Care Sector Sponsor Licence Compliance: The 2026 Guide for Care Providers

Key Takeaways

• Care is the most heavily enforced sector in UK sponsorship. More than 470 care sector sponsor licences have been revoked since July 2022, affecting over 39,000 workers, and the first quarter of 2026 saw a record 1,712 suspensions and 1,545 revocations across all sectors.
• Overseas recruitment into care worker roles is closed. Occupation codes 6135 and 6136 can now only be used for applications for permission to stay, so you cannot sponsor a care worker directly from abroad.
• To sponsor someone under the three-month route, they must have been legally working for you in one of those codes for at least the three months ending on the date the Certificate of Sponsorship is issued, and the application must be made before 22 July 2028.
• If you sponsor care workers or senior care workers in England, your organisation must be registered with the Care Quality Commission. A narrow exception applies to some long-standing workers continuing with the same sponsor.
• The salary floor for these roles is £31,300 a year or the lower going rate, whichever is higher, and discounted rates are not available at all if the job is on the Immigration Salary List.
• Two minimum wage traps are specific to care. Travel between clients counts as working time, and on sleep-in shifts the position depends on whether the worker is awake for the purposes of working and whether suitable sleeping facilities are provided.
• Care pay sits unusually close to the legal floor. Because the minimum wage rises every 1 April while immigration salary levels change separately, a package that complied last year can fall below the minimum wage this year without anything else changing. Treat each April as a compliance review, not just a payroll adjustment.
• Dependants are generally not permitted for care workers unless the worker has been continually employed in the role on a qualifying visa since before 11 March 2024, or a limited family exception applies.
• Care compliance fails in the gaps between rotas, payroll and HR records. WPC HR's compliance software keeps sponsored worker files, salary checks and right to work evidence aligned in one place, and our Sponsor Licence Compliance Audit reviews your whole sponsored workforce against current requirements before the Home Office does.

Introduction

No sector is under more immigration scrutiny than adult social care. The combination of high sponsorship volumes, variable hours, low margins and a workforce that depends on sponsorship has made care the Home Office's priority target, and the consequences have been severe. More than 470 care sector sponsor licences have been revoked since July 2022, affecting over 39,000 workers, and enforcement across all sectors reached a record high in the first quarter of 2026.

What makes care difficult is that the rules changed fundamentally and then kept moving. Overseas recruitment into care worker roles has closed. Salary is now tested pay period by pay period rather than annually. Dependants are restricted. And on top of the immigration rules sit minimum wage obligations that bite harder in care than almost anywhere else, because of travel between visits and sleep-in shifts.

This guide sets out the current position for care providers holding or relying on a sponsor licence: who you can still sponsor, how the three-month rule really works, what the Care Quality Commission requirement means, the salary and minimum wage rules that catch providers out, where dependants stand, and what to have in place before a compliance visit. Every figure and rule here is drawn from the Immigration Rules and GOV.UK guidance current at the time of writing, and because this area changes frequently we have linked the live sources throughout.

Why Care Is the Most Scrutinised Sector

Understanding why care draws attention helps you anticipate what an officer will look for. Several features of the sector create risk that simply does not exist in an office environment.

• Variable hours and rota-based working, which makes salary compliance harder to evidence than a fixed monthly salary.
• Travel between service users, which counts towards working time for minimum wage purposes but is often unpaid or under-recorded.
• Sleep-in and night shifts, where the rules on what counts as working time are genuinely complex.
• Large sponsored headcounts relative to the size of the business, which is itself a trigger point for a compliance visit.
• A history of sector-wide enforcement, meaning your organisation is assessed against a backdrop the Home Office already regards as high risk.

The practical consequence is that care providers should assume they will be visited, and that the visit will be unannounced. Our guide to preparing for a Home Office compliance visit sets out how those visits are scored.

Who You Can Still Sponsor in Care

This is the single most important change for care providers, and it is still widely misunderstood. Under the Immigration Rules, where a worker is being sponsored in occupation code 6135 (care workers and home carers) or 6136 (senior care workers), the application must be for permission to stay. In plain terms, these codes cannot be used for entry clearance, so you cannot recruit a care worker from overseas into these roles.

GOV.UK reflects this in the Health and Care Worker visa guidance, which lists 6135 and 6136 only under the codes eligible to extend, update or switch, not among the codes eligible for an initial application. Our group covered the closure when it was announced in its articles on the care worker visa route closing from 22 July 2025 and on the UK ending overseas care worker visas.

