The Skilled Worker visa was sold as a route for skilled professionals. The Home Office has licensed more than 120,000 businesses to use it, part of a worker-sponsor register that has tripled since 2022. This is some of what is on it.
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All licensed right now to sponsor a "Skilled Worker" visa from overseas
Counts identify businesses by their registered company name, so the real totals run higher: a vape shop trading as "Cloud Nine Ltd" does not show up. Holding a licence is permission to sponsor eligible roles, not proof anyone has been sponsored.
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Licensed sponsors
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Low-skill-ceiling sectors
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Growth since 2022
Here they are, across the country
Every dot is a business licensed to sponsor a Skilled Worker visa. This view shows only the sectors where that makes little sense — vape shops, nail bars, car washes, barbers, phone shops. Pick a single sector to see just those.
And the list has tripled since 2022
There is no official record of how the register has grown. Reconstructed from National Archives snapshots, the number of licensed sponsors has more than tripled in four years.
Footnotes
Who owns them
Ownership is concentrated.
From the public register of persons with significant control, a number of individuals are each the controlling owner of several licensed sponsor companies that are recently incorporated in low-skill sectors. They are not named here: owning multiple companies is lawful, and these characteristics are not in themselves evidence of wrongdoing. Shared registered offices are a weaker signal still, because the highest counts are formation agents and virtual offices where unrelated businesses simply buy the same mailing address.
Most-used registered offices
Sponsors here
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Sources:
Method: sectors are inferred from each company's registered name by keyword, not from official trade codes, so the sector counts are lower bounds. Sponsors are matched to Companies House by exact-name only and geocoded from their postcode. The 2022-to-now series is rebuilt from archived copies of the same Home Office register, deduplicated by name; counts of "Skilled Worker" sponsors exclude the other worker routes (Global Business Mobility, Ministers of Religion, Creative and Charity Worker, and the rest).