A Standard Visitor visa is the permission a person needs to come to the United Kingdom for a short stay. That may be a holiday, a visit to family, a business trip, private medical treatment or a short course of study. Which permission you need depends partly on your nationality. Some nationalities must obtain a visa as entry clearance before they board, and entry clearance is permission granted before travel. Most others need an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) instead, which is a digital travel permission linked to the passport. Nationality is not the whole test. Anyone coming to marry, form a civil partnership or give notice of either needs a visa, whatever passport they hold. This article answers the questions such as, Does anyone coming for more than six months. or why an apparently straightforward application can be refused?
This article covers who needs a visa and who needs an ETA, what the genuine visitor requirement asks of an applicant, what a visitor may and may not do in the United Kingdom, how long a visit can last, what the route costs from 8 April 2026, and what follows a refusal. It does not cover the Student, Skilled Worker or family routes. It also leaves out the Crown Dependencies, which set their own immigration rules, and applications made from inside the United Kingdom to switch into another route. Each of those is a separate question with its own detailed answer.
Key Takeaways
A Standard Visitor visa is entry clearance granted under Appendix V of the Immigration Rules. Visa nationals must obtain it before they travel, and most other visitors need an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) instead. Two purposes, however, need a visa whatever the applicant's nationality: a stay of more than six months, and marriage, civil partnership or giving notice of either, unless the applicant is a relevant national.
The route turns on the genuine visitor requirement: leaving at the end of the visit, not living in the United Kingdom through frequent or successive visits, a purpose the route permits, no prohibited activity, and sufficient funds for the whole visit without working or drawing public funds.
A visit is normally limited to six months, and a long-term visa granted for two, five or ten years does not extend any individual visit beyond those six months.
Fees from 8 April 2026 are £135 for a visit of up to six months and £506, £903 and £1,128 for long-term visas of two, five and ten years, with a published service standard of three weeks.
Remote working for an overseas employer is permitted, provided that working is not the purpose of the visit.
Working for a United Kingdom organisation, being paid from a United Kingdom source and studying for longer than six months are all prohibited.
A refusal carries no right of appeal outside human rights grounds and no administrative review, so the only step available is either a fresh application, made with the earlier refusal on the applicant’s record or judicial review where the decision is legally flawed.
Do You Need a Visa, an ETA or Neither?
The first question is not whether a person qualifies as a visitor but what kind of permission they must hold before travelling. Five positions are possible:
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Visa nationals are nationals of the countries listed in Appendix Visitor: Visa National List. They must apply for and obtain a Standard Visitor visa before they arrive, and travelling without one means being refused at the border.
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Anyone coming to marry, form a civil partnership or give notice of either must obtain entry clearance before travel, whatever their nationality, unless they are a relevant national as defined in section 62 of the Immigration Act 2014. So, it’s not a Standard Visitor visa but a Marriage or Civil Partnership Visitor Visa.
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Anyone coming for more than six months must also obtain entry clearance before travel, whatever their nationality. This covers the two longer grants described below, which are private medical treatment for up to eleven months and the twelve-month academic visit. A United States or European Union national in either category cannot rely on an ETA.
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If your nationality appears in Appendix ETA National List, you must obtain an ETA before travelling. It costs £20, lasts two years or until your passport expires, and covers visits of up to six months only.
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British and Irish citizens, and anyone who already holds entry clearance or existing permission to be in the United Kingdom, need neither.
The visa national list also includes within it two groups, namely stateless persons and people travelling on a document other than a national passport issued by the country of which they are a national. A refugee travel document or an emergency travel document can therefore bring a visa requirement with it even where the holder’s nationality would not.
It is worth being precise about what an ETA is. It is authorisation to travel, not permission to enter: the decision on admission is still taken by an officer at the border, and an ETA holder who cannot satisfy that officer can be refused entry on arrival. An ETA is not an alternative to a visa for anyone whose purpose falls outside the visitor route.
What Does the Genuine Visitor Requirement Actually Require?
A visa application turns on a single requirement in Appendix V, which is that the applicant must satisfy the decision maker that they are a genuine visitor. That phrase carries five separate conditions, and failing any one of them is enough on its own. The applicant must:
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leave the United Kingdom at the end of the visit;
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not live in the United Kingdom through frequent or successive visits, and not make it their main home;
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genuinely be seeking entry for a purpose the visitor route permits;
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not intend to carry out any activity the route prohibits; and
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have sufficient funds to meet all the reasonable costs of the visit, including the return or onward journey, without working or drawing on public funds.
