?

Sponsorship was legally possible on that publication date. Three questions stay open: whether the employer is hiring at all, whether the role meets the current skill level and salary rules for your occupation code, and whether the licence still stands when your offer arrives.

The bottom line

The UK register of licensed sponsors answers one question precisely: which organisations held a worker sponsor licence, on which routes, at which rating, on the day the file was published. Read all five columns and the answer is genuinely useful. Read only the name and it will send you into months of applications to employers who were never able to hire you.

The routine is simple enough to run yourself. Download the current file from GOV.UK, filter to your route first, park the B-ratings, ignore the town column while you narrow by sector, then test each surviving employer against your occupation code and the current Home Office salary rules. Date the list and recheck it before you resign, move or pay anyone. Everything here is general information, every rule and restriction must be reconfirmed on GOV.UK on the day you rely on it, and an adviser registered with the Immigration Advice Authority, or a practising solicitor or barrister, should confirm your own case before you act.

If you want to know whether the sponsored route is the right target before you spend weeks working it, start with the free eligibility assessment. It matches your occupation, qualification and experience against the routes that fit across the UK and the other destinations worth considering, and it will tell you plainly when the constraint on your file is something other than finding a sponsor. If you want the sequence written out, naming the route, the occupation code and the order to do things in, that is what the NextMigrate personal migration roadmap is for: $499, originally $999, started with a $99 deposit with the balance settled afterwards. See pricing.