Which UK visa sponsors are hiring now? The Home Office register, joined to live jobs

Most live UK jobs are at a licensed visa sponsor, and most of those jobs could not be sponsored. On 3 October 2026, 35,867 of the 55,895 open UK postings in JobShifu's crawl, 64.2%, sat at an employer on the Home Office register of licensed sponsors. But among sponsor postings that state pay, only 28.0% start at £41,700 or more, the general salary floor for a Skilled Worker visa [2]. A licence tells you an employer can sponsor. It does not tell you the role you want qualifies.

The register is public and updated several times a week, and it is the list every "UK visa sponsor companies" page republishes [1]. It answers who can sponsor. It does not answer who is hiring, or for what. So JobShifu, which crawls employer career boards directly, joined the 2 October 2026 edition of the register to every UK posting that was open the next day. This post is published by JobShifu, and the method is at the bottom.

Two in three open UK jobs are at a licensed sponsor

The register lists 127,606 organisations. Of the 2,984 employers with at least one open UK posting in the crawl, 1,125 (37.7%) match an organisation on it, and they hold 35,867 open postings, 64.2% of the total. 9,170 of those were first seen in the previous seven days. 71 matched sponsors had 100 or more open UK postings; the median matched sponsor had 5.

That is a much higher share than the US equivalent. JobShifu's H-1B join found about one in four open US postings at an employer with an H-1B approval record. The UK register is a licence list, not a record of visas granted, and large UK employers hold licences routinely, so the share is high by construction.

Who has the most open roles

Open postings on the employers' own boards on 3 October 2026, matched to the register edition of 2 October. Large employers' counts are floors: the crawl keeps a rolling window per board. One sponsor with 588 open postings and none new in seven days is left out of the table, because a board that stops adding roles is more likely stale than hiring.

The top of the list is retail, childcare and post, with two engineering consultancies, a bank and two healthcare chains. Where they publish pay, most of it is below the Skilled Worker floor: 17 of Bright Horizons' 843 pay-stating postings, and 19 of Royal Mail's 695. The two healthcare chains are the exception, with 39% of Circle Health's pay-stating postings and 32% of Specsavers' at £41,700 or more.

A licence is not a sponsorable job

Since 22 July 2025, most new Skilled Worker sponsorship needs a job at RQF level 6, roughly degree level [3], paying at least £41,700 a year or the going rate for the occupation, whichever is higher [2]. There are exceptions: lower rates for new entrants, and occupations on the Immigration Salary List or the Temporary Shortage List, which runs to the end of 2026 [3].

The live postings show how much that narrows the field. Of the 13,565 open sponsor postings that state a pay figure, 3,799 (28.0%) start at £41,700 or more, and 4,852 (35.8%) reach it at the top of the range. At employers that are not on the register, the share is higher: 42.3% start at or above the floor. Sponsors post a lot of shop-floor, warehouse and care work, and those roles tend to carry pay in the ad more often than professional ones, which likely pulls the share down.

The category picture says the same thing from the other side. 92.8% of open food and hospitality postings are at a licensed sponsor, and 74.1% of logistics and warehouse postings, because the big chains hold licences. Software engineering, the role most people searching for sponsorship have in mind, sits at 57.5%, and data and analytics at 52.3%.

Where to start if you need UK sponsorship

1. Start from the register, then filter by the job. The register is the right first cut, and it is free. The second cut is the role: degree-level, and paid at or above £41,700 or the going rate. Most postings at most sponsors fail the second cut.
2. Weight the list by role, not by volume. The sponsors with the most open postings are mostly hiring for store, nursery and delivery roles. The degree-level roles you need are a small part of their boards, so filter the register's employers by your role before you rank them by size.
3. Ask per role, early. A licence is held by the employer. Whether this role will be sponsored is a decision made per vacancy. The posting, or the recruiter, answers that.
4. Check the posting is still open before you spend an evening on the application. The free checker looks the link up on the employer's own board.

Common questions

How do I find companies that sponsor UK work visas?

The Home Office publishes the register of licensed sponsors on GOV.UK as a CSV, updated several times a week. It lists every organisation licensed to sponsor workers, with its town, rating and the routes it can sponsor. It tells you who can sponsor, not who is hiring or for which roles.

Does a licensed sponsor sponsor every job it advertises?

No. A licence is held by the employer, and each sponsored role still has to meet the route's rules. For a Skilled Worker visa that is usually a degree-level occupation paid at least £41,700 or the going rate. On 3 October 2026, only 28.0% of open sponsor postings that stated pay started at that figure.

What salary do you need for a UK Skilled Worker visa?

GOV.UK sets the usual floor at the higher of £41,700 a year or the going rate for the occupation. Lower rates apply in some cases, for example to new entrants and to roles on the Immigration Salary List. Since 22 July 2025, most new sponsorship also needs a job at RQF level 6, roughly degree level.

Which UK jobs are most likely to be at a visa sponsor?

By share, food and hospitality (92.8% of open postings at a licensed sponsor), nursing and allied health (76.1%) and logistics and warehouse (74.1%). Those are also the categories least likely to meet the Skilled Worker skill and salary rules. Software engineering sits at 57.5%.

Method

• Register. The Home Office register of licensed sponsors: workers, edition of 2 October 2026, downloaded from GOV.UK on 3 October 2026: 143,138 rows, one per organisation and route, covering 127,606 organisations [1]. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Postings. Open postings located in the UK on employer career boards JobShifu crawls, on 3 October 2026: 55,895 postings from 2,984 employers.
• Matching. Employer names were normalized (case, punctuation, "&" as "and", and trailing legal or place words such as Ltd, plc, LLP, Group, Holdings, UK and International removed; "trading as" names dropped) and matched exactly. 27 brands whose register entry is a different legal name (for example Next, registered as Next Retail Ltd, and Sainsbury's, as J Sainsbury Plc) were matched by hand-checked alias; they account for 8,998 of the 35,867 matched postings. Three single-word matches that turned out to be different companies were removed. A posting-weighted random sample of 48 matched employers and a uniform sample of 40 were read by hand, with no false matches found.
• Pay. JobShifu's pay extractor, annualized, for postings stating pay in pounds. 18,486 of the 55,895 open postings state pay, so the threshold comparison covers that subset.
• Categories. JobShifu's job-category tagger; 37.8% of open UK postings are not yet tagged and are left out of the category figures.
• Limits. The crawl reaches employers that post on boards it covers, so most of the register's small employers are not in it. Name matching can miss a sponsor registered under an unrelated name, which would understate the share. A licence says nothing about a specific role.
• Dataset. Published under CC BY 4.0 as uk-sponsors-hiring-2026-10-03.json: totals, category shares, the pay comparison, the alias list, and per-employer open counts. Cite as: JobShifu, UK licensed visa sponsors with live job postings, October 2026, with a link to this post. No posting text is republished.

Sources

1. UK Home Office, Register of licensed sponsors: workers, edition of October 2, 2026; downloaded October 3, 2026.
2. GOV.UK, Skilled Worker visa: your job; consulted October 3, 2026.
3. UK Home Office, Explanatory memorandum to the statement of changes to the Immigration Rules: HC 997, 1 July 2025; consulted October 3, 2026.