The Home Office revoked 1,545 sponsor licences in the first quarter of 2026, the highest quarterly figure on record and more than half of 2025's full-year total of 3,100. Most of those employers weren't running scams. They were running spreadsheets, and the spreadsheet missed something.
This guide covers what your duties actually are once you hold a sponsor licence, the reporting deadlines that catch employers out, what separates a downgrade from a suspension from a revocation, and what a compliance visit really looks at.
Your sponsor duties, in plain English
The Home Office's full rulebook runs to hundreds of pages, but the duties come down to four commitments:
- Keep records. For every sponsored worker: right to work evidence, qualification copies, contact details, salary evidence, and attendance history. Appendix D is the Home Office's list of exactly which documents to keep. For the right to work side, our Right to Work Check Checklist shows how to run and record a compliant check.
- Monitor your workers. You need HR systems that track each worker's immigration status, attendance, and circumstances. "We'd notice if something changed" doesn't count as a system.
- Report changes on time. Worker events (someone doesn't start, disappears, changes role, or leaves) and business changes (a merger, a new address, insolvency) each carry a deadline. More on these below, because this is where most licences go wrong.
- Operate lawfully. Pay the salary on the Certificate of Sponsorship, comply with employment law, and only assign a CoS to a role that genuinely qualifies.
The reporting deadlines that catch sponsors out
Most reporting runs through the Sponsorship Management System (SMS), the Home Office's online portal, and the clocks are short:
- A sponsored worker doesn't start, stops coming to work, or leaves: 10 working days.
- A worker's role, salary, or work location changes: 10 working days.
- Your organisation changes (merger, takeover, insolvency, major change of business): 20 working days.
Miss a deadline and you've breached your duties, even if the underlying event was harmless. And the system offers no slack in the other direction either: a change-of-circumstances request to UKVI (UK Visas and Immigration, the Home Office department that runs sponsorship) can take up to 18 weeks to process unless you pay £350 for a five-day priority decision.
What actually gets licences suspended or revoked
Reviewing enforcement patterns, the same failures come up again and again: right to work checks that were never done or never recorded, sponsored roles that don't match what the worker actually does, salaries that drifted below the threshold on the CoS, reports filed late or not at all, and compliance visits that found no working systems behind the paperwork.
Two of those deserve extra attention in 2026. Illegal working penalties now run to £45,000 per worker for a first breach and £60,000 for a repeat, and total fines have climbed from £28 million in 2023 to more than £130 million in 2025. And since April 2026, HMRC and the Home Office share payroll data, which means a National Minimum Wage problem can now surface as a sponsor licence problem without anyone visiting your office.
Downgrade, suspension, revocation: what each one means
The Home Office has three levers, in rising order of pain.
A downgrade drops your licence from an A-rating to a B-rating. You can't assign new CoS until you've completed a paid action plan, but your existing workers are unaffected. It's the warning shot.
A suspension freezes the licence while the Home Office investigates. No new CoS, and your name comes off the public register. Suspensions end in either reinstatement or revocation, and the difference usually comes down to how good your records look under examination.
A revocation ends the licence. Your sponsored workers usually have 60 days to find a new sponsor or leave the UK, and your organisation is normally barred from reapplying for at least 12 months. For a care provider or any employer with a sponsored workforce, that's not an inconvenience, it's an existential event. The sponsor licence revocation guide covers what happens, and what little can be done, after that decision lands on your doormat.
The compliance visit
Home Office officers can visit announced or unannounced, before you're licensed or at any point after. They'll want your records for each sponsored worker, evidence your HR systems do what your application said they do, and often interviews with your Authorising Officer and the workers themselves.
The employers who pass aren't the ones with the best story. They're the ones who can produce any worker's file in minutes. The Home Office Audit Checklist shows you exactly what an inspector looks for, so you can run the audit on yourself before they do:
Download the Home Office Audit Checklist →
Staying compliant without a second job
Here's the sharp truth about sponsor compliance: the complexity isn't the law, it's the admin. Every duty above is manageable on its own. What breaks employers is running all of them, continuously, across a changing workforce, on tools that were never built for it.
That's the problem Borderless Immigration exists to solve. Employers on the platform hold a 95% average compliance score 90 days after joining, because the records, deadlines, and reports are tracked in one place instead of eleven tabs.
Book a demo to see your compliance position in one screen. There's just too much at stake to run it on a spreadsheet.
Sponsor licence compliance FAQs
What records do I need to keep for sponsored workers?
The Home Office's Appendix D list: right to work evidence, passport and visa copies, qualification documents, contact details, attendance records, and salary evidence. Keep them for the duration of sponsorship and, for most documents, at least a year after it ends.
How often does the Home Office carry out compliance visits?
There's no fixed cycle. Visits can happen before a licence is granted, after any report you file, in response to a tip-off, or at random. Unannounced visits are increasingly common, so the realistic assumption is: any working day.
What's the difference between suspension and revocation?
A suspension is a freeze while the Home Office investigates; you can recover from it. A revocation ends the licence, gives your sponsored workers usually 60 days to find a new sponsor, and normally bars you from reapplying for at least 12 months.
Can I appeal a sponsor licence revocation?
There's no formal right of appeal. The realistic routes are a judicial review (slow, expensive, rarely successful) or a fresh application after the cooling-off period. Prevention is genuinely the only good option here.
Do small sponsors get compliance visits too?
Yes. Size offers no protection, and smaller sponsors are often more exposed because compliance sits with one person who also does everything else.
Automate Home Office Audits with Borderless
The Borderless platform provides a centralized system for all sponsorships, automating reminders for key tasks and ensuring best practices across your organization, simplifying audit preparation and ongoing compliance.
