Guidance and legislation reflected in this article is understood to be current as of 01/10/2026.
A Home Office sponsor compliance visit is an inspection by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) to test whether a licence holder is meeting its sponsor duties in practice rather than on paper, and an officer can arrive without warning and ask to see the files of any sponsored worker within minutes. For a UK employer holding a Worker or Temporary Worker sponsor licence, that visit is not a hypothetical risk. It is a standing possibility from the day the licence is granted until the day it ends, and knowing exactly what the officer is checking, and against what standard, is often the difference between a visit that closes with no further action and one that opens a formal action plan.
Sponsor compliance moved four times in 2026, so what an officer expects to see has changed. This guide covers how visits are triggered and arranged, the minimum proportion of worker files and right to work (RTW) documents an officer must check, the four-part “eligible role” test that replaced the genuine vacancy requirement on 06/03/2026, the salary and Appendix D record-keeping changes that followed, the SMS security changes introduced in September 2026, the wider right to work regime that took effect for every UK employer on 01/10/2026, and what outcomes follow a visit. It draws on the Home Office’s own compliance officer guidance and the current Workers and Temporary Workers sponsor guidance. It does not cover applying for a sponsor licence, which is a separate process with its own requirements.
Key Takeaways
-
A Home Office sponsor compliance visit can be announced or unannounced, and can happen before a licence is even granted or at any point afterwards.
-
Officers must check a minimum proportion of sponsored worker files and right to work (RTW) documents, the exact percentage depends on how many workers you sponsor.
-
Since 06/03/2026, the “genuine vacancy” requirement has been replaced by a four-part “eligible role” test that must be met throughout the sponsorship, not only when the Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) is assigned.
-
Sponsors must now keep evidence that sponsored workers were told about their UK employment rights, under updated record-keeping rules in Appendix D of the sponsor guidance.
-
From 03/09/2026, multi-factor authentication (MFA) became mandatory for Sponsorship Management System (SMS) users, and the Level 2 User role is being phased out from 09/09/2026.
-
From 01/10/2026, the right to work civil penalty regime widens beyond direct employees to cover many subcontractor, agency and platform-worker arrangements, under section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025.
-
A visit can end with no action, a reduced CoS allocation, a downgraded rating with a time-limited action plan, licence suspension, or licence revocation.
Why the Home Office Carries Out Compliance Visits, and What Triggers One
Sponsorship rests on two principles set out in the Home Office’s compliance officer guidance. First, employers who benefit from bringing migrant workers to the UK must play their part in making sure the system is not abused. Second, the Home Office needs to be satisfied that a reputable employer genuinely wishes to employ the worker it is sponsoring. A compliance visit exists to test both of those things in practice, not just on paper.
There are two broad categories of visit. A pre-licence assessment visit takes place before a licence is granted, or before an existing sponsor adds a new route to its licence, the officer checks whether the organisation’s human resources (HR) systems are ready to meet sponsor duties, and whether the number of workers requested is realistic for the size of the business. A post-licence compliance visit is carried out on an organisation that already holds a licence, and can be triggered by several things: intelligence about the organisation, the sponsor reaching a “trigger point” in the number of workers or Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS) it has used, a joint operation with another part of the Home Office, a B-rating that requires an action plan to be reassessed, or the sponsor itself requesting the visit.
Sponsor duties run continuously from the day the licence is granted until the sponsor surrenders it, lets it lapse, or the Home Office revokes it. Responsibility for an individual worker starts the moment a CoS is assigned to them and continues until the sponsor tells the Home Office it is no longer sponsoring that person, the worker leaves the UK and their permission expires, or the worker moves to a different sponsor.
Because the Sponsorship Management System (SMS) sits at the centre of nearly everything a compliance officer checks, the people who hold the four Key Personnel roles, Authorising Officer (AO), Key Contact (KC), Level 1 User and Level 2 User are themselves part of what gets examined. Only Level 1 and Level 2 Users can access the SMS, and every sponsor must have at least one Level 1 User able to carry out day-to-day sponsorship activity, though, as explained below, the Level 2 User role is now being withdrawn.