The guidance puts the responsibility on the applicant to give the caseworker enough evidence to show they meet the visitor rules, and the caseworker then decides whether, on that evidence, the visit is more likely genuine than not. The evidence must fit the visit that has been described. Suitability, however, is the exception. If the doubt is about something like a past breach of the rules, the guidance says the burden shifts to the Home Office.
Sufficient Funds and Support from a Third Party
There is no fixed sum a visitor must show. The visitor route contains no minimum income figure of the kind found in the family rules and no specified balance a bank statement must reach. What has to be established is sufficiency measured against the visit that has been described, which is why a modest amount can be adequate for a fortnight staying with relatives while a much larger amount is inadequate for four months of independent living in London.
Support from another person is permitted, but on conditions. Travel, maintenance and accommodation may be provided by a third party where that party has a genuine professional or personal relationship with the applicant. Three matters have to be established about that third party, according to the Home Office caseworker guidance:
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that the relationship with the applicant is genuine;
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that the third party intends to provide the support; and
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that, where the third party is an individual providing financial support, they “have enough funds available to adequately support themselves and anyone normally dependent on them, as well as the applicant”.
A further condition applies to a supporter in the United Kingdom. The guidance states that the third party must not be in breach of immigration law at the time of the decision on the application or of the visitor’s entry to the UK, and that where that is not the case “the support must be disregarded”. The guidance does not prescribe a list of documents for this purpose; what the financial evidence has to do is show sufficient funds for the planned stay. It also sets one limit on what a supporting document should attempt: a decision maker “must not ask for or accept a written guarantee or undertaking from the applicant concerning the length of their stay”. A sponsor letter promising how long the visitor will remain therefore achieves nothing, because the caseworker cannot accept it.
Frequent and Successive Visits
Two different limits are commonly run together here and separating them matters. The first is this: a single visit cannot exceed six months, because that is the maximum period Appendix V allows a standard visitor to be granted, subject only to the private medical treatment and academic exceptions set out below. The second is that: there is no rule capping the total time a visitor may spend in the United Kingdom across a year. The Home Office caseworker guidance says so in terms, stating that there is “no specified maximum period, which an individual can spend in the UK in any period, such as ‘6 months in 12 months’”.
What replaces that arithmetic is a judgement about the pattern of travel. The guidance directs caseworkers to refuse an application where it is clear from the applicant’s travel history that they are seeking to remain in the United Kingdom for extended periods or making the United Kingdom their home, weighing cumulative time spent here over twelve months, how frequently the applicant returns, whether time spent here exceeds time spent in their own country, and their previous immigration history, financial circumstances and family, social and economic background. A visitor therefore cannot be told they have used up an allowance, but they can be refused because the pattern of visits reads as residence.
The table below shows how a similar amount of time in the United Kingdom can produce opposite outcomes, because what is being assessed is where the applicant actually lives.
The two readings above are illustrative: the guidance sets out the factors, not the outcomes.
Time spent in the United Kingdom is therefore evidence going to the question, not the question itself.
What Can You Do on a Standard Visitor Visa?
The permitted activities are a closed list, set out in Appendix Visitor: Permitted Activities, and a purpose that does not appear on it cannot be pursued as a visitor however harmless it sounds. Appendix V provides for four types of visitors and the Standard Visitor is only one of them, so it is worth being clear which activities belong to which type. A Standard Visitor may do all of the permitted activities, with one exception: a visitor under an Approved Destination Status Agreement may only do the activities in PA2(a). The other three types are separate categories under the same appendix rather than sub-classes of the Standard Visitor, and each is confined to a narrower set:
Anyone whose purpose falls within one of those three narrower categories besides Standard Visitor applies as that type of visitor rather than as a Standard Visitor. In outline, the activities open to a Standard Visitor cover:
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Tourism, visits to friends and family, recreational courses of up to thirty days, and volunteering for a registered charity for up to thirty days.
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General business activity, including meetings, conferences, seminars and interviews, negotiating and signing contracts, attending trade fairs and carrying out site visits.
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Activity within a corporate group, such as advising on an internal project, troubleshooting, and regulatory or financial audit of a United Kingdom branch.
