Roughly 1 in 7 UK visa sponsor job adverts rule out sponsorship

What we found

A licence isn't a promise. The sponsor register tells you an employer can sponsor a visa. The advert tells you whether this job will. Around 14% of the adverts we read said it won't.

A few big employers post most of the refusals. Ten employers account for half of the full-text refusals. Leave them out and the rate drops to about 1 in 7. Most sponsors didn't say no once: of the 778 employers with 10 or more adverts, 464 ruled sponsorship out in none of them.

Early-career jobs are hit hardest. 61% of internship and placement adverts ruled it out, and 32% of entry-level ones. For director-level roles it was 13%.

It varies a lot by type of work. Care (48%) and engineering (40%) are highest, both driven largely by a handful of employers. Legal (6%), accounting (8%), marketing (8%) and sales (9%) are lowest.

Saying yes is rare. Fewer than 1 in 100 adverts say sponsorship is available. For every advert that offers it, about 25 rule it out.

Why adverts say no

Most just say it. About two-thirds of the adverts that ruled sponsorship out contain a line like "we are unable to offer visa sponsorship". About a quarter set a condition instead: security clearance, UK nationality, or several years of living in the UK. Around 1 in 10 only say you must already have the right to work here.

A lot of this is the visa rules talking, not the employer. Since July 2025 most jobs below degree level can't be sponsored under the Skilled Worker route, and care homes can no longer recruit care workers from abroad.¹ Defence work needs security vetting that newcomers usually can't pass yet. Here's how some large employers put it:

• Next (store roles) This role is not one we would typically consider for sponsorship under the Skilled Worker route due to, for example, the relevant Home Office requirements on skills level not being met.
• Mott MacDonald not currently offering sponsorship to candidates under the Skilled Worker visa route in the UK
• MBDA Security Clearance: British Citizen or a Dual UK national with British citizenship
• BAE Systems (roles with higher vetting) applicants must typically have 5 to 10 years of continuous residency in the UK
• QinetiQ all applicants for this role must be eligible for SC clearance, as a minimum
• Babcock Many of the positions within our company are subject to national security clearance and Trade Control restrictions

And some say yes, clearly:

• Barclays Barclays will accept applications from candidates who require visa sponsorship to work in the UK
• Barchester Healthcare Offer to pay Health & Care Worker Visa immigration fees (for eligible nurses)
• Medivet Relocation support and Visa sponsorship available

Between them, these three post about 6 in 10 of all the adverts that offer sponsorship.

By type of work

Share of full adverts live on 23 September 2026 that ruled sponsorship out.

* One employer accounts for 40% or more of the refusals in this group.

Healthcare is the odd one out: fewer refusals than most, and by far the most offers.

By seniority

Internships are driven by engineering and defence graduate schemes, and by apprenticeships: government-funded apprenticeships need three years of UK residence.²

How this fits the wider picture

• Fewer work visas. 235,000 work visas were granted in the year to June 2026, 18% fewer than the year before. Skilled Worker grants are down 48% and Health and Care Worker grants 90% from their 2023 peak.³
• Higher bar since July 2025. The skill threshold went back up to degree level, removing around 180 occupations, and overseas recruitment of care workers closed.¹ Middle-skilled jobs now qualify only through a temporary shortage list.⁴
• A licence covers a lot of jobs. Only 1.9% of private companies held a sponsor licence at the end of 2023, but 31% of UK workers worked for one.⁵ That's why "the employer is licensed" and "this job is sponsored" are such different things.
• Offers are rare elsewhere too. In the US, about 0.14% of job postings offered visa or green card sponsorship in May 2025, mostly in medicine.⁶
• Overseas interest sits where the refusals are. About 5% of UK job searches come from abroad, concentrated in data, tech, engineering and healthcare.⁷

We couldn't find another study that measures how often UK sponsors' adverts rule sponsorship out. If you know of one, tell us.

If you need a visa

1. Read the advert's own words, not just the employer's name. The licence is where you start, not the answer.
2. Look for a clear offer ("visa sponsorship available", "we will sponsor a Skilled Worker visa"). Fewer than 1 in 100 adverts have one, so they're worth prioritising.
3. On SponsorJobs, adverts that rule sponsorship out aren't listed, and adverts that offer it are labelled. Browse visa sponsorship jobs.

How we did it

Every advert SponsorJobs collects from an employer on the sponsor register is read by a language model when it arrives. It checks whether the advert offers sponsorship, might, says nothing, or rules it out. A "rules it out" verdict also needs the matching wording to be in the text. We count those adverts here.

• What counts as ruling it out: saying sponsorship isn't available, asking for the right to work without sponsorship, UK nationality, several years of UK residence or a checkable UK history, or security clearance (SC or DV). Routine right-to-work checks, BPSS and DBS checks don't count.
• Adverts, not jobs: we count each employer's advert text once, so reposts and copies across sites aren't double counted.
• Where the adverts come from: public job boards and employer career sites. About a third reach us as short snippets (around 500 characters), which usually cut off the sponsorship line. That's why the full-advert figure (about 1 in 5) is higher than the overall one. Of 209 identical jobs we had in both forms, the snippet was ruled out 0 times and the full advert 37 times.
• Accuracy: in a random check of 80 ruled-out adverts, 97.5% were right by our rules. If a bare "you must have the right to work in the UK" isn't counted as a refusal, it's 90%. A check of 80 adverts we'd left in found no clear refusals we had missed.

Limits

• This is adverts we collect from licensed sponsors, not every job advert in the UK.
• It's a snapshot of late September 2026: the live adverts on 23 September plus new ones over the next two days.
• We match employers to the register by name, and a small number of matches will be wrong.
• The reason categories come from the advert wording and are approximate.

Use the data

The aggregate figures are in a CSV: no advert text, no personal data. You're welcome to use them with a credit and a link (CC BY 4.0).

SponsorJobs (2026). Do UK visa sponsors' job adverts offer sponsorship? https://sponsorjobs.co/research/visa-sponsorship-adverts-2026