New SMS Security Rules from September 2026: MFA and the End of the Level 2 User
On 28/08/2026, the Home Office published version 08/26 of Part 1 (Apply for a licence) and Part 3 (Sponsor duties and compliance) of the Workers and Temporary Workers sponsor guidance, alongside a new SMS User Manual 13 covering multi-factor authentication (MFA). Two changes from this update matter directly for anyone managing SMS access, and a compliance officer visiting your organisation from autumn 2026 onwards will expect both to be in place.
First, MFA became mandatory for SMS users, rolling out in phases from 03/09/2026 and expected to reach all Worker and Temporary Worker sponsors by November 2026. From 09/09/2026, any organisation granted a new sponsor licence has MFA enabled automatically. Once a licence has been migrated, logging in requires a username and password as before, plus a one-time passcode sent by text message to a Level 1 User’s registered mobile number or email address. Because the passcode depends entirely on the contact details held on the SMS being correct, sponsors should check mobile numbers, email addresses and dates of birth for Level 1 Users and should be aware that sharing a passcode with a colleague, even informally, is treated by the Home Office as a risk to the licence.
Second, the Level 2 User role is being phased out. From 09/09/2026, sponsors can no longer appoint new Level 2 Users, including temporary staff supplied by an employment agency, who cannot be converted to Level 1 status at all. Existing Level 2 Users must be upgraded to Level 1, where eligible, or have their SMS account deactivated, by 08/03/2027 after which the Home Office will deactivate any that remain. Alongside this, the Home Office has introduced a process for identifying and deactivating SMS accounts that have not been used for 12 months or more, writing to both the Authorising Officer and the inactive Level 1 User before doing so. For a compliance officer, an SMS record that does not reflect who is actually still working for the sponsor is itself a marker of weak HR systems, exactly the kind of gap a visit is designed to find.
Announced or Unannounced? How Compliance Visits Are Arranged
Sponsors agree, as a condition of holding a licence, to give Home Office staff access to any premises or site under their control on demand, the only real exception is diplomatic or consular premises. An officer cannot force entry, since they are not a warranted officer, but a refusal to allow access is recorded in the visit report as non-cooperation and can lead to the licence being refused or revoked.
Visits are normally unannounced, particularly where the request is intelligence-led, where the compliance team believes an unannounced visit will produce more accurate results (for example, in a higher-risk sector), or where previous visits raised serious concerns. An unannounced visit lets the officer see the organisation in its normal working state, rather than one that has been tidied up for the occasion. The trade-off is that the right people may not be available, in which case the officer must still speak to someone involved in the day-to-day running of the business, such as an owner or director, and may need to return or follow up by telephone, email or post.
Announced visits have their own advantages, the sponsor knows what documents to prepare and the right staff are usually available but they carry a corresponding risk from the officer’s point of view. The Home Office’s own guidance to compliance officers gives a candid example: a sponsor might retrospectively complete a signing-in book to suggest an ongoing attendance record exists when it does not, or make sure a sponsored worker is doing the job stated on their CoS for the day of the visit only. Whether a visit is announced or unannounced depends on the specific tasking request, the information already held about the sponsor, and the sponsor’s current rating.
Separately, the Home Office can also carry out a digital compliance check instead of, or in addition to, an in-person visit. This involves verifying an organisation’s trading presence and interviewing key staff and sponsored workers by video call, sometimes requiring evidence to be presented before, during or after the interview.
What Happens During the Visit: HR Systems, Files and Interviews
The compliance officer’s central task is to assess the sponsor, not the individual worker. The guidance is explicit that officers are checking whether the sponsor is meeting its sponsorship obligations, whether it has the systems and procedures to do so, whether the information on its original licence application was accurate, and whether it is complying with its duty to prevent illegal working. Any information the officer gathers about specific workers feeds into that assessment of the sponsor, it is not, in itself, the main point of the visit.
