Right to Work Checks for Sponsored Employees UK 2026

For Employers. Right to work checks for sponsored employees are not optional extras — they are a mandatory legal requirement that sits alongside your sponsorship duties, and a failure in either can lead to civil penalties of up to £60,000 per illegal worker, revocation of your sponsor licence, and in serious cases, criminal prosecution. Every employer holding a Skilled Worker or other worker sponsor licence must understand that sponsoring someone and checking their right to work are two distinct obligations, each with its own process, evidence standard, and record-keeping requirement.

Why Sponsored Workers Require a Different Checking Process

When you employ a British or Irish citizen, or an EU settled status holder, the right to work check is typically a straightforward document review or online verification. Sponsored workers are different. Their right to work is tied directly to their visa permission — which is time-limited, role-specific, and recorded in the Home Office's digital systems rather than always in a physical passport stamp.

This means the checking method, the evidence you must retain, and your ongoing monitoring obligations are more complex. Getting this right is not just about avoiding penalties: it is a core compliance duty that the Home Office examines during unannounced sponsor licence audits.

If you are still early in your sponsorship journey, it is worth reading our guide on Sponsor Licence Compliance Duties After Approval 2026 alongside this article, as right to work checks sit within a broader compliance framework.

The Three Lawful Methods for Checking Right to Work

The Home Office prescribes three routes for establishing a statutory excuse — the legal defence that protects you from a civil penalty if an employee later turns out not to have had the right to work.

1. Online Right to Work Check (Share Code Service)

This is the primary method for sponsored workers in 2026. A worker with a Biometric Residence Permit (BRP), a Biometric Residence Card (BRC), or immigration status held in the Home Office's eVisa system generates a share code at gov.uk/prove-right-to-work. You enter the share code and their date of birth at gov.uk/view-right-to-work, which returns a result confirming their permission to work, the conditions attached, and the expiry date.

You must:

• Complete this check on or before the employee's first day of work.
• Print or save a clear record of the result, including the date you conducted the check.
• Store the record for the duration of employment plus two years after it ends.

Verify which nationalities and visa types fall under the online-only route at the official Employer's guide to right to work checks on gov.uk, as the system has been updated significantly since the BRP phase-out programme began.

2. Manual Document Check

Manual checks apply in a narrower range of circumstances in 2026 — primarily for workers who hold physical documents not yet captured in the eVisa system, or in specific transitional situations. The Home Office publishes two lists of acceptable documents:

• List A documents: These belong to workers with a permanent or unrestricted right to work (e.g., British passport, Irish passport, certain permanent residence documents). A single List A check provides a statutory excuse for the full duration of employment.
• List B documents: These belong to workers with time-limited permission. They provide a statutory excuse only until the expiry date, at which point a follow-up check is mandatory.

Sponsored workers will almost never be on List A — by definition, their right to work is tied to a specific visa with an expiry date. You should expect to conduct follow-up checks for every sponsored employee.

When conducting a manual check, you must:

• See the original document (not a photocopy or scan).
• Satisfy yourself it is genuine, belongs to the person, and has not obviously been tampered with.
• Make a clear copy and record the date.

3. Employer Checking Service (ECS)

The Employer Checking Service is used when neither of the above methods is available — typically because the worker has a pending immigration application or appeal and cannot yet demonstrate their status digitally. This can happen when a sponsored worker applies to extend their visa and is awaiting a decision.

An ECS check returns a Positive Verification Notice (PVN) if the worker has a right to work, which provides a statutory excuse for six months. After that period, you must repeat the check or obtain alternative evidence.

Request an ECS check at gov.uk/employee-immigration-employment-status.

The Timing Rules: When Must You Complete the Check?

The statutory position is clear: the right to work check must be completed before the employee's first day of work, not on it, not after it. A retrospective check — even one conducted an hour after work starts — does not establish a statutory excuse.

For sponsored workers, this creates a practical sequencing issue. You will typically:

1. Offer the role and issue a Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS).
2. The worker applies for their visa (if outside the UK) or applies to switch visa category (if already in the UK).
3. The visa is granted and the worker is issued a BRP or eVisa.
4. Only at this point can you complete the right to work check.
5. The worker starts employment.

Do not allow a sponsored worker to start work based on the CoS alone or on a visa application acknowledgement. The right to work check requires confirmed, granted permission to work.

