Ravdeep Roewal
Key takeaways
The Home Office took away 1,948 sponsor licences between July 2024 and June 2025. The twelve months before that? 937. Add a £41,700 minimum salary and a skill bar that now sits at degree level, and sponsoring someone from abroad has turned into a much bigger job than it used to be.
So if you were planning to bring overseas staff for UK businesses into the country this year, it’s worth stopping for a minute. A lot of UK firms have gone the other way and started employing staff overseas, in the country they already live in. An offshore virtual bookkeeper or remote business administrator working from India doesn’t need a UK visa at all.
I’ll go through both options below: what the visa route costs in 2026, what a UK company employing staff overseas has to get right, and where I think each one fits.
Why is hiring overseas staff harder in 2026?
A few things changed at once. Fewer jobs qualify. The pay floor went up. And the Home Office has got a lot stricter with businesses that hold a licence. These four numbers sum it up:
Home Office
1,948sponsor licences revoked July 2024 to June 2025, roughly double the year before
GOV.UK
£41,700the lowest yearly salary you can usually pay a Skilled Worker
CIPD
111job types that stopped qualifying for the visa in July 2025
NatWest Mentor
£6,167what a medium or large firm pays the Home Office to sponsor one person for three years
It’s also worth being clear what “overseas staff” means here, because people use the phrase for two quite different set-ups.
- Sponsoring them here. They move to the UK on a Skilled Worker visa and go on your payroll like anyone else on the team. You hold the licence, and the Home Office expects to hear from you whenever something changes.
- Employing them where they live. Think of a bookkeeper in Mohali who logs into your Xero at 9am UK time. She never comes to the UK, so there’s no visa. Her contract sits under Indian law.
Either way it’s overseas employment. The difference is who ends up holding the costs and the admin.
What does sponsoring a Skilled Worker cost?
Fees went up again on 8 April 2026. This is what you’re looking at now, based on NatWest Mentor’s 2026 breakdown and Davidson Morris.
| Cost | Who pays | Small or charitable sponsor | Medium or large sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsor licence (one-off) | Employer | £611 | £1,682 |
| Certificate of Sponsorship | Employer | £525 per worker | £525 per worker |
| Immigration Skills Charge | Employer | £480 per year | £1,320 per year |
| Visa application (outside UK, up to 3 years) | Usually worker | £819 | £819 |
| Immigration Health Surcharge | Usually worker | £1,035 per year | £1,035 per year |
Say you’re a small business sponsoring one person for three years. You pay £2,576 before they’ve started, mostly because all three years of the skills charge are due upfront. For a medium or large business it’s £6,167. And you can’t claw any of that back out of their wages; the rules don’t allow it.
The worker has their own bill of £3,924 for the visa and the NHS surcharge. In practice a lot of employers pick that up as well. Not many people will move country and pay four grand for the pleasure.
Then there’s the salary itself. At £41,700, employer National Insurance (15% on anything above £5,000) comes to £5,505. A small firm is looking at about £49,800 in the first year, and a larger one goes over £53,000. That’s before pension, recruiter fees, or any help with the move.
If it’s a specialist engineer you can’t find here, that might be money well spent. A credit controller is a much harder sell.
Which roles still qualify for sponsorship?
Not as many as you’d hope. On 22 July 2025 the visa moved up to degree level (RQF 6 in the jargon) and the salary threshold went from £38,700 to £41,700. The CIPD counted 111 job types that fell out because of it.
Some mid-level jobs are hanging on via the Temporary Shortage List, but there are strings attached. People on it can’t bring family with them, and there are no discounts. It’s also due to end with 2026, unless the Migration Advisory Committee says otherwise.
A lot of the jobs smaller firms find hardest to fill are below that line. Things like:
- 1general office admin
- 2 data entry
- 3customer service or live chat
- 4bookkeeping
- 5booking sales appointments
You can check your exact job code on the GOV.UK eligible occupations list before you budget for anything. Most of the ones above won’t be there.
The bit people forget about
Getting a licence is the easy part. Keeping it is where the work is. You’ll be doing right-to-work checks, keeping records the Home Office can ask for with little notice, and reporting things like a pay change or a long absence. Get it wrong and the licence can go. If it does, the people you sponsor can lose their right to stay, and that’s a rotten thing to happen to someone who’s done nothing wrong.
How does employing staff overseas work?