To do this, officers work to fixed minimum sampling levels rather than reviewing every file. For worker file checks, an officer must examine at least 10% of sponsored worker files, with a minimum of 3 files where there are 3 or more workers, all files where there are fewer than 3 workers, and a minimum of 15 files where the sponsor has more than 150 sponsored workers. For RTW documentation specifically, the minimum checking rate is higher for smaller sponsors and lower for larger ones: 40% of workers where there are 1 to 50 sponsored workers, a minimum of 3 workers where there are 3 to 9, all workers where there are fewer than 3, 25% where there are 51 to 150, and 10% where there are more than 150. Officers can apply discretion around these minima where they can operationally justify doing so.
Worker interviews follow a similar pattern: all sponsored workers are normally interviewed where there are fewer than 3, and a minimum of 3 interviews is standard where there are more, rising to as many as 10 if the initial interviews uncover new breaches. For HR teams, the practical implication is simple, files need to be locatable within minutes, whether they are stored electronically or on paper, and any sponsored worker who might be interviewed should understand why the officer wants to speak to them.
Do Your Right to Work (RTW) Checks Hold Up?
RTW compliance sits at the centre of most compliance visits, and the Home Office tightened its position on exactly whose checks are being examined during 2026. Guidance updated on 20/05/2026 clarified that sponsors must carry out RTW checks on workers they sponsor, and on workers they otherwise employ directly but it also confirmed that earlier wording from March and April 2026, which had suggested a broader duty covering unsponsored contractors or labour-supply arrangements, should be disregarded. In practice, this means employers should keep two separate obligations distinct: the general duty to prevent illegal working, which applies to everyone an employer directly employs, and the sponsor-specific record-keeping duties set out in Appendix D, which apply to sponsored workers.
Where a sponsor has carried out an RTW check correctly, in line with current Home Office guidance, it establishes a statutory excuse against a civil penalty even if the worker later turns out not to have permission to work. There is no fixed follow-up interval such as every 12 months or every 6 months. The timing depends on what the initial check established.
Where a worker has time-limited permission, the follow-up check must be completed before that permission expires. Where the worker relied on an outstanding in-time application, appeal or administrative review, the follow-up check is due before the date shown on the online right to work check result or on a Positive Verification Notice (PVN) issued by the Home Office Employer Checking Service (ECS). A PVN normally gives a statutory excuse for six months, so this is the main situation in which a six-month follow-up arises. The same applies where the document held has no expiry date, for example an Application Registration Card. Workers with no time limit on their right to work, such as British and Irish citizens and those with settled status, generally need no follow-up check.
The consequences of getting this wrong are significant. Since 13/02/2024, civil penalties for illegal working under section 15 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 can reach £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach, and £60,000 per illegal worker for a repeat breach within three years. Continued scrutiny of how sponsors manage digital status checks and online RTW evidence, particularly following the shift to eVisas, means this is an area where compliance officers are likely to spend real time.
The Right to Work Regime Is Widening From 01/10/2026
Separately from anything specific to sponsors, a much broader change to RTW compliance takes effect on 01/10/2026. Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 officially headed “extension of prohibition on employment to other working arrangements”, and brought into force by the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/683, made 24/06/2026 amends sections 15 to 24 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 to extend the illegal working civil penalty regime beyond direct employees for the first time. From that date, the regime can also catch workers’ contracts, individual subcontractors, agency and platform workers, and arrangements made through online job-matching services.
The practical effect is a new “extended liability” concept: a business can face a civil penalty of up to £60,000 per worker even where it does not directly employ or engage the individual concerned, where liability moves up its labour supply chain. Genuinely self-employed individuals who are in business on their own account and contract directly with their own clients remain outside the scheme, as do businesses acting purely as the end-client of a service they are not supplying onward. A revised Code of Practice on Preventing Illegal Working applies from the same date, and where a business is not the direct employer, establishing a statutory excuse generally requires a written contract with prescribed terms in place before work starts, plus a compliant RTW check on the worker and on any substitute permitted under the contract. The change applies to engagements starting on or after 01/10/2026; arrangements already in place before that date sit outside the new provisions.