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Installing, servicing or repairing goods, machinery or software supplied under contract by an overseas business, and overseeing the delivery of a contract as the client of a United Kingdom export company.
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Work-related training, including clinical attachments and observer posts, and scientific, research and academic collaboration.
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Legal services and advocacy by an overseas lawyer, giving expert evidence, preaching and pastoral work, and performing or competing as an artist, entertainer, musician or sportsperson.
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Private medical treatment and organ donation, study of up to six months, and a small number of pre-arranged paid engagements.
Remote Working and Permitted Paid Engagements
Remote working is expressly recognised. A visitor may deal with their overseas employment while they are here, answering correspondence and joining meetings, provided that dealing with that employment is not the purpose of the visit. What the route does not allow is moving one’s working life to the United Kingdom for a period and describing it as a holiday.
Permitted paid engagements are the narrow exception to the rule against payment from a United Kingdom source. This engagement reaches only the specific engagements listed at V13.3 of Appendix V. The engagement must be arranged before travel, must be supported by a formal invitation, and must be carried out within the first thirty days after arrival. A lecturer who receives an invitation in the fourth month of a six-month visit cannot rely on the exception, whatever the merits of the invitation.
Work, Payment and Study That Are Not Permitted under Standard Visitor Visa
Three prohibitions sit behind the activity list. The first is that a visitor must not intend to work in the United Kingdom, which includes taking employment and doing work for an organisation or business here. The rules then close the obvious way round it: a permitted activity must not amount to the visitor undertaking employment, or to filling a role or providing short-term cover for a role within a United Kingdom organisation. A person sent to cover a colleague’s absence at a United Kingdom subsidiary is therefore outside the route even though activity within a corporate group is otherwise permitted.
The second prohibition concerns payment. A visitor must not receive payment from a United Kingdom source for activities carried out here, subject to a short list of exceptions listed at V4.6 of Appendix V. What matters is the source of the payment, not its size. The third concerns study, which is permitted only up to six months and only at an institution meeting the accreditation requirements of the route. Recreational courses of up to thirty days are dealt with separately, and the guidance directs caseworkers to consider whether a pattern of repeated visits is being used to avoid the requirements of the Student and Child Student routes.
How Long Can You Stay, and Can You Extend?
A standard visitor is normally granted permission for up to six months, subject to conditions: no access to public funds, no work other than the permitted activities, and a restriction on study. Longer grants are available where the visit is for private medical treatment, and for academics, whose partner and children may also be granted the longer period. Long-term visit visas extend the life of the visa and not the length of a visit.
Extension is not a route to remaining in the United Kingdom. Applying in order to carry on living here engages the very requirement the route is designed to test, and each arrival on a long-term visa remains subject to examination at the border.
What Does a Standard Visitor Visa Cost in 2026?
Fees are set by regulations rather than by the Immigration Rules themselves, and they changed on 8 April 2026. The published service standard is that a decision usually follows within three weeks, and that an application may be made no earlier than three months before travel. That standard runs from the point at which identity has been verified and the supporting documents provided, not from the moment the online form is completed.
Worked Example: Repeat Short Visas Against a Five-Year Visa
Two visa nationals plan the same travel: two visits a year of about three weeks each, to see family and attend an annual industry conference, sustained over five years. Applicant A applies for a short visit visa each time. Applicant B applies once for a five-year long-term visa. Neither uses a priority service.
These figures are illustrative. The correct cost depends on nationality, the length and purpose of the visit, whether a priority service is used, and any biometric enrolment or courier charges levied at the visa application centre.
The arithmetic is only half the point. At £135 a visit, seven applications over five years already cost more than the £903 five-year visa, so the break-even comes early. The larger difference is risk: Applicant A must satisfy the genuine visitor requirement ten times, and one refusal, perhaps in a year when their employment has changed, stays on their immigration history.
What Happens if Your Application Is Refused?
This is where the visitor route differs sharply from work and family applications, and it is the reason to take a first application seriously. A refusal of entry clearance as a visitor carries no right of appeal. An appeal lies only where a protection claim or a human rights claim has been refused, or protection status revoked, and a visitor refusal falls outside all of those unless a human rights claim has been made and refused. Administrative review is not an alternative either, because the visitor route is not one of the routes on which administrative review is available. In practice the only step open to a refused applicant is a fresh application or judicial review where the decision is legally flawed.