For more on the CoS process and its relationship to hiring, see our guide on Certificate of Sponsorship Explained for Employers 2026.

Follow-Up Checks: Your Ongoing Duty

This is where many employers with sponsor licences fall short. A single check at the start of employment is not sufficient for sponsored workers.

Because a Skilled Worker visa (and most other sponsored work routes) has an expiry date, you must conduct a follow-up right to work check before the current permission expires. The Home Office expects you to:

• Diarise the expiry date of every sponsored worker's permission at the point of the initial check.
• Initiate the follow-up check in advance of expiry — not on the expiry date itself.
• Record the result of the follow-up check with the same rigour as the initial check.

If the worker's visa has been extended and they are waiting for a decision, use the ECS route. If their extension is refused and they no longer have the right to work, you must not allow them to continue working, and you must report this through the Sponsor Management System (SMS).

Failure to conduct follow-up checks on time is one of the most common compliance failures seen during Home Office audits. The audit trail on your SMS dashboard and your internal HR records should tell a consistent story.

What Good Record-Keeping Looks Like

The Home Office can conduct an unannounced compliance visit at any time. Your right to work check records must be available immediately and must demonstrate a clear, unbroken compliance history for every sponsored worker.

For each worker, your records should include:

Store records in a way that is searchable by employee and by date. If the Home Office visits and you cannot produce records within a short period, this itself is treated as a compliance failure.

The Relationship Between Right to Work Checks and Your Sponsor Licence

Many employers — particularly smaller businesses new to sponsorship — treat right to work checks and sponsor licence compliance as two separate workstreams managed by different people. In practice, they are tightly linked.

Your SMS dashboard contains records of every CoS you have assigned. The Home Office expects the right to work check records held in your HR system to align with those CoS records. Discrepancies — for example, a CoS assigned but no corresponding right to work check record, or a check completed with the wrong method — are treated as evidence of systemic compliance failure.

The consequences of compliance failure can include:

• Downgrading your licence from A-rated to B-rated, which prevents you from assigning new CoS until you complete a corrective action plan.
• Suspension of your licence pending investigation.
• Revocation of your licence, which immediately affects all sponsored workers.
• Civil penalties of up to £60,000 per illegal worker (verify current penalty levels at gov.uk).

For a broader view of how this fits into your obligations as a licensed sponsor, see Hiring International Workers: Employer Obligations UK 2026.

Common Mistakes — and How to Fix Them

The following errors appear repeatedly in Home Office enforcement cases and compliance audit outcomes. Each one is avoidable with good process design.

1. Allowing work to start before the check is complete. Fix: build a pre-employment checklist that physically blocks a start date being confirmed until the right to work check result has been saved to the employee file.

2. Using the wrong checking method. From late 2024, BRP holders should be using the online share code system. Conducting a manual document check where the online route is required does not establish a statutory excuse. Fix: train HR staff on the current method hierarchy and review it whenever the Home Office updates its employer guidance.

3. Failing to record the date of the check. The date you conducted the check is a required element of the record. A copy of a document with no date attached is of limited use in an audit. Fix: use a stamped or digitally dated record for every check, without exception.

4. Missing follow-up check deadlines. Diarised expiry dates are only useful if someone acts on them. Fix: assign ownership of the follow-up check diary to a named individual, with a reminder set at least 60 days before expiry to allow time for ECS checks if needed.

5. Accepting a visa application acknowledgement as evidence of right to work. An acknowledgement that an application has been submitted is not evidence of permission to work. Fix: only accept a completed ECS check (with PVN) as evidence for a worker in this situation.

6. Not retaining records for the full two-year post-employment period. Former employee files are often the first to be deleted during system migrations. Fix: set automated retention rules in your HR system that flag records for deletion no earlier than two years after the employment end date.

7. Inconsistent treatment across the workforce. If you apply more rigorous checks to workers of certain nationalities without a legal basis for doing so, you risk unlawful discrimination claims. Fix: apply a single, documented checking protocol across all new starters, differentiated only by the checking method the law requires for their situation.

8. Confusing the right to work check with the right to rent check. If your business also provides accommodation to workers — which is sometimes relevant in sectors such as agriculture or social care — the right to rent check is a separate obligation. Fix: maintain separate checklists for each duty.

Illustrative Worked Example

The following is illustrative only and does not represent any specific case or predict any outcome.