There is an important nuance. Some other health and care occupation codes remain open for overseas recruitment, including 6131 (nursing auxiliaries and assistants) and 1232 (residential, day and domiciliary care managers and proprietors). That does not create a workaround. The Immigration Rules require you to choose the occupation code that genuinely describes the role, and a decision maker must not have reasonable grounds to believe you picked a less appropriate code because the right one was ineligible. Selecting 6131 for what is really a care worker post is precisely the kind of choice that leads to refusal and a compliance investigation. We cover code selection in detail in our guide to SOC codes and going rates.

The Three-Month Rule Explained

Where a worker does not already hold Skilled Worker permission in a care code, the route into sponsorship is the three-month rule. The Immigration Rules require that the worker has been legally working for the sponsor in occupation code 6135 or 6136 for at least the three months ending on the date the Certificate of Sponsorship was issued to them.

Three details are commonly misread, and each of them matters:

• It must be work for you. The rule refers to working for the sponsor, not to three months of care experience generally or three months with another provider. Experience elsewhere does not satisfy it.
• The three months end on the date the certificate is issued. Not the application date and not the start date, so the timing of assignment matters.
• The work must have been lawful. The worker must have had permission allowing that work throughout, which makes your right to work records the evidence base for the whole application.

This route also has an end date. Where you are relying on the three-month rule, the application must be made before 22 July 2028. The alternative route is available where the worker already has permission as a Skilled Worker sponsored in 6135 or 6136, or in the former SOC 2010 codes 6145 or 6146. Our group explains the mechanics from the worker's perspective in its guide to the three-month experience rule.

The Care Quality Commission Requirement

If you are sponsoring a care worker (6135) or senior care worker (6136) with a working location in England, your organisation must be registered with the Care Quality Commission, and the registration needs to be active. GOV.UK states this plainly and directs employers to check their registration with the CQC.

Two practical points follow. First, if you have branches, the registration position needs to be correct for each location where sponsored workers are based, and your sponsor licence application or update should reflect the working locations accurately. Second, there is a narrow exception in the Immigration Rules: the CQC requirement does not apply where the worker was previously granted permission under the old SOC 2010 codes 6145 or 6146 before 11 March 2024, has continuously held Skilled Worker permission in those or the equivalent current codes since, and is applying to continue working with the same sponsor. That exception is genuinely narrow and should not be relied on without checking the individual's history.

A regulatory failure has immigration consequences. Losing or lapsing CQC registration does not simply create a care regulation problem; it removes a condition of your ability to sponsor in these codes.

Salary Rules for Care Roles

Care roles sit in a group of health and care occupation codes with their own salary rules, separate from the general Skilled Worker thresholds. For 6135 and 6136 the requirement is set out on the GOV.UK page on different salary requirements.

Note the distinction between the lower going rate and the full going rate, which is easy to miss and produces underpayment findings. Going rates are published in the going rates table and are pro-rated to the worker's hours, so part-time and variable rotas need to be calculated rather than estimated.

Salary must be met in every pay period

The rules no longer accept an annual average. The going rate must be met for every hour worked in each pay period, and the required annual salary is tested over a rolling window: any three-month period where you pay monthly or less often, any 12-week period where you pay more frequently, or any 17-week period for confirmed uneven working patterns. For a sector built on variable rotas, this is the single biggest ongoing compliance risk, and it needs to be checked before each payroll run rather than reviewed annually.

What counts towards the salary

Only guaranteed basic gross pay counts, together with other guaranteed payments treated exactly like basic pay for tax, pension and National Insurance. Shift pay, overtime and bonuses do not count, whether or not they are guaranteed. Neither do allowances of any kind, nor benefits in kind. Deductions and money the worker repays to you are subtracted from the salary the Home Office recognises. Care packages that rely on enhancements for unsocial hours can therefore look adequate on paper and still fall short.

The Two Minimum Wage Traps in Care

Meeting the immigration salary rules is not enough. The National Minimum Wage applies as a separate legal duty, it is an hourly rate tested on actual hours worked, and it rises every 1 April. GOV.UK is explicit that the employer must ensure the job pays at least the minimum wage and follows UK rules on weekly hours, or the application will be refused. Current rates are on the National Minimum Wage rates page: from April 2026, £12.71 for those aged 21 and over, £10.85 for 18 to 20 year olds, and £8.00 for under 18s and apprentices.

Travel time between clients

This is the classic domiciliary care failure. The Government's guidance on working hours for which the minimum wage must be paid states that time spent travelling from one work assignment to another counts as working time, and gives the example of a care worker driving from one client to another between appointments. That time must be included when you calculate the hourly rate.

