Right to work checks from 1 October: the duty sponsors already had

Version 08/26 of Part 3 of the sponsor guidance, valid from 28 August, lists its changes at the top. One of them is a single added paragraph at C7.27, confirming that from 1 October 2026 right to work checks extend beyond employees. Most of the coverage has treated that as news for employers generally. For anyone holding a sponsor licence, the more useful paragraph is the one directly underneath it, and it is not in the list of things that changed.

Here is what C7.27 adds, what C7.28 says, and why a sponsor can now fail in two separate places on the same worker.

What changed on 1 October

The Home Office sets out the old position plainly in its own Equality Impact Assessment. Legislation on preventing illegal working has been in place since 1997, and since 2008 employers have complied by running manual or digital right to work checks. But, in the department’s words, the existing scheme “only applies to individuals classified as an ‘employee’”, which means employers using workers or self-employed individuals “do not have a legal responsibility to carry out right to work checks”.

Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 closed that gap on 1 October. C7.27 of the sponsor guidance now reads:

From 1 October 2026, the responsibility to carry out right to work checks will also apply to organisations that engage individuals under a worker’s contract or individual sub-contractors, or operate an online matching service providing details of an individual who is a service provider to potential clients or customers.

Three limbs, and it is worth being precise about them, because the shorthand circulating on LinkedIn is not the test.

You’re in scope if you engage individuals under a worker’s contract. You’re in scope if you engage individual sub-contractors. And you’re in scope if you operate an online matching service providing details of a service provider to potential clients or customers, which the Equality Impact Assessment clarifies means doing so for remuneration.

The Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, described the extension in his written statement to Parliament as covering companies who contract workers or sub-contractors to provide services under their company name, “such as agency workers or workers in the gig economy”. That is an accurate illustration and a useful one, but the words “agency” and “gig economy” appear nowhere in the sponsor guidance. They’re examples, not the boundary. A genuinely self-employed person who isn’t engaged under a worker’s contract may sit outside the rule, and an organisation that has never used an agency in its life may sit inside it through the online matching limb. Test yourself against the three limbs, not against the labels.

One relief: this isn’t retrospective. It applies to relevant employment commencing on or after 1 October 2026. Arrangements already running aren’t pulled in, though contracts of employment carry on under the existing rules as before.

The paragraph sponsors keep missing

Now read C7.28, which almost nobody quotes:

As a licensed sponsor, you also have a duty to carry out a right to work check on any worker you are sponsoring, regardless of the nature of the employment relationship between you and the sponsored worker. In these circumstances, even if you are not required to establish a statutory excuse under the right to work scheme, you must still carry out a right to work check (or ensure that check is carried out if you are not directly employing or engaging the worker) to comply with your sponsor duties.

Read those two paragraphs together and the shape of the problem appears. For most businesses, 1 October was the day a new duty arrived. For a licensed sponsor, a duty on sponsored workers already sits in the sponsor guidance rather than in the statute, and it has never depended on the nature of the employment relationship. What 1 October added for sponsors is the statutory scheme, and its civil penalties, stacked on top of an obligation they were already carrying.

That produces two distinct failure modes on the same worker.

Miss the check on a sponsored worker who reaches you through an intermediary and you’ve breached a sponsor duty, even in circumstances where no statutory excuse was required of you. Miss it on a newly in-scope contractor from 1 October and you’re exposed to the civil penalty regime as well.

If that sounds like an over-reading, C7.30 settles it. Among the consequences the Home Office lists for employing someone without the right permission is this one:

where the statutory right to work scheme does not apply (for example, where you are not the worker’s direct employer) but you are otherwise sponsoring a worker who does not have the relevant permission to work, we are likely to revoke your licence

The Home Office has written down, in its own guidance, that revocation is likely in circumstances where the statutory scheme doesn’t reach you at all. The sponsor duty runs on its own track.

What it costs to get this wrong

C7.30 sets the civil penalty at “up to £60,000 for each illegal worker”. Note both halves of that: it’s a ceiling rather than a flat rate, and it’s charged per worker. The published starting points before mitigation are £45,000 per worker for a first breach in three years and £60,000 per worker for a repeat, so a repeat breach starts at the ceiling. A 30% reduction is available on a first breach if the penalty is paid within 21 days.