Where a human rights appeal does lie, its scope is narrower than applicants expect. The first question on such an appeal is whether Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights is engaged at all, and where it is not, the tribunal cannot go on to review the entry clearance officer’s decision under the Immigration Rules. Even where Article 8 is engaged, the tribunal is not deciding whether the applicant met the requirements of the visitor route: the ability to satisfy those requirements is a weighty but not a decisive consideration. An appeal is therefore not a rehearing of the visitor application. It decides whether refusing entry was a proportionate interference with the right Article 8 protects.
The cost of a refusal is not the application fee. A refusal must be declared on later applications and forms part of the previous immigration history that decision makers are directed to weigh. A refusal on funds, or on the ground that the applicant appears to be living in the United Kingdom through repeated visits, is particularly difficult to unwind, because a fresh application must explain not only what has changed but why the earlier assessment of the same travel pattern was wrong.
Frequently Asked Questions
The applicant must meet the suitability requirements and the genuine visitor requirement in Appendix V, which means satisfying the decision maker that they will leave at the end of the visit, will not live in the United Kingdom through frequent or successive visits, are coming for a purpose the route permits, will not carry out a prohibited activity, and have sufficient funds for the whole visit without working or drawing public funds.
Up to six months per visit, with longer periods available for private medical treatment and for academics and their families. A long-term visa granted for two, five or ten years permits multiple entries across its life but does not extend an individual visit beyond six months.
Any single visit is limited to six months, but there is no annual cap on the total. The caseworker guidance states that there is no specified maximum period a person can spend in the UK in any period, such as six months in twelve. What is assessed is whether the pattern of visits means the person is in effect living in the United Kingdom, so a high total is evidence going to that question rather than a breach in itself.
Yes, provided remote working is not the purpose of the visit. You must not take employment in the United Kingdom or do work for a United Kingdom organisation or business, must not fill or provide short-term cover for a role here, and must not receive payment from a United Kingdom source outside the listed exceptions.
No. The Electronic Travel Authorisation applies to travellers who do not hold entry clearance or existing permission, so a visa holder does not need one. An ETA is authorisation to travel rather than permission to enter, and it does not guarantee admission at the border.
From 8 April 2026 the fee is £135 for a visit of up to six months, and £506, £903 or £1,128 for long-term visas of two, five or ten years. The published service standard is a decision within three weeks, and the earliest an application can be made is three months before travel.
Not against the refusal itself. An appeal lies only where a protection or human rights claim has been refused, or protection status revoked, and administrative review is not available on the visitor route. Where a human rights appeal does lie, the tribunal must first decide whether Article 8 is engaged at all.
Glossary
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Standard Visitor visa
Permission granted under Appendix V of the Immigration Rules to come to the United Kingdom for a short stay.
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Entry Clearance
Permission obtained before travelling to the United Kingdom, as distinct from permission granted on arrival.
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Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA)
A digital travel permission, linked to the passport, required of most travellers who do not need a visa.
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Visa National
A person whose nationality, statelessness or travel document appears in Appendix Visitor: Visa National List, and who must obtain entry clearance before travel.
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Genuine Visitor Requirement
The requirement in Appendix V that the applicant satisfies the decision maker on intention, purpose, prohibited activities and funds.
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Permitted Activities
The closed list in Appendix Visitor: Permitted Activities of what a visitor may do in the United Kingdom.
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Permitted Paid Engagement
A pre-arranged, formally invited engagement carried out within the first thirty days after arrival, and paid from a United Kingdom source.
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Long-term Visit Visa
A visa valid for two, five or ten years allowing multiple visits, each still limited to six months.
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Administrative Review
The internal reconsideration process available on certain routes, but not on the visitor route.
Conclusion
If any of the situations above sound familiar like a heavy travel pattern, funds held by somebody else, a purpose sitting at the edge of the permitted activities, or a refusal already on the record, the risk is not abstract. Because there is no appeal outside human rights grounds, no administrative review and no refund, there is realistically one attempt at getting the framing right. A conference or a family occasion three weeks away will not wait for a second application. Establishing before applying, rather than after a refusal, that the purpose of the visit and the evidence supporting it meet the requirements of the Standard Visitor visa is the difference between a trip that happens and one that does not.
Visitor and Business Immigration Services — Sterling & Wells
Sterling & Wells advises individuals and businesses on visitor applications.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute immigration advice. Your circumstances may alter the outcome. Speak to a qualified immigration adviser regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority before acting.