If the job can be done on a laptop, the visa question goes away. One thing doesn’t: someone still has to employ the person properly in their own country. A UK company employing staff overseas normally does it in one of these four ways.
| Structure | Legal employer | Main risk | Usually suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your own local entity | You, through a subsidiary | Cost and admin; Pebl puts the minimum initial investment for an Indian entity at £20,000 | Firms planning a large team in one country |
| Employer of Record | The EOR provider | Finding, managing, and keeping good people is still on you | Single hires spread across countries |
| Independent contractor | Nobody; they invoice you | Misclassification if you control hours and methods like an employer | Short, defined projects |
| Managed offshore staffing partner | The partner | Choosing a weak partner | Ongoing roles where you also want recruitment, office space, and IT handled |
Opening your own company in India only makes sense once you’re hiring in bigger numbers. For one or two people, an EOR or a staffing partner is far less hassle.
What does a UK company employing staff overseas need to get right?
Most of the risk sits in six places.
| Check | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Local employment law | In India the employer pays 12% of base salary into the Employees’ Provident Fund, and the employee pays the same. Lower earners also get state insurance, with the employer paying 4.75%. Notice periods depend on the state. |
| Contractor status | You set their hours, they use your systems, and there’s no end date? That’s an employee, whatever the paperwork says. |
| Permanent establishment | If someone there signs deals for you, or you run an office there, you could end up owing tax locally. Worth asking a tax adviser. |
| Data transfers | Letting staff abroad see UK customer data counts as a restricted transfer under UK GDPR. The usual fix is the ICO’s IDTA or the UK Addendum. |
| UK tax | Someone who isn’t UK resident and works wholly outside the UK generally isn’t caught by PAYE. Have your accountant confirm it first. |
| Written terms | Put in writing who employs them and who owns their work. Notice periods too. |
Should you sponsor them here or employ them there?
| Factor | Sponsor them in the UK | Employ them where they live |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront Home Office cost | £2,576 to £6,167 per three-year hire | None |
| Salary floor | £41,700 or the going rate | Local market rate |
| Eligible roles | Mostly graduate level | Any role that can be done remotely |
| Time to start | Most licence decisions take under eight weeks, then the visa | About four weeks through Aspire Offshore |
| Ongoing compliance | Home Office sponsor duties plus UK employment law | Local law, handled by the legal employer |
| Best fit | On-site, regulated, or senior specialist roles | Finance, admin, support, and digital roles |
There isn’t one right answer. If you need a senior engineer in the building every day, sponsor them. But a remote finance assistant who spends all day in Xero can do that from Chandigarh as easily as from Birmingham.
Quick check
Can the job be done remotely? Is it below degree level, or paid under £41,700? If the answer to both is yes, employing them where they live is likely the better route.
Which roles suit overseas employment?
The test I use is simple enough. Does the work follow clear steps, and can someone in the UK check it? If so, it tends to work well from abroad. These are the roles where we’ve seen it go best for UK clients.
| Role | What they do | What stays in the UK |
|---|---|---|
| Offshore virtual bookkeeper | Codes transactions, reconciles bank feeds, and gets VAT workings ready in Xero, QuickBooks, or Sage | Signing off and filing the VAT return |
| Offshore credit controller | Chases late invoices, matches up payments, and reports on who owes what | Settlements, write-offs, and legal action |
| Finance assistant or accounts receivable assistant | Sends invoices, checks supplier statements, and sets up payment runs | Approving and releasing payments |
| Business administrator or executive assistant | Looks after diaries, inboxes, documents, and travel | Decisions and client meetings |
| HR administrator | Onboarding paperwork, staff records, absence tracking | Hiring calls and disciplinaries |
| Data entry specialist or CRM administrator | Keeps your records and CRM tidy and up to date | How the data gets used |
| Customer service agent or live chat agent | Answers email and chat during UK hours | Complaints above an agreed limit |
| Appointment setter or lead generation specialist | Finds prospects and books meetings in for your sales team | The sales conversation |
| SEO specialist or content writer | Keyword research, on-page fixes, first drafts | Brand sign-off and budget |
| On-site or senior UK specialist | Not a fit for overseas | Sponsor if you can’t hire locally |
Hardly any of these would pass the degree-level test for a visa anyway. All of them can be done from a desk in India.
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Is employing staff overseas the answer?
For most office jobs, I think so. There are still times when sponsoring is the better call, though:
- 1the work can only be done in person, say in a lab, on a site, or in a clinic
- 2they’ll be seeing clients face to face most weeks
- 3it’s a senior role you’d be paying well above £41,700 for anyway
- 4you want them here for years, maybe running the place one day
If two of those fit, the visa fees are a small part of the overall cost. If none fit, you’d be paying for a visa the job doesn’t need.
Summary
Sponsorship is still there, but it now suits a fairly small group: well-paid, degree-level people you need in the UK, at a business that’s ready to keep on top of sponsor duties for years. Most finance, admin, and support jobs don’t look like that. For those, employing staff overseas where they already live gets someone started sooner and costs less, as long as you’re clear on who the employer is and your data is protected. If you’d like to hire overseas staff this way, book a consultation and we can talk it through.