What does not count is the ordinary commute between home and work, regardless of whether the worker has a fixed place of work, and rest breaks taken during travel. The exposure arises where rotas pay only for contact time in the client's home while the worker spends a substantial part of the day driving between short calls. Divide total pay for the pay period by total working hours including that travel, and the result must be at or above the applicable rate. Our group's article on unpaid travel time between care visits explains why this can put a sponsor licence at risk, not just create a wage claim.

Sleep-in shifts

The position here was settled by the Supreme Court in 2021 in the Mencap litigation, and the Government's guidance reflects it. Workers on a sleep-in shift are only working, and only eligible for the minimum wage, when they are awake for the purposes of working. They are not entitled to the minimum wage for time they are permitted to sleep.

Two important qualifications apply. First, for time work and salaried hours work, the employer must provide suitable sleeping facilities for the sleeping time to be excluded. If suitable facilities are not provided, the minimum wage is payable for the entire shift. Second, if in practice the worker is expected to be active for all or most of the shift and can only nap between tasks, it is likely the whole shift counts as working time. Where a worker who was initially woken occasionally becomes persistently woken, they may cease to be a sleep-in worker altogether. This is fact-sensitive, so document what actually happens rather than what the rota assumes.

Why the April uplift matters more in care

In most sectors the immigration salary threshold sits so far above the minimum wage that the two never meet. Care is different, because the thresholds are lower and the hours are often longer, which means the two floors can cross.

Take the standard £31,300 requirement. Spread over a 37.5-hour week that is roughly £16.05 an hour, comfortably clear of the £12.71 minimum wage for workers aged 21 and over. The same salary spread over a 48-hour week works out at about £12.54 an hour, which is below the minimum wage even though the immigration requirement is satisfied. Where a reduced rate applies with a £25,000 floor, the margin is tighter still: at 37.5 hours that is around £12.82 an hour, only pennies clear. Add travel time between clients to the hours worked and the effective rate falls further again.

Because the minimum wage rises on 1 April every year, and immigration salary levels are set separately and move at different times, a package that was compliant last year can quietly drop below the floor this year with nothing else having changed. The practical answer is an annual review each April: recalculate the effective hourly rate for every sponsored worker, using actual hours including travel, and check it against the new rate before the first payroll run of the new rates.

Dependants: Where Care Workers Stand

Family rights are restricted for care roles, and this affects recruitment and retention conversations directly. According to GOV.UK, a care worker or senior care worker may bring a partner and children only where one of the following is true:

• They have been continually employed in the UK as a care worker or senior care worker, on a Health and Care Worker visa or a Skilled Worker visa, since before 11 March 2024.
• They are applying for a child born in the UK.
• They are the only living parent responsible for the child and are applying for permission for that child to stay in the UK.
• The child's other parent is also sponsored as a care worker or senior care worker and they are applying for permission for the child to stay.

Be careful not to confuse this with the wider medium skilled restriction, where the qualifying date is before 22 July 2025 rather than 11 March 2024. The care rule came first and is the earlier date. Full detail is on the GOV.UK page on your partner and children, and our group answers the common questions in its guide to whether care workers can bring their family to the UK.

One genuine advantage remains. On the Health and Care Worker visa, neither the worker nor their dependants pay the immigration health surcharge, which is a meaningful cost saving compared with the standard Skilled Worker route.

Right to Work and the October 2026 Expansion

Care providers carry the same right to work duties as every employer, and they carry them across a workforce that often includes bank staff, agency workers and high turnover. A compliant check must be completed before employment begins for every worker, including British and Irish citizens, using the correct method for their status. Our complete guide to right to work checks sets out the process, and GOV.UK explains it on its page for checking a job applicant's right to work.

Two care-specific points deserve attention. First, right to work records are not only about avoiding a civil penalty of up to £45,000 per worker; in care they are also the evidence that underpins the three-month rule, because you have to show the worker was legally working for you throughout that period. Second, from 1 October 2026 the right to work regime expands beyond employees to cover many contractors, agency and gig arrangements. Providers that rely on agency staff or engage carers through intermediaries should map who now falls in scope before the deadline. Our guide to the October 2026 expansion explains who is caught, and our article on illegal working civil penalties covers the financial exposure.

Records and Reporting for Care Providers

Care files are inspected against the same Appendix D standard as any other sponsor, but several categories carry particular weight in this sector.