For a sponsor the money is rarely the worst part. C7.30 sets out what else follows:

• A civil penalty makes revocation likely, and you cannot hold a new licence for at least 12 months after the penalty is paid in full. More than one penalty can push that to up to five years.
• Enforcement action to recover a penalty can affect your ability to get credit.
• Knowingly employing an illegal worker carries up to two years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both.

C7.31 adds that the Home Office may tell other bodies, the Fair Work Agency among them. C7.32 confirms it publishes the details of employers issued with civil penalties on GOV.UK.

Twelve months without a licence is not a fine. For an organisation whose rotas depend on sponsored workers, it’s the business.

It’s also worth knowing that a penalty doesn’t have to start with a visit. The Home Office confirms that penalties are also issued off intelligence referrals from other departments and off routine data sharing with HMRC. The scale is not small either: in the first half of 2026, more than 1,200 UK businesses were issued a civil penalty for illegal working, worth over £74 million between them.

Digital checks need a registered provider

The same package tightens digital identity verification. Running digital checks stays optional, but if you choose to, the check must be carried out through a government registered digital verification service provider, or DVSP. The term also covers what you may know as an Identity Service Provider (IDSP) or Identity Document Validation Technology (IDVT).

If you already use a digital identity provider in onboarding, the question to ask now is whether they’re registered. The requirement has applied since 1 October. Of the 27 organisations that gave the Home Office a cost during the consultation, DVSP checks ran from 72p to £41.36 per worker, with a median of £5, so for most businesses this is a procurement question rather than a budget problem.

The guidance landed on the day itself, and that changes what you should build on

Something worth saying plainly, because it affects how you should prepare.

When the Home Office consulted on this, it received 70 responses to the question about liability in supply chains. 34 disagreed with the approach proposed, most of them because they wanted liability settled upfront rather than worked out retrospectively after something had gone wrong. The government’s response committed to “clarify liability arrangements upfront, including how responsibilities apply within supply chains”, and to allow enough time before the requirements came into force for organisations to adapt.

Right up to the day itself, the Employer’s guide to right to work checks was a draft, and the sponsor guidance still points readers to “the draft ‘Employer’s guide to right to work checks’”. The final version was published on GOV.UK on 1 October 2026, the same day the rule took effect, so nobody has had long to read it against their own arrangements.

The practical consequence isn’t panic, it’s sequencing. The three statutory limbs in C7.27 are settled and you can design against them today. The detailed operational guidance, particularly on who carries the check in a multi-layered chain, is new and untested. Build the parts that are fixed, read the final guide for the rest, and write the allocation of responsibility into your contracts rather than relying on guidance alone.

Five things to do now

1. List everyone who works under your name and isn’t on your payroll: agency staff, individual sub-contractors, platform workers, anyone engaged under a worker’s contract. That list is your newly in-scope population, and most organisations have never assembled it in one place.
2. Cross-check that list against your sponsored workers. Anyone appearing on both is your highest-risk group, because C7.28 and the statutory scheme can both bite on the same person.
3. Agree in writing who runs the check. Where an agency or intermediary sits in the chain, put it in the contract: who checks, who holds the evidence, and who produces it on request. Whatever the final guide says about liability, settle it commercially as well.
4. Check your digital provider is registered, if you run digital checks. Confirm your DVSP’s status now; the requirement is already in force.
5. Store the evidence as though you’ll be asked for it tomorrow. A compliant check only protects you if you can produce it, dated, for every worker in scope.

Our Right to Work Check Checklist walks through what a compliant check looks like step by step, and the Home Office Audit Checklist covers what the Home Office asks to see when it comes looking.

Where Borderless fits

Borderless Immigration runs right to work checks, compliance tracking, and sponsor licence management in one platform, so your workers’ statuses are verified, recorded, and in date without a spreadsheet holding it together. If you want to know what the 1 October changes mean for your own workforce, book a demo and we’ll walk through it with you.

There’s just too much at stake.

Sources: Workers and Temporary Workers: guidance for sponsors part 3, version 08/26; Written ministerial statement HCWS159, 30 June 2026; Prevention of illegal working: extending the Right to Work Scheme to other working arrangements, government response; Home Office, Illegal working and enforcement activity to the end of June 2026.