The short answer: can you still sponsor a carer in 2026?
You can sponsor a carer who is already in England, but you can no longer recruit one from overseas. The care worker and senior care worker route closed to new applications from abroad on 22 July 2025, following the May 2025 Immigration White Paper that set out ending overseas recruitment for adult social care. Carers already here on the Health and Care Worker visa can extend and switch in-country until 22 July 2028, and you can assign a Certificate of Sponsorship to a worker switching from the displaced-worker pool or from another visa, provided you first try to recruit from the carers already in England who need new sponsorship.
This guide is written by LOYALS, a King's Cross firm of chartered accountants that runs weekly payroll, pensions and council invoicing for London home care agencies, so the angle here is the money, not the immigration paperwork. Your solicitor handles the licence and the visa. What we get asked, over and over, is the finance question underneath it: what does a sponsored carer actually cost the business, what of it reduces the tax bill, and how do you carry the cash until the council pays. If you run a domiciliary agency, our care agency accountants page sets out how we take that whole finance function off your desk.
The costs matter more now than they did two years ago because they have risen sharply and because the pool of people you can sponsor has narrowed. Fewer assignments, but each one is dearer and every pound of it lands on you. Get the budgeting and the tax treatment right and it is a manageable overhead. Ignore it and it quietly erodes a margin that is already thin on council-funded work.
Who you can still sponsor after 22 July 2025
Only carers already in the UK, in most cases. The overseas front door is shut. Whether a specific person can be sponsored now comes down to where they are and what visa they hold, and the flowchart below walks the four situations we get asked about most. The Home Office also expects England providers to prioritise care workers who are already here and need a new sponsor, many of them displaced when the Home Office revoked hundreds of care licences through 2024, before you look at anyone new. You can read the detail in the government's Immigration White Paper published in May 2025.
The practical effect is that most sponsorship activity now sits in two buckets: renewing the carers you already sponsor as their visas come up, and taking on carers who are in England but stranded because their previous sponsor lost its licence. Both still cost you the full set of Home Office fees. The route being "closed" does not make sponsorship free, it just changes who is eligible. If anything the fees per assignment have gone up while the pool has shrunk, which is the squeeze most owners feel.
What sponsoring one carer actually costs you
Budget around £3,400 for the first sponsored carer if you are a small sponsor, then roughly £2,800 for each one after that. The difference is the sponsor licence, which is a one-off cost that covers you for four years across every worker you sponsor. After that, each carer carries their own Certificate of Sponsorship and Immigration Skills Charge. Here is how that first-worker figure breaks down for a small sponsor assigning a three-year certificate, with all amounts as at August 2026.
Take each fee in turn. The sponsor licence for a Worker route sponsor is £611 for a small or charitable organisation and £1,682 for a medium or large one, from 8 April 2026, and it lasts four years. The Certificate of Sponsorship is £525 per assignment since 9 April 2025, up from £239, and you pay it every time you assign or reassign a certificate, including extensions. The Immigration Skills Charge rose on 16 December 2025 and is now £480 for the first 12 months plus £240 for each further six months for a small sponsor, or £1,320 plus £660 per further six months for a large one. The full charge is due upfront for the whole length of the certificate, so a five-year certificate is £2,400 for a small sponsor and £6,600 for a large one, paid on day one. The rates are set out in HMRC and Home Office guidance on the Immigration Skills Charge.
The one piece of good news specific to care is the Immigration Health Surcharge. On most work visas the employer or the worker pays £1,035 per year, but Health and Care Worker visa holders and their dependants are exempt, so it is nil. That is a genuine saving worth thousands over a visa, and it is set out on the Health and Care Worker visa guidance. Do not budget for it, and do not let a payroll provider quietly deduct it.
The number that catches growing agencies out is the small-versus-large sponsor split. You are a small sponsor if you meet two of three tests: turnover of £10.2 million or less, a balance sheet total of £5.1 million or less, and 50 employees or fewer. Plenty of home care agencies sit right on the 50-employee line. Cross it and your Immigration Skills Charge nearly triples per worker, from £1,440 to £3,960 over a three-year certificate. We have seen an agency take on a new council block, sail past 50 staff, and only find out at the next assignment that its per-carer sponsorship cost had jumped. Model that threshold before you commit to the hours, not after.