On reporting, the usual deadlines apply: changes affecting a sponsored worker within 10 working days, and changes to your organisation within 20 working days. In care the events that trigger reports are frequent, including changes of work location as packages move, reductions in hours, and early terminations. Our guides to Appendix D record-keeping and the full sponsor duties checklist set out the detail.

What Happens If You Lose Your Licence

The consequences in care are more acute than in most sectors, because the workforce and the regulated service are intertwined. If a licence is revoked, sponsorship ends and the permission of your sponsored workers is normally curtailed, typically giving them 60 days to find a new sponsor, apply on another basis or leave the UK. For a provider delivering regulated care, losing a substantial part of the workforce at short notice is not only an operational problem but a CQC one, since you must still meet staffing requirements.

A cooling-off period then applies before you can apply for a new licence, normally 12 months and up to five years where there are aggravating factors. There is no right of appeal against revocation, which is why the written representations made during a suspension carry so much weight. Our guide to suspension, downgrade and revocation explains the process and deadlines, and our group's article on what care workers can do if a sponsor licence is revoked covers the position from the worker's side, which is useful if you ever have to have that conversation with staff.

A Compliance Checklist for Care Providers

Work through this periodically rather than when a visit is expected. Anything you cannot answer confidently today is a gap worth closing now.

Sponsorship basics

1. Your CQC registration is active and covers every location where sponsored workers are based.
2. Every sponsored care worker was sponsored through a valid route, either the three-month rule or existing Skilled Worker permission in the relevant codes.
3. Where the three-month rule was used, you hold evidence the worker was legally working for you throughout those three months, ending on the date the certificate was issued.
4. Occupation codes genuinely reflect the duties performed, and the reasoning is recorded.

Pay and hours

1. Salary meets £31,300 or the lower going rate, whichever is higher, calculated on guaranteed basic pay only.
2. The requirement is checked before every payroll run, not annually.
3. Travel between clients is recorded and included in minimum wage calculations.
4. Sleep-in arrangements are documented, including whether suitable sleeping facilities are provided and what the worker actually does during the shift.
5. Each April, the effective hourly rate is recalculated for every sponsored worker against the new minimum wage, using actual hours including travel.

Records and readiness

1. Every sponsored worker has a complete Appendix D file that can be produced within minutes.
2. Right to work checks are complete and dated across the whole workforce, including bank and agency staff.
3. You have mapped which contractors and agency arrangements come into scope from 1 October 2026.
4. Reportable events in the last 12 months were reported within 10 or 20 working days, with evidence retained.
5. An internal audit or mock compliance visit has been carried out in the last 12 months and documented.

How Can WPC HR Help?

Care compliance rarely fails because a provider set out to cut corners. It fails because rotas, payroll, HR files and the Sponsor Management System drift apart, and nobody sees the gap until an officer does. WPC HR's HR compliance software is built to hold those things together. It stores each sponsored worker's file in the Appendix D structure UKVI expects, records right to work and share code checks with dated, tamper-evident evidence, tracks visa expiries and reporting deadlines with automated alerts, and monitors salary against each worker's certificate so a shortfall in a single pay period surfaces immediately rather than at an audit. For a sector where hours vary week to week, that continuous visibility is the difference between knowing where you stand and hoping. If you would like a specialist to review your sponsored workforce against current requirements, our Sponsor Licence Compliance Audit examines every worker rather than a sample and gives you a prioritised plan for anything that needs correcting.

📞 Call us: 020 8087 2343
📅 Book a free compliance audit: wpchr.co.uk/sponsor-licence-compliance-audit
🔗 See the platform: wpchr.co.uk/hr-compliance-software-features

Conclusion

Care providers are operating under the tightest sponsorship regime of any sector, and the rules have moved repeatedly. Overseas recruitment into care worker roles has closed, sponsorship now depends on the three-month rule or existing permission, CQC registration is a condition rather than a formality, salary is tested pay period by pay period, and dependants are restricted for anyone who did not hold the role before 11 March 2024. Layered on top are minimum wage duties that are unusually demanding in care because of travel between visits and sleep-in shifts.

None of this is unmanageable, but none of it survives an informal approach. The providers that come through compliance visits well are the ones that can produce a complete file for any worker within minutes, evidence what was actually paid for every hour worked, and show that occupation codes, contracts, rotas and payroll all tell the same story. Build that discipline into everyday operations, review it before each payroll run and each April, and audit yourself before someone else does. Where you would rather have a system carry that burden and surface problems while they are still fixable, that is exactly what WPC HR is built to do.

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