This sits alongside, rather than instead of, a sponsor’s existing duties. Most sponsors are themselves “employers” for the purposes of the wider scheme, and construction, logistics, cleaning, hospitality, care, food delivery, warehousing and facilities management have all been flagged by the Home Office as higher-risk sectors for this kind of mixed workforce. A civil penalty issued under the extended regime is not, in itself, a sponsor compliance breach but it is precisely the sort of adverse finding a compliance officer will ask about, and it can carry its own sponsor licence consequences where it points to wider weaknesses in how the organisation manages its workforce. Employers who use contractors, agency staff or platform workers alongside sponsored employees should treat the run-up to 01/10/2026 as a discrete compliance project: map the labour supply chain, audit existing contracts and RTW evidence across all of these arrangements, not just employees, and update contractor and agency terms before the commencement date rather than after it.
Does Every Sponsored Role Pass the New “Eligible Role” Test?
Sponsors have had to show that a role was a “genuine vacancy”. From 06/03/2026, that requirement was replaced with a new, formally defined concept: the “eligible role”. The Home Office’s sponsor guidance glossary sets out a four-part composite test. A role is only eligible if it exists, or can reasonably be expected to exist, at the point the CoS is assigned; if it requires the worker to carry out the specific duties, responsibilities and weekly hours recorded on the CoS; if it meets every relevant requirement of the route being used, including skill level, salary, and compliance with the National Minimum Wage and Working Time Regulations; and if it is appropriate to the sponsor’s business model, business plan and scale. Crucially, the Home Office must also be satisfied the role will continue to meet all four elements throughout the whole period of sponsorship which is not a test that is passed once and then forgotten.
This is a meaningful shift from a point-in-time check to an ongoing one. A role that was genuinely needed and correctly described when the CoS was assigned can still fail the eligible role test eighteen months later if the sponsor’s business has changed, if the worker’s actual duties have drifted from what is on the CoS, or if a salary review has not kept pace with the going rate for the occupation code. Compliance officers are, in effect, now expected to test alignment between the job as described, the job as actually performed, and the business need behind it, at whatever point they visit.
It is worth being precise about where this sits in law. The eligible role test is defined in the sponsor guidance, which the Home Office updates administratively and which carries legitimate expectation weight, but it is not itself part of the Immigration Rules, which are laid before Parliament under the Immigration Act 1971. The salary and skill-level thresholds that feed into the eligible role test, by contrast, are set out in Appendix Skilled Occupations to the Immigration Rules, currently, for most Skilled Worker roles, the higher of £41,700 a year and the going rate for the occupation code. Lower salary thresholds do exist in defined circumstances. A salary of at least £33,400 a year can be enough where the worker is under 26, studying or a recent graduate, or in professional training, where they hold a relevant science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) PhD, or where they hold a postdoctoral position in science or higher education. In those cases the going rate is reduced to between 70% and 90%. Roles on the Immigration Salary List also need only £33,400, but the standard going rate must still be met. A relevant PhD in any other subject requires at least £37,500, and different salary rules apply to some healthcare and education jobs and to certain extensions. For a compliance officer, the practical point is that the sponsor must be able to show which threshold it relied on, and that the worker met that category’s conditions when the Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) was assigned. Employers and their advisers should be careful not to conflate the two: a guidance change can happen and has happened twice in the first five months of 2026 far more quickly than a change to the Rules themselves.
Is Your Salary and Record-Keeping Evidence in Order?
Two separate sets of changes affect what a compliance officer will want to see on payroll and HR files in 2026. First, for CoS issued on or after 08/04/2026, salary compliance is assessed differently: sponsored workers must be paid at least monthly unless their contract states otherwise, the amount received in each pay period must meet or exceed the minimum hourly rate set for the role, and for workers paid monthly, the Home Office now checks compliance over a rolling 3-month period rather than a 12-month period. This shortens the window in which a temporary shortfall can be corrected before it becomes visible on a compliance check and increases the value of running your own payroll reconciliation regularly rather than only at year end.
