A UK employer sponsoring a £38,000 hire from overseas is £4,500 a year under the legal floor — and has already spent £4,485 by the time anyone checks. That is the ordinary shape of a failed Skilled Worker sponsorship in 2026.
Here is the order things happen in. You hold a sponsor licence, pick a candidate, agree a salary and assign a Certificate of Sponsorship. Assigning it costs £525, and the Immigration Skills Charge falls due in the same moment: £1,320 a year for a medium or large sponsor, £480 a year for a small or charitable one. Sponsor for three years at the large-sponsor rate and that is £3,960 of skills charge on top of the £525 certificate — £4,485 gone from the company before a Home Office caseworker has read a single line of the job offer. The salary test happens afterwards.
The salary test is where people get it wrong: there are two floors and the job must clear both. The first is the general threshold: £41,700 a year since 22 July 2025, or £33,400 on the reduced route for the immigration salary list and new entrants. The second is the going rate for the occupation code, pro-rated to the hours actually worked, counting at most 48 hours a week. Take a £42,500 going rate at 37.5 hours: the floor for that job is £42,500, not £41,700, and a £38,000 offer is £4,500 short.
Part-time is the trap that costs the most. Drop the same job to 20 hours a week and the going rate pro-rates down to about £22,667 — but the general threshold does not pro-rate at all. The floor stays at £41,700. A part-time offer at £24,000 is not a little short; it is £17,700 short, and the role cannot be sponsored at those hours. Then there is the other side of the bill, the part the candidate sees. The visa application fee is £819 from outside the UK for up to three years and £1,618 for more than three, or £943 and £1,865 when switching or extending inside the UK. The Immigration Health Surcharge is £1,035 a year. Three years from overseas is £3,924 on the applicant side, so the whole hire comes to £8,409 — a number that belongs in the budget before the offer letter goes out.
None of this is secret, but it is scattered. GOV.UK's own Skilled Worker cost page lists the visa fee and the health surcharge and never mentions the £525 certificate or the skills charge; those sit on the employer pages, and the salary rules on a third. No free page pro-rates your going rate to your hours — the one step that decides whether the certificate you are about to pay for is usable.
The Skilled Worker Sponsor Cost Gate is a browser extension and a free web page that run the same calculation. Enter the salary, the paid hours, the going rate, your salary route, your sponsor size, the length of sponsorship, where the worker applies from, and the date you must act by. It returns the minimum this job may be paid, the gap, the skills charge, what leaves the company at assignment, the applicant-side total, the all-in figure, and the date the same bill falls due again — free, with no key and no locked answer.
The full version changes a different thing, not the answer: it exports every line to a .csv for the hiring budget or the compliance file, and it schedules reminders 30, 14 and 1 days before the date you entered. Immigration advisers publish fixed fees of roughly £2,000 to £5,000 for a sponsor licence application; per-hire advice is billed on top. Checking the floor before you assign the certificate takes a minute.
Figures checked 19 September 2026 against GOV.UK: Skilled Worker visa (your job; how much it costs), certificates of sponsorship, immigration skills charge.
Free in your browser (the same rules): https://getreadystack.com/tools/skilled-worker-sponsor-cost-gate
Licence ($60, once, 7-day refund): https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_GqTI0aPIPAdJ2gHJ6ymS3Konk8VT92j6AxhkJ2xMvgD
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