About This Site

The UK Home Office maintains a register of every business licensed to sponsor overseas workers on visas. This database, published as the “Register of Licensed Sponsors,” contains over 140,000 organisations that have been granted the ability to bring in workers from abroad under routes like the Skilled Worker visa. We built this site to make that data searchable and mappable so that anyone can explore who exactly is sponsoring visa workers and where they are located.

What the data reveals is striking. The Skilled Worker visa was designed, in theory, for roles that require genuine expertise — jobs the domestic labour market cannot fill. In practice, the register tells a different story. Barber shops, fried chicken takeaways, hand car washes, vape shops, and off-licences hold sponsor licences alongside hospitals, universities, and technology companies. The system has become a back door for mass low-wage migration, rubber-stamped by a Home Office that hands out licences to virtually any business that applies. The “skills shortage” justification has been stretched so far beyond its original meaning that it now covers jobs most people would never consider skilled. Search the data for yourself and draw your own conclusions.