Second, Appendix D, the keeping documents guidance within the sponsor guidance was updated from 06/03/2026 to require sponsors to retain evidence that sponsored employees or workers have been told about their employment rights in the UK. In practical terms, this means having an HR process that provides this information, typically at onboarding or induction, and keeping a record such as a signed acknowledgement. That evidence must be retained until whichever is later: one year after the sponsorship ends, or the date a Home Office compliance officer has examined and approved the record. A sponsor with no documented process for this is exposed on a point that did not exist as a distinct requirement before March 2026.
Underneath both changes sits the ordinary reporting duty via the SMS: key changes affecting a sponsored worker, absences, resignations, changes to duties or pay, and organisational changes must be reported through the system, and an officer will expect to see that what is on the SMS matches what is actually happening in the business.
What Happens After the Visit: Ratings, Action Plans and Licence Outcomes
A compliance visit ends with the sponsor in one of several positions. Where everything checked out, an existing sponsor simply keeps its current licence status, or a prospective sponsor’s application moves forward. Where the officer identifies problems, the range of possible outcomes includes a reduction or removal of the sponsor’s CoS allocation, a downgrade to a B-rating together with a time-limited action plan setting out what must be fixed and by when, suspension of the licence, or revocation.
A B-rating is not necessarily the end of the story, it comes with a defined period to put things right, and the sponsor is revisited to check whether the action plan has been completed. If it has, the rating can be restored; if new or worsening issues come to light on the revisit, further action follows. Where an officer finds a potential illegal worker during a visit, this is referred to the Home Office’s Civil Penalties Compliance team, and the question of whether the sponsor holds a statutory excuse becomes central to the outcome. Separately, if a sponsor gives an officer false information during a visit, or the officer obtains evidence of dishonesty, the guidance requires this to be reported as a breach of sponsorship obligations in its own right, independent of whatever the underlying issue was.
How to Prepare Before a Compliance Officer Arrives
Given that a visit can happen with no warning, the only realistic strategy is continuous readiness rather than last-minute preparation. In practice, this means a small number of recurring checks:
-
Confirming that your Key Personnel and SMS records are accurate and up to date
-
Making sure worker files whether electronic or paper can be located and produced within minutes
-
Running your own sample RTW audit against the same minimum percentages an officer would apply
-
Checking that each sponsored role still meets all four elements of the eligible role test, not just at the point the CoS was assigned
-
Confirming that your Appendix D employment-rights evidence exists and is filed against the right worker
-
Checking Level 1 Users’ mobile numbers, email addresses and dates of birth are correct on the SMS ahead of MFA migration, and planning the upgrade or removal of any Level 2 Users before 08/03/2027
-
Mapping any contractors, agency staff or platform workers alongside your sponsored employees, and checking their right to work position ahead of the 01/10/2026 extension of the civil penalty regime
-
Reviewing salary records against the current pay-period rules rather than assuming an annual check is still sufficient
This is also the point where an independent mock compliance visit earns its cost. Run properly, it tests exactly what a Home Office officer will test, the same file sampling rates, the same RTW documentation standard, the same questions about the eligible role test before an actual officer does, and while there is still time to fix what it finds.
Worked Example
Take a UK employer holding a Skilled Worker sponsor licence with 40 sponsored workers, who receives an unannounced compliance visit. Under the worker file check minima, the officer must review at least 10% of files which is a minimum of 4 files for this employer. Under the RTW check minima, because the sponsor has between 1 and 50 workers, the officer must check RTW documentation for 40% of the workforce which is 16 workers.
Of those 16 workers, suppose 2 hold time-limited permission that expired several months earlier, and no follow-up RTW check was carried out at the point that permission expired.
The difference between these two outcomes, in this example, is up to £90,000 and it turns entirely on whether one administrative task was diarised and completed on time. These figures are illustrative. Whether a penalty is actually issued, and at what level, depends on the specific facts, the discount factors in the current Code of Practice, and whether a statutory excuse can be established.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Unannounced visits are the normal approach, particularly where the visit is intelligence-led or where the compliance team believes an unannounced visit will give a more accurate picture. As a condition of holding a licence, sponsors must allow access to any premises under their control on demand.
