The list exists, it's free, and it's official
The Home Office publishes the Register of licensed sponsors: workers as a downloadable spreadsheet, refreshed regularly. It contains every organisation in the UK currently holding a sponsor licence for work routes, along with the town or city of its registered address, its licence rating, and which routes it can sponsor on.
That register is the only authoritative answer to “does this company sponsor visas?” Anything else — a recruiter's assurance, a LinkedIn post, a “visa sponsorship available” tag on a job board — is a claim about the register, not the register itself. This site exists largely to close that gap: we match employer names on live job listings against the register automatically, which is what our Verified badge means.
Four things the register does not tell you
This is where most searches go wrong. A licence is permission to sponsor, not a commitment to sponsor. Specifically:
- It doesn't mean they have vacancies. Plenty of licensed sponsors aren't hiring at all this quarter, and many hold a licence purely to move existing staff between international offices.
- It doesn't mean they'll sponsor *this* role. A hospital trust with a licence still won't sponsor a receptionist post — the job itself has to be an eligible occupation at an eligible salary.
- It doesn't mean the salary works. The Skilled Worker route has a general salary floor of £41,700 a year plus an occupation-specific “going rate”, and the higher of the two applies. A licensed sponsor advertising a £29,000 role usually cannot sponsor that role.
- It doesn't mean the licence is still valid today. Licences get suspended and revoked, sometimes with no public announcement beyond the register quietly dropping a name. A register match is a snapshot, not a guarantee.
A workflow that actually works
- 1Work backwards from real vacancies, not from the register. Searching the register alphabetically and cold-emailing 400 companies is a well-known way to waste a month. Start with jobs that exist, then check the employer.
- 2Check the employer name against the register before you apply. Names rarely match exactly — job boards list “Acme Health” where the register says “ACME HEALTHCARE GROUP LIMITED”. Search for the distinctive word, not the full string, and ignore suffixes like Ltd, Limited, LLP and Group.
- 3Check the route column, not just the name. An organisation licensed only for Global Business Mobility (intra-company transfers) or a Temporary Worker route cannot hire you as a Skilled Worker from the open market. This is the single most common false positive.
- 4Check the salary against the going rate for the occupation, not against the general floor. A £45,000 offer clears £41,700 but still fails if the going rate for that occupation code is £48,000.
- 5Only then invest in the application. A tailored CV and cover letter for a role that passes both tests is worth twenty generic applications to roles that pass neither.
Steps two to four are exactly what this site automates. Our job search runs every listing through a register match and a salary-threshold check, so the filtering happens before you read the advert rather than after you've applied.
What A-rated and B-rated mean
The register shows a licence rating. A-rating is the normal, healthy state: the sponsor can assign Certificates of Sponsorship as usual. B-rating means the Home Office has found compliance problems and put the sponsor on a time-limited action plan. B-rated sponsors are restricted in assigning new certificates while they fix things, and some never get back to an A-rating.
A B-rating isn't automatically a reason to walk away — organisations do recover — but it is a reason to ask direct questions early, and to keep other applications live rather than betting everything on that one offer.
Sectors where sponsorship is genuinely common
Sponsorship is not evenly distributed. Concentrating your search where licences and eligible salaries overlap saves an enormous amount of time:
- Healthcare — NHS trusts and large private providers sponsor at scale, and many clinical roles sit on the Health and Care Worker visa with its own lower salary floor. See our guide to NHS visa sponsorship.
- Higher education and research — universities and research institutes are long-established sponsors, though many academic contracts are fixed-term.
- Technology — software, data and infrastructure roles usually clear the salary thresholds comfortably at mid-level and above, which makes sponsorship commercially straightforward for the employer.
- Engineering and construction professions — chartered and semi-chartered engineering roles, especially in consultancies with international projects.
- Finance, accountancy and actuarial work — high going rates, but salaries in these occupations are usually well above them.
One important exception: adult social care. Care worker and senior care worker roles (occupation codes 6135 and 6136) were closed to new applicants from outside the UK for certificates of sponsorship assigned on or after 22 July 2025. People already working legally in the UK may still be able to switch or extend in those codes. If you see an overseas-facing advert promising sponsorship as a care worker in 2026, treat it as a serious red flag.
Red flags worth taking seriously
- Anyone asking you to pay for the sponsorship itself, the Certificate of Sponsorship, or a “job guarantee”. The sponsor licence fee and certificate costs are the employer's to pay, and it is unlawful to pass certain sponsorship costs on to the worker.
- A job advert with a salary well below £41,700 that promises Skilled Worker sponsorship, with no explanation of which lower option applies.
- An “agent” who claims to have exclusive access to sponsoring employers, or a list you have to buy. The register is free.
- An employer name you cannot find on the register at all, where nobody will tell you the exact legal entity that would sponsor you.
- Pressure to accept quickly, or to sign something before you have seen a written offer naming the sponsoring entity and the salary.
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