The cost you can no longer pass to the carer
You cannot recover any of it from the worker, and trying is one of the fastest ways to lose your licence. The Immigration Skills Charge could never be passed on, that has been the rule since it was introduced. What changed for care is that from 9 April 2025 the ban was widened, so a care sponsor also cannot recoup the sponsor licence fee, the Certificate of Sponsorship fee, or any of the associated costs of obtaining and running the licence from a sponsored care worker. The Home Office guidance is blunt: it will normally revoke your licence if you recoup, or even try to recoup, those costs.
This matters because it removes an option some agencies used to lean on. A repayment clause that clawed back the certificate fee if the carer left early is now unenforceable for these specific costs, and worse, having it in the contract at all is a red flag on a compliance visit. The table below shows, cost by cost, what you pay, whether you can pass it on, and whether it reduces your tax.
What is deductible: the Corporation Tax and benefit-in-kind angle
For the company, the fees are normally deductible against Corporation Tax, so the real cost is lower than the sticker price. The sponsor licence fee, the Certificate of Sponsorship fee and the Immigration Skills Charge are staff costs incurred wholly and exclusively for the business of employing carers, so they reduce your taxable profit in the accounts. At the 19 percent small profits rate, £2,576 of fees is worth roughly £489 back in tax; at the 26.5 percent marginal rate it is closer to £683. That does not make the cash go away, but it does mean the fees should sit in the profit and loss as an allowable expense, not be capitalised or lost in a suspense account where the relief never gets claimed.
Here is the trap that generic advice misses. HMRC has been shifting its view on the employee side, and increasingly treats employer-paid immigration costs, including the visa, the surcharge and in some cases the Certificate of Sponsorship and Immigration Skills Charge, as a taxable benefit in kind on the worker. That sits in direct tension with immigration law, which forbids you from passing those costs on. So you can end up in the odd position of paying a cost you are legally barred from recovering, and HMRC still treating it as if you had handed the carer a taxable perk. For a carer on or near the minimum wage, an unexpected tax charge on a few thousand pounds of "benefit" is exactly the kind of nasty surprise that damages trust and retention.
The clean way to handle it is a PAYE Settlement Agreement, or PSA, where the employer settles the tax on the benefit centrally so it never lands on the carer's payslip. You can read the mechanics in the government guidance on PAYE Settlement Agreements. This is the sort of thing a specialist payroll and PAYE service sets up as a matter of course for a sponsoring employer, and it is the single most common gap we find when we take over a care agency's payroll. Because HMRC's position here is still moving, treat the benefit-in-kind treatment as "confirm before you file" rather than settled, and get it reviewed for your specific facts.
Clawback and repayment agreements: what actually holds up
A clawback clause can be enforceable, but only for the right costs and only if it is fair. You cannot claw back the sponsor licence fee, the Certificate of Sponsorship fee or the Immigration Skills Charge from a care worker, full stop, because immigration law prohibits recovering those specific costs. What you can sometimes recover, through a properly drafted repayment agreement, are genuinely separate costs that the worker would otherwise have borne, such as a visa application fee you agreed to fund, or training that carries a real market value. The Immigration Health Surcharge is the usual example elsewhere, though for care workers it is nil, so it rarely arises.
Even where a clawback is allowed in principle, it has to be reasonable. A clause that is so heavy it effectively traps the worker into staying can be struck down as a restraint of trade. The classic bad example is demanding the full amount back from someone who leaves after 20 months of a 24-month period, with no tapering. A fair clause tapers the amount owed over time, is capped at what you actually spent, and is agreed in writing before the cost is incurred. Get that wrong and you have an unenforceable clause and a soured relationship with a carer you need on the rota next week.
Our practical steer: keep the clawback narrow, taper it, exclude every prohibited cost, and never rely on it as a way to make the numbers work. The sponsorship fees are a genuine cost of running a care business now, and the plan should be to absorb and relieve them, not to recover them from the people delivering the care. For how these people costs sit alongside the rest of your wage bill, see our guide on the Employment Allowance and the public sector work test for care providers.