Scenario: A medium-sized accountancy practice sponsors a qualified accountant from overseas on a Skilled Worker visa. (For context on roles of this type, see Accountant Jobs in the UK with Visa Sponsorship 2026.)

• The HR manager assigns a CoS in the SMS on 3 February 2026.
• The applicant receives a visa valid from 1 April 2026 to 1 April 2029.
• On 28 March 2026, the applicant generates a share code and emails it to HR.
• On 28 March 2026, the HR manager conducts the online right to work check, saves a PDF of the gov.uk result page showing the check date and the visa expiry of 1 April 2029, and saves it to the employee file.
• The employee starts work on 1 April 2026.
• The HR manager diarises a follow-up check for 1 February 2029 — two months before expiry.
• In February 2029, HR contacts the employee, who has applied for a further leave to remain extension. HR conducts an ECS check and receives a PVN, extending the statutory excuse for six months.
• The extension is granted in April 2029; a new share code check is completed immediately.

This sequence demonstrates a clean compliance record: right check, right method, documented, followed up on time.

A Note on Discrimination Law

It is unlawful under the Equality Act 2010 to conduct right to work checks in a discriminatory way. Requiring a sponsored worker to produce more documentation than an equivalent British worker in the same checking category, or refusing to accept the prescribed checking route for a particular nationality, can give rise to a discrimination claim.

The Home Office's employer guidance specifically addresses this risk. If your HR team is designing internal processes, ensure they are reviewed for equality compliance as well as immigration compliance. Where there is doubt, take advice from an employment lawyer alongside any immigration solicitor advice.

Using an Identity Service Provider (IDSP)

Since 2022, employers have been able to use certified Identity Service Providers to conduct digital right to work checks remotely for British and Irish citizens. IDSPs use IDVT (Identity Document Validation Technology) to verify identity documents digitally.

For sponsored overseas workers, IDSPs are not the primary route — the online Home Office share code service remains the prescribed method. However, if your organisation employs a mixed workforce and uses an IDSP for some workers, ensure your staff understand clearly which workers should be checked via the IDSP and which via the Home Office portal. Mixing up the routes is a compliance risk.

When to Seek Professional Advice

Right to work checks for sponsored employees are procedural — and this guide covers the procedure. But there are situations where the procedural answer is not straightforward:

• A worker's previous sponsor lost their licence and the worker's status is unclear.
• An employee's visa has expired and there is a question about whether a pending application protects their right to work.
• You have identified a historic error in your right to work check records and are unsure how to self-report.
• A Home Office compliance officer has contacted you.

In any of these situations, instruct a licensed immigration solicitor or an OISC-regulated adviser before taking action. This is not a situation for trial and error. You can find regulated advisers through the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner (OISC) register at gov.uk/find-an-immigration-adviser.

For those managing complex sponsor licence programmes, our overview of Corporate Immigration Services: What They Do and Cost 2026 outlines what professional support typically looks like and what to expect from an immigration services provider.

Key Official Sources to Bookmark

All right to work check guidance is published and maintained by the Home Office on gov.uk. Fees, methods, and requirements change — sometimes without much advance notice. Bookmark the following:

• Employer's guide to right to work checks: gov.uk/government/publications/right-to-work-checks-employers-guide
• Online right to work check service: gov.uk/view-right-to-work
• Employer Checking Service: gov.uk/employee-immigration-employment-status
• Code of practice on preventing illegal working: gov.uk/government/publications/illegal-working-penalties

Do not rely solely on third-party summaries — including this article — as your definitive compliance reference. Immigration rules and Home Office guidance are updated regularly, and in a YMYL area like this, the official source is authoritative.

Summary: The Non-Negotiables

To close, here are the non-negotiables for right to work checks on sponsored employees:

• Complete the check before the first day of work, using the correct method for the worker's status.
• For most sponsored workers in 2026, the online share code check is the required route — not a physical document check.
• Record everything: the method, the result, and the date.
• Diarise follow-up checks and treat the reminder as a hard deadline, not a soft one.
• Retain records for the duration of employment plus two years.
• Treat right to work compliance as inseparable from your wider sponsor licence compliance programme — the Home Office does.

Getting this right protects your business, your workers, and your licence to sponsor. If you are building or reviewing your compliance framework, the guides on Sponsor Licence Compliance Duties After Approval 2026 and Hiring International Workers: Employer Obligations UK 2026 are recommended reading alongside this one.