It depends on how many workers you sponsor. For worker files generally, it is at least 10%, with a minimum of 3 files for sponsors with 3 or more workers. For RTW documentation specifically, it ranges from 40% for sponsors with 1 to 50 workers down to 10% for sponsors with more than 150 workers.
Not necessarily. A visit can be triggered by intelligence, but it can equally follow a B-rating action plan review, a trigger point in the number of workers sponsored, a joint operation with another Home Office team, or even a request from the sponsor itself.
The eligible role test, introduced on 06/03/2026, is a four-part test covering whether the role exists, matches the CoS, meets route requirements including salary and skill level, and is appropriate to the business. Unlike the previous genuine vacancy requirement, it must be met continuously throughout the sponsorship, not only when the CoS is assigned.
Not really. For an unannounced visit, the officer will normally still proceed and speak to whoever is available, such as an owner or director, and may follow up separately with Key Personnel afterwards. For an announced visit, the sponsor is told in advance what documents are needed, which allows for better planning.
Outcomes range from no action, through a reduced CoS allocation or a B-rating with a time-limited action plan, to suspension or revocation of the licence. Where a potential illegal worker is identified, the matter is separately referred to the Home Office’s Civil Penalties Compliance team.
Yes. From 09/09/2026, no new Level 2 Users can be appointed, and every existing Level 2 User must be upgraded to Level 1 status, where eligible, or have their account deactivated, by 08/03/2027. Level 2 Users supplied by an employment agency cannot be converted and must be removed instead.
Yes, in addition to your existing sponsor duties. Most sponsors are themselves “employers” under the wider scheme introduced by section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, so if you also engage subcontractors, agency staff or platform workers, those arrangements need their own right to work checks and contractual protections from 01/10/2026.
Given that visits can happen without warning and the outcome depends on evidence that has to already exist, correctly completed RTW checks, eligible role documentation, Appendix D records, reviewing your position before an officer arrives, rather than after, is where a specialist assessment adds the most value.
Conclusion
If any of the checks described above, the RTW minima, the eligible role test, the Appendix D employment-rights evidence, the new pay-period salary rules would raise a question mark in your own organisation, that question mark is exactly what a compliance officer is trained to find. This is not a scenario where a general HR policy or a generic checklist gives the right answer; the analysis has to be run against your actual files, your actual SMS records and your actual sponsored roles.
Getting a compliance rating wrong when it did apply means an action plan and a period under closer scrutiny. Getting a civil penalty wrong when a check could have been made correctly means a bill that can run into six figures. If you would like your sponsor licence position reviewed before a compliance officer does it for you, the box below sets out exactly what our mock compliance visit covers.
Sterling & Wells: Sponsor Licence Compliance Audit
At Sterling & Wells, we carry out mock sponsor compliance visits and full sponsor licence audits for UK employers on the Worker and Temporary Worker routes. We test your position against the same standards a Home Office compliance officer applies and give you a written report before an officer does it for you.
| What a Home Office officer checks | What our audit does |
|---|---|
| Worker files (at least 10%) | Samples files at the same minimum rates and tests whether each can be produced within minutes |
| Right to work (RTW) documents (10% to 40%) | Re-performs sampled checks and tests follow-up dates and statutory excuse evidence |
| The "eligible role" test | Compares the CoS, the job as actually performed and the business need for each sampled role |
| Salary and pay-period rules | Reconciles payroll to the CoS and the current pay-period rules |
| Appendix D employment-rights evidence | Checks that signed acknowledgements exist and are filed against the right worker |
| SMS records, MFA and Level 2 Users | Reviews Key Personnel details, contact details and the Level 2 User upgrade plan before 08/03/2027 |
| Contractors, agency and platform workers from 01/10/2026 | Maps the labour supply chain and reviews contract terms and RTW evidence |
| Worker and Key Personnel interviews | Prepares the people an officer is likely to speak to |
- Disclaimer
This article is for general information only and does not constitute immigration advice. It reflects Home Office guidance and Immigration Rules believed to be current as of the stated dates; always check the live guidance on GOV.UK before relying on it, as sponsor guidance is updated administratively and can change with little notice. For advice on your organisation’s specific circumstances, please contact Sterling & Wells.
