122,000 UK companies hold a Skilled Worker licence. Between them they made about 87,000 sponsored hires last year. Most licensed sponsors sponsor nobody — so the list everyone downloads is mostly empty.
Everyone downloads the sponsor register, sees a hundred thousand companies, and starts mass-applying. Put the register next to the visa grants that were actually made and the arithmetic is blunt.
121,929
organisations licensed to sponsor Skilled Workers
÷
86,750
new sponsored hires in 2025, from overseas and from inside the UK
=
0.71
sponsored hires per licensed sponsor, per year
And that is the mean. A few hundred NHS trusts, consultancies and banks sponsor dozens each, so the median licensed sponsor sponsors nobody at all in a given year. The register tells you who may sponsor. It never tells you who does.
Sponsored work visas granted from overseasrolling 12 months · Skilled Worker + Health & Care
Home Office Occ_D02, year ending June 2026. Dashed lines mark the two rule changes that bracket the fall: the care-worker dependant ban and £38,700 threshold (Mar–Apr 2024), and the RQF 6 skill floor, £41,700 threshold and end of overseas care recruitment (22 July 2025).
Two ways into a sponsored jobnew Skilled Worker & Health and Care sponsorships
Applied from overseasSwitched from inside the UK
Overseas from Occ_D02; in-country from Exe_D02, counting only main applicants whose previous leave was not already a work route — genuinely new sponsorships, not renewals. In 2021 the overseas channel was 4.8× the in-country one. In 2025 it was 1.1×. Switches from the Graduate route alone went from 187 in 2021 to 29,219 in 2025.
IT professionals sponsored from overseasSOC 213 · bars = grants · label = share of all sponsored work
2026 covers Q1–Q2 only. IT is now the single largest sponsored occupation entering the UK for the first time — not because tech hiring grew, but because care work collapsed around it (SOC 613: 107,847 grants in 2023, 3,167 in 2025).
Industry
2023
YE Q2 2026
change
Human health & social work
141,353
7,167
−95%
Professional, scientific & technical
11,481
5,338
−54%
Information & communications
7,924
3,659
−54%
Financial & insurance
7,464
5,934
−20%
Accommodation & food service
8,851
541
−94%
Education
5,815
1,747
−70%
Finance is the most resilient large sector in the data — it fell by a fifth while everything around it halved.
Register of licensed sponsors: workers
Search the register
Every licensed sponsor, grouped so an employer appears once with all its routes. The map and the table are one query — filter once and both update. Routes an outside applicant cannot apply to are marked: intra-company transfers move an employer's existing overseas staff and are not open jobs.
located to the organisationtown centre only
Loading the register…
Employer
Location
Routes & rating
“Near me” uses your browser's location and never leaves your device — nothing is sent anywhere. If you'd rather not share it, type a postcode instead and the same distance search runs from there.
daily snapshot diff
Licensed this week
There is no official archive of the register — the download URL changes on every publish and nobody keeps the history. This project takes its own daily snapshot and diffs it. A company that has just paid for a licence is a company that intends to use it, which makes this the highest-signal list in the whole dataset.
read this before trusting anything here
What this data cannot tell you
No per-sponsor volumes exist. The certificate-of-sponsorship datasets were discontinued after year-ending December 2024 and were only ever aggregate. Nobody publishes how many people a named company sponsored, so any product showing a per-company count is guessing.
A licence says capability, not intent. A company can hold one for years and never use it.
The register carries no company number — only name and town — so matching it to Companies House is inherently fuzzy.
A pin is not an office door. Coordinates come from geocoding the organisation's name and town, so a blue pin is a best guess at the organisation, accurate to roughly a postcode district; an amber one is only the centre of the town. The postcode shown beside a result is the Companies House registered office, which is separate data and can sit somewhere else entirely — plenty of firms are registered at an accountant's address.
Removed is not revoked
When a sponsor disappears from the register it can mean a voluntary surrender, an expiry, a merger, or simply a rename. The Home Office publishes no revocations list for the worker routes — only aggregate counts of action taken against sponsors.
So departures are labelled removed from register here, and nowhere is a revocation implied. Stating otherwise about a named company would be defamatory if wrong.