The cash-flow hit and how to plan for it
The hardest part is not the total, it is the timing. The Immigration Skills Charge and the Certificate of Sponsorship are paid in full on the day you assign the certificate, upfront, for the entire length of the visa. There is no monthly instalment option. So a small agency renewing four carers on three-year certificates in the same quarter faces roughly £7,860 of Home Office fees in a single hit, plus the licence if it is up for renewal, landing weeks before the council income that funds those carers arrives. Councils on care contracts typically pay 30 or more days in arrears, and often later. Keeping cash steady across that lag is its own discipline, which we cover in our guide on cash flow for care providers.
The fix is ordinary financial discipline applied deliberately. Put every certificate renewal date into a rolling 13-week cash-flow forecast, so a cluster of assignments never lands as a surprise. Where you can, stagger renewals across quarters rather than bunching them. And if the timing is genuinely tight, invoice finance against your approved council invoices can bridge the gap, which we set out in our guide on invoice finance for home care agencies. None of this reduces the fees. It stops them turning a profitable month into an overdrawn one.
This is also where the regulator side and the money side meet. Your ability to keep sponsoring, and to keep operating at all, rests on financial viability that the Care Quality Commission can ask you to evidence, and a business that cannot show it can absorb a predictable cost like sponsorship fees looks shaky on exactly the metric the CQC probes. Running the fees through a proper forecast is not just good housekeeping, it is part of the evidence base that keeps your registration and your licence secure.
Here is how the three common approaches actually compare for handling care sponsorship costs:
| What you need | DIY / in-house | Generic accountant | LOYALS care specialist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Relieves sponsor licence, CoS and ISC against Corporation Tax | ✗ Often missed | ● If flagged | ✓ Built into the accounts |
| Sets up a PSA so the benefit-in-kind never hits the carer | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ Standard for sponsors |
| Models the small-to-large sponsor threshold before you cross it | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ Watched as you grow |
| Builds fee renewals into a rolling cash-flow forecast | ● If you have time | ✗ | ✓ 13-week forecast |
| Understands CQC financial viability evidence | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ Care specialism |
| Open Mon to Sat for urgent questions | ✗ | ✗ Mon to Fri 9 to 5 | ✓ 10am to 7pm Mon to Sat |
This is why home care operators carrying real sponsorship costs tend to move from a generic accountant to a care specialist.
What to do before your next Certificate of Sponsorship
Before you assign the next certificate, run through a short list so the cost is planned, relieved and correctly reported. Most of it is sequencing, not exotic tax planning.
- Confirm your sponsor size. Check whether you are still a small sponsor against the turnover, balance sheet and 50-employee tests. If you are near the line, model the higher Immigration Skills Charge before you commit.
- Budget the fee as an upfront lump sum. The Certificate of Sponsorship and the full Immigration Skills Charge are due on assignment, for the whole visa length, in one payment.
- Check the fees are being relieved. Make sure your accounts show the sponsor licence, certificate and skills charge as allowable expenses against profit, not parked somewhere the Corporation Tax relief never gets claimed.
- Close the benefit-in-kind exposure. If you are paying immigration costs for carers, get a PAYE Settlement Agreement reviewed so the tax does not fall on the worker.
- Strip out any illegal clawback. Remove any clause that tries to recover the licence, certificate or skills charge from a care worker. It is unenforceable and a compliance risk.
- Put renewals in the forecast. Map every certificate expiry into a rolling cash-flow forecast and stagger them across quarters where you can.
Done in the right order, the fees are a known, relieved, forecastable overhead. Left to chance, they land unrelieved, hit the carer as an unexpected tax charge, and turn up in a month you could not afford them. LOYALS runs the payroll, the sponsorship-cost bookkeeping and the cash-flow forecasting for home care agencies across London and the UK, so you can budget for a Certificate of Sponsorship before you assign it, not after the money has gone.
Run a care agency? If you would rather have the payroll, the sponsorship-cost accounting and the cash-flow forecasting handled for you, our care agency accountants service runs the whole finance function from £995 a month, so the fees are always budgeted, relieved and reported correctly.