UK Sponsor Licence Register 2026: Status Codes, Data Fields, and Building a Verification Workflow

When a candidate asks your HR team "are you actually licensed to sponsor me?", the right answer isn't "we'll check with legal." It should be something your compliance systems can answer in seconds. Here's a complete reference for reading the UK Register of Licensed Sponsors and building verification into your hiring workflow.

What the Register Contains

The Home Office publishes the Register of Licensed Sponsors as a downloadable CSV at gov.uk. The file is updated on every working day and contains every organisation currently holding an active licence. There's no pagination to navigate — it's a flat file you can pull, parse, and index.

Key fields in the CSV:

Field	What It Means
Organisation Name	Legal entity name, not necessarily trading name
Town/City	Registered office location
County	County of registered address
Type of Sponsor	Worker, Student, or both
Route	Specific routes the licence covers (Skilled Worker, Intra-Company, etc.)
Rating	A-rated or B-rated (see below)

Licence Ratings: A vs B

This is the field most compliance tools overlook.

A-rated sponsors are fully compliant. They can issue Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS) freely for any role that meets the standard eligibility criteria.

B-rated sponsors have had compliance concerns identified. They're still licensed, but they're operating under a specific action plan agreed with the Home Office. Critically, B-rated sponsors cannot sponsor new workers until they return to A-rating or receive specific permission. If your hiring system only checks for presence in the register without checking rating, you may generate a CoS you cannot legally issue.

A licence can move between A and B rating — and ratings are reflected in the daily CSV update, so a polling-based sync will catch these changes.

When Absence Means Denial

A company not appearing in the register holds no active licence. The Home Office doesn't publish a list of revoked or expired licences, so absence is definitive: the company cannot currently sponsor visas.

Common reasons a previously-listed company disappears:

• Licence voluntarily surrendered
• Licence revoked by the Home Office following non-compliance
• Licence expired (rare — licences are typically indefinite once granted, but can lapse if renewal requirements aren't met)
• Corporate restructuring — the legal entity changed

If you're building a system that tracks sponsoring employers over time, capturing licence presence by date lets you detect when an employer leaves the register and trigger compliance alerts.

Building a Verification Workflow

A production-grade sponsor verification check should include:

1. Entity name normalisation
The register uses exact legal entity names. "NHS Foundation Trust" and "NHS Trust" can refer to different entities. Fuzzy matching on company names against Companies House data is the most reliable approach. Match on company registration number where possible.

2. Presence check
Is the organisation in the register at all? Boolean. Log with timestamp.

3. Route validation
Does the licence cover the specific route needed? A company licensed only for Intra-Company Transfers cannot issue a standard Skilled Worker CoS. Validate the requested route against the Route field.

4. Rating check
Is the sponsor A-rated or B-rated? If B-rated, your workflow should pause and escalate rather than auto-proceed.

5. Freshness
How old is your local copy? The Home Office updates the register daily. If your cached data is more than 24 hours old at the time of check, re-fetch before making a decision.

6. Periodic re-checks
For active sponsored employees, re-check their employer's licence status at a cadence matching your compliance obligations (typically monthly). If a licence is revoked, the 60-day countdown for the sponsored worker begins immediately — your HR system should fire an alert the same day.

Where This Fits in the Hiring Pipeline

Sponsor verification should fire at two points:

At offer stage: Confirm the hiring entity holds the correct licence type and rating before extending a conditional offer to a candidate who will need sponsorship. This avoids offers that can't legally be fulfilled.

At CoS generation: Re-validate immediately before generating a Certificate of Sponsorship. Don't rely on the offer-stage check being recent enough.

Tools like ImmigrationGPT surface sponsor register data in plain English, which is useful for candidates doing their own verification — but for internal HR systems, direct register integration gives you the auditability and freshness control you need.

Edge Cases Worth Handling

• Large employer groups: Umbrella organisations with multiple sub-entities may have licences across several legal entities. A candidate's offer letter may reference a trading name that differs from the licensed entity. Build in an entity lookup step.
• Healthcare and education: Many NHS trusts, universities, and schools hold Worker licences. These sectors also have higher-than-average incidence of B-rating due to compliance complexity at scale.
• Sponsor licence pending: Some employers will say they're "in the process of applying." Licence applications take a minimum of eight weeks. Your system should not assume a pending application will be granted, and should not generate any CoS on its basis.

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This post is for informational and technical reference purposes only. UK immigration rules are subject to change. For compliance decisions, consult a qualified immigration adviser or solicitor registered with the OISC.