Vignettes are gone, the record you still have to keep isn't

The Home Office published version 08/26 of Appendix D on 3 August 2026, and the headline is that vignettes have stopped. Since 1 July 2026, nobody granted entry clearance receives a sticker in their passport. What the update does not do is remove the one Appendix D record that has always been physical: the sponsored worker’s date of entry to the UK, evidenced by a wet-ink stamp from an immigration officer.

That gap is where sponsors will get caught. Every other part of the process has moved online, so it is a reasonable assumption that this part did too. It didn’t. Here is what changed on 3 August, what stayed exactly as it was, and the four things to check in your onboarding before your next overseas arrival.

What Appendix D 08/26 actually changed

Appendix D is the part of the sponsor guidance that lists the documents you have to keep for every worker you sponsor. Version 08/26 replaced version 05/26, published on 20 May 2026, and the Home Office’s own change note lists three things.

Section 1.2 was updated to reflect that vignettes stopped being issued to all applicants granted entry clearance from 1 July 2026. Before that date, some successful applicants still received a physical sticker.

The ‘form for affixing a visa’ has been replaced by the ‘form for accompanying an eVisa’. This one is easy to miss because it affects a small group. Where an applicant does not hold a Home Office accepted passport or identity document, they cannot be given a sticker, so the Home Office issues a separate form instead. Until 1 July 2026 that form carried a vignette. Now it doesn’t, and it has a new name.

Section 5, paragraph (a) was tidied to reflect that Biometric Residence Permits (BRPs) are no longer issued or valid. BRPs stopped being issued and all of them expired on 31 December 2024, so this is housekeeping rather than news. One detail is worth holding onto: a copy of a BRP is still acceptable evidence of a worker’s National Insurance number, provided the card was valid at the time you took the copy.

What did not change, and why that’s the story

Your record-keeping duties are identical to what they were on 2 August. The documents you have to keep, and how long you have to keep them, have not moved.

Which means the date of entry check is still there, in full.

You have to make that check where two things are both true: the worker’s current permission comes from a grant of entry clearance, and you sponsored that entry clearance application. You are checking that they entered the UK during the validity period of their visa. If they arrived before the “valid from” date, they do not have permission to work for you, and the guidance is direct about the fix: they need to leave the Common Travel Area (the UK, Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man, and Ireland) and re-enter once the visa is valid.

You do not need to run this check for someone extending their permission or switching route inside the UK. It applies to arrivals.

The share code check does not cover this

This is the single most common misreading, and the guidance is unambiguous about it. When you carry out an online right to work check, the date the service says the worker has the right to work from is the date their visa is valid from. It is not the date they arrived.

So a completed share-code check leaves you with the first half of the date of entry check and none of the second half. You still have to establish, and record, when the person actually entered the country.

Where the entry stamp lives now

For a worker with an eVisa and nothing else, the entry stamp will normally be on a blank page of their passport or travel document. You must make and keep a copy of that page.

That is the change in practice. It used to be that the stamp was endorsed on the vignette, so the page you copied was obvious: the one with the sticker on it. Now you are looking for an inked stamp on an otherwise empty page, and if your onboarding checklist says “copy the visa page”, it is pointing at a page that no longer exists.

Two variations to know about.

If the worker was granted entry clearance earlier in the transition, they may still hold a vignette sticker alongside their eVisa. In that case the stamp will usually be on the vignette, and you copy that page as before.

If the worker didn’t hold an accepted passport when they applied, they will be carrying one of the two forms. A ‘form for affixing a visa’ with a vignette on it if their application was granted before 1 July 2026, or a ‘form for accompanying an eVisa’ with no vignette if it was granted on or after that date. Either way the stamp goes on the form, and you copy the part of the form that carries it.

When there is no stamp at all

Plenty of arrivals will not have one. The guidance lists the cases: entering from another part of the Common Travel Area, entering through eGates, EU, EEA, or Swiss nationals with a biometric passport who applied for entry clearance before 15 July 2025 using the UK Immigration: ID Check app, and offshore workers who arrive in UK waters without landing.

Offshore workers have their own reporting duty under the Immigration (Offshore Worker Notification and Exemption from Control (Amendment)) Regulations 2023, so check the offshore guidance separately.

For everyone else with no stamp, you ask the worker for evidence of travel, a boarding pass or a ticket, in paper or digital form. You then make a record of the date they entered. You do not have to keep the boarding pass itself, but you do have to keep the record of the date.

What this costs you if you get it wrong

There is no fine attached to Appendix D. It doesn’t work that way. A missing Appendix D document is a record-keeping failure, and record-keeping failures are what a Home Office compliance officer is there to find. They are a route to suspension and, at the wrong end, revocation of your sponsor licence.

The civil penalties you have seen quoted, £45,000 per worker for a first breach and £60,000 for a repeat, sit under illegal working legislation and are a separate matter. Don’t let anyone conflate the two when they are explaining this internally. The risk here is your licence, not a penalty notice.

Four things to check this week

Your onboarding checklist doesn’t mention a vignette. If it tells anyone to wait for a sticker, or to copy the visa page, it is describing a document that will not arrive.

Whoever runs onboarding knows where the stamp is. A blank passport page with a wet-ink stamp on it looks like nothing. It is the evidence.

Your team can recognise a ‘form for accompanying an eVisa’. Most HR teams have never seen one. It is rare, and it is exactly the case that gets filed wrong.

Date of entry is a separate field in your records, not a by-product of the right to work check. If your file has a share code result and no arrival date, the record is incomplete.

If you sponsor workers under 16, where this is permitted, there is one more. They are outside the statutory right to work check regime and the online service does not cover them, so you ask to see their live eVisa and keep a screenshot.

Our Home Office Audit Checklist walks through the records a compliance officer asks for and what counts as evidence for each one. If it is the right to work side you want to tighten first, start with the Right to Work Check Checklist.

Where Borderless fits

Borderless Immigration keeps every sponsored worker’s records in one place, with the Appendix D documents prompted, dated, and stored against the right person rather than sitting in a shared drive nobody has opened since the last audit. When guidance changes, the checklist changes with it.

If you want to know whether your current records would survive a compliance visit, book a 20-minute review and we will tell you plainly where the gaps are. There’s just too much at stake to find out from a compliance officer.

Source: Home Office, Workers and Temporary Workers: guidance for sponsors, Appendix D: record-keeping duties, version 08/26, valid from 3 August 2026.