What the UK licensed sponsor register looks like in numbers (126,661 organisations)

Jobs By Country — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:13:46 +0000

If you want a skilled job in the UK as a foreigner, the first thing people tell you is to check the Home Office register of licensed sponsors. It is a public file with one row for every organisation that is allowed to sponsor workers. Nobody tells you what is in it, so we loaded the 9 October 2026 version into a database and counted.

JobsByCountry is a job board, and we use the register to mark employers that hold a licence. This post is what we found while doing that. The tables are on our site as a page and as CSV files, linked at the end.

The headline numbers

The register has 143,206 entries for 126,661 organisations. An organisation gets one entry for each visa route it is licensed for.
121,369 organisations (95.8%) can sponsor Skilled Worker visas. The second largest route, Global Business Mobility for senior or specialist workers, has 10,309.
12,931 organisations (10.2%) are licensed for more than one route.
Only 93 organisations have a B rating. A B rating means the organisation has to improve and cannot issue new certificates until it does. Everything else is A.

Where the sponsors are

London has 36,438 organisations, which is 28.8% of the whole register. After that the list drops quickly: Birmingham 3,071, Manchester 2,861, Leicester 1,408, Glasgow 1,364, Bristol 1,286, Edinburgh 1,165, Leeds 1,077, Nottingham 1,043 and Ilford 918. The ten largest towns together hold 40.0% of the register.

One caution about this part. The town is whatever the organisation typed in its application. We only merged spellings that differ in upper and lower case, so some London boroughs, such as Harrow or Ilford, show up under their own names and not under London. The real concentration around London is higher than the 28.8% shown.

There is no sector in the register

We wanted to say which industries sponsor the most. The file does not allow it, because it has no sector field. What we did instead was count organisation names that contain a word. It is only a hint of what an organisation does, but the differences are interesting:

names containing "care": 5,049 organisations (4.0%)
health, medical, nursing, dental, clinic or hospital: 3,824 (3.0%)
software, digital, technology, data or systems: 3,330 (2.6%)
school, academy, college, university or nursery: 2,217 (1.8%)
restaurant, kitchen, cafe, takeaway, grill, pizza or curry: 1,978 (1.6%)
construction, engineering or building: 1,925 (1.5%)

Do not read these as sector shares. A company called "Data Kitchen Ltd" appears in two of these lines, and most organisations match none of the words.

What a licence does not tell you

Being on the register means the Home Office licensed the organisation to sponsor workers. It does not mean the organisation has a vacancy, and it does not mean it will sponsor you for a particular job. For that you still need the job description or a written answer from the employer.

This is why on JobsByCountry we keep two things apart. A job is marked as mentioning sponsorship only when the job text says so. Separately, an employer is marked as licensed only when its name matches the register exactly. We do not merge them into one "sponsors visas" badge.

Data

The numbers above and the two CSV files (by route and by town, with the register date in every row) are here:

https://jobsbycountry.com/uk/sponsor-register-data

You can use them freely. If you publish them, a link to that page is all we ask. The original register is published by the Home Office on GOV.UK, and it changes often, so check the date before relying on a figure.