A standard change of circumstances request on your sponsor licence can take up to 18 weeks. The post licence priority service brings that down to 5 working days for £350 a request, and for most sponsors it is the only lever available when a pending Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) allocation, a departed authorising officer, or a Level 1 User account that does not exist yet is holding up a hire.
It is also a queue, with a daily capacity limit, a shorter working day than yours, and a payment deadline that runs through the weekend. Borderless Immigration has set out below what the service covers, who qualifies, and the four preparation failures that end a request before a caseworker ever opens it.
Reporting a change and getting it processed are two different clocks
You must report significant changes in your own circumstances to UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) within 20 working days. Submitting the request through the sponsorship management system (SMS) is what discharges that duty, so a request sitting in the Home Office queue is not in itself a compliance failure.
What it is, is a change that has not taken effect yet. Until the request is decided, the allocation you asked for is not yours to assign, the authorising officer who left in June is still the person your licence says answers for the organisation, and your new Level 1 User cannot get into the SMS. That is the cost the priority service buys down, and it is an operational cost rather than a compliance one. Keeping the two apart matters, because sponsors who think a pending request is a breach tend to pay for priority on things that could have waited, and miss the ones that are genuinely blocking work.
What the post licence priority service actually is
Its formal name is the Worker and Temporary Worker priority change of circumstance service. Sponsors call it the post licence priority service, after the Home Office mailbox that receives the requests.
It is not the sponsor licence priority service, which fast-tracks a new licence application before you hold a licence at all, costs £750, and works to a 10 working day timescale. If you already hold a licence and you are changing something on it, the post licence service is the one you want. The two get confused in both directions, and the fees are far enough apart to be worth getting right.
The fee is £350 for each request. The Home Office is explicit that the payment buys consideration, not approval, so an eligible and fully paid request can still be refused.
The ten requests it covers
The service is limited to a fixed list of change of circumstances request types:
- additional CoS allocation, in year
- annual CoS allocation, the follow-on request
- adding a new Level 1 User
- changing an existing Level 1 User's details
- replacing the authorising officer
- amending the authorising officer's details
- replacing the key contact
- amending the key contact's details
- appointing a representative
- amending your organisation details after a move to new premises
Anything outside that list goes through the standard SMS route at standard speed, however urgent it is for you.
What it will not cover
Three exclusions catch sponsors out, and the first is expensive. An additional allocation request must be for undefined CoS only. Requests for defined CoS are rejected and the fee is not refunded, so a single mislabelled request costs £350 and gets you nothing.
Student cases cannot be prioritised through this service. Neither can post-licence requests on the Global Business Mobility UK Expansion Worker, Service Supplier, or Secondment Worker routes.
Who is eligible
You need to be an A-rated, fully active Worker or Temporary Worker sponsor. A licence that has been downgraded to a B rating is out, which is one more reason the rating is worth protecting for its own sake rather than as a badge.
You also need to have submitted the request through the SMS first, and it must not yet be in progress or allocated to a caseworker. Priority is something you apply to a live request, not a different way of making one.
If the request is to replace the authorising officer or to appoint a representative, you need the submission sheet, electronically signed, attached to your priority request and sent to the sponsor change of circumstances mailbox. This is the most costly detail on this page: the submission sheet cannot be obtained once the SMS request has been closed, so if it was not printed at the time, the request is not eligible and there is no way to make it eligible.
Your key personnel are the part of the licence most likely to change without anyone treating it as an immigration event. Our Sponsor Licence Duties and Guidance for Authorising Officers checklist sets out what the role carries and what has to be reported when the person in it moves on.
Download the Authorising Officer duties checklist
How the queue actually works
The service is open from 7am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. Requests sent outside those hours are not considered, which means a request emailed at 5.30pm on a Thursday has not joined a queue, it has been discarded.
At least 120 priority requests are accepted each day. The Home Office publishes any change to that limit on the SMS message board rather than on GOV.UK, so the message board is the only place the current number appears. A day's allocation can fill, and once it has, eligibility makes no difference.
There are three stated reasons a request fails: it is ineligible, the daily limit has been reached, or it arrived outside operating hours. In none of those cases will you be told. The guidance is blunt about it: if you do not receive a response, assume your request has not been successful. Nothing arrives to prompt you, so somebody has to be watching for the absence.
The payment window is shorter than it looks
A successful request generates two emails. The first confirms acceptance and gives you instructions. The second carries a Worldpay payment link, and the guidance itself tells you to check your spam folder for it.
You then have 72 hours from that second email to pay, and those 72 hours include weekends. If payment does not arrive in time, the priority request expires and you start again from the beginning.
Run that against a normal working week. A link that lands at 4pm on a Friday and drops into the authorising officer's junk folder has expired by Monday afternoon, before anyone has looked at it. You lose the slot rather than the money at that point, because the payment never went through, but you also lose the week and you rejoin the queue at the back. The fix is a monitored inbox rather than a faster response.
When the five working days actually start
The 5 working day consideration period begins the working day after payment is made. Pay on a Monday and the clock starts on Tuesday, which puts the outcome around the following Tuesday rather than the Friday you might have counted on.
Where a submission sheet is required, the 5 working days run from the date UKVI receives it, not from the date you paid. Complex requests, or ones that need extra checks, can run beyond the window; the Home Office writes to the authorising officer when that happens.
The Home Office may also ask for further information inside the 5 days. If the answer does not come back in time the request can be rejected, again with no refund. The outcome, whatever it is, goes by email to the key personnel listed on the licence. If the delay is caused by something on their side, a technical fault for instance, a refund may be available.
Whether £350 a request is worth it
The fee is per request, so the arithmetic scales with how often your licence changes rather than with your headcount. Two key personnel changes and two allocation increases in a year comes to £1,400. Set against a standard route that can take up to 18 weeks, or roughly 90 working days, £350 buys back as much as 85 of them.
The better test is not cost, though. It is what the pending change is blocking. An allocation you cannot assign is a start date you cannot confirm, and a start date you cannot confirm is a candidate deciding whether to keep waiting. An authorising officer who has already left is a licence whose named accountability sits with someone who no longer works there. Those are worth £350 on a Tuesday morning. A premises address that changed last month, on a licence with no live requests, is not.
Most rejections are preparation, not paperwork
Read back through the reasons a request fails and almost none of them is a legal question. They are process questions, and every one can be designed out before the day you need the service.
Print the submission sheet before you close the SMS request, every time, whether or not you intend to use priority, because it cannot be recovered afterwards. Submit early in the working day, while the day's allocation is open. Keep the authorising officer's inbox monitored, junk folder included, for the 72 hours after any priority request goes in. Forecast CoS demand far enough ahead that the request you make is for undefined allocation rather than defined.
None of that is immigration advice. It is record-keeping, calendar discipline, and knowing your own allocation position, which is the part sponsors running 50 or more sponsored workers on spreadsheets consistently cannot do at the speed a 7am to 5pm window demands. A solicitor gets instructed after the request has already failed. The complexity here is not the rule, it is the choreography.
Borderless keeps your key personnel records, allocation position, and reporting deadlines in one place, so the SMS request goes in complete and the submission sheet exists before anyone needs it. If your last change of circumstances took months, that is usually where it went wrong. There's just too much at stake to find out the hard way.
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