UK sponsor register, October 2026. 1,104 companies added, 927 removed

What a removal means, and what it does not

A company leaving this register has not been punished, and this page never says it has. A licence can be handed back, allowed to run out, surrendered during a merger, lost when the company changes its registered name, or taken away by the Home Office. The public list does not say which of those happened. It only says the company is no longer on it.

What a removal does mean is plain enough, and it is the part that matters to a person. A company that is not on the register cannot issue a certificate of sponsorship. So no job in its name can lead to a work visa while it is off the list, whatever an advert says and whatever an agent tells you. Nobody may charge you for a certificate of sponsorship either. Selling one is a crime in the UK.

If a company you have applied to is on the list below, the right next step is to ask the company directly, not to assume the worst and not to assume anything else.

What the month shows

1. 1,104 companies joined and 927 left. The register grew by 177 companies over the period. It held 126,830 companies when we last read it.
2. About a quarter of the movement was a company changing where it is listed, not a company arriving or leaving. The register lists an organisation once for each town it is registered in. Count those listings instead of companies and the month looks like 1,432 arrivals and 1,293 departures. But 329 of those arrivals are a new town for a company that was already on the register, and 363 of those departures are a town a company stopped being listed under while staying on the register. We counted companies, so neither is in our figures.
3. 111 of the 927 companies that left, 12 in every hundred, have a care word in their registered name. Across the whole register that share is 5.7 in every hundred. So care names leave at roughly three times the rate they appear.
4. 905 of them held a Skilled Worker licence, which is the route most people reading this site need.
5. 2 of them were B rated on the last day they appeared. A B rating is supposed to be the warning sign, and watching for one does not work. Companies go from A to gone.
6. The heaviest single edition took 94 companies off at once. They were last listed in the edition of 23 October 2026.

Care

Care is the part of this register our readers live in, so it is worth being exact about how it was counted. There is no sector column on the Home Office register. Nothing in the file says a company is a care company. So we read the registered name and nothing else, and a company counts as care when its name contains one of these words on its own: care, cares, caring, carers, homecare, healthcare, nursing, domiciliary.

That rule is blunt in one direction only. It misses every care company whose name says nothing about care, and there are many. It does not sweep in companies that are not in care, because the words have to stand as whole words, so a company with careers in its name is not counted. The real care figure is therefore higher than the one above, not lower.

On that rule, 111 of the 927 companies that left in October 2026 were care names, and 112 of the 1,104 that joined were. The register as a whole holds 7,178 care names out of 126,830 companies.

Routes and ratings

The routes a company held on the last day we saw it. A company can hold more than one, so these add up to more than the number of companies.

• Skilled Worker905
• Global Business Mobility: Senior or Specialist Worker66
• Creative Worker10
• International Sportsperson7
• Tier 2 Ministers of Religion7
• Religious Worker6
• Charity Worker4
• Global Business Mobility: UK Expansion Worker3
• Scale-up1

On the Skilled Worker route the Home Office gives every sponsor an A rating or a B rating, and a B means the licence is already in trouble. 2 of the companies that left this month carried one. That is worth knowing before anybody builds a habit of checking for it.

Where they were

The town each company was registered in on the last day we saw it. This is the registered address, not where the work was.

• London250
• Manchester35
• Birmingham29
• Leeds13
• Leicester13
• Bristol12
• Harrow9
• Milton Keynes9
• Coventry8
• Edinburgh8
• Slough8
• Cambridge7

Every company that left, named

All 927 of them, newest first, gathered under the day each one was last on the list. Where we recorded which gov.uk file we read, the heading names that edition. Where we did not, it names the morning we read the register instead. Tap a name to see what we hold on that company.

Take the data away

One file, both directions, 2,031 rows. It carries the registered name, the town, the county, the routes, the rating, the register edition each company was last listed in where we recorded it, the morning we read the register, and a link to our page for the company.

Download the data as CSV

You may reuse it freely. The underlying register is published by the Home Office under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and we are not adding a condition of our own. A link back is welcome and is not required.

How to cite this page

In a sentence.

SponsorJobUK, “UK sponsor register, October 2026”, 1 November 2026. https://sponsorjobuk.com/sponsors/changes/2026-10

With a figure in it.

927 organisations left the UK register of licensed sponsors in October 2026 (SponsorJobUK analysis of the Home Office register of licensed sponsors, 1 November 2026).

If you are checking a single company rather than the whole list, cite its own page instead. Every company above links to one, and each of those pages says the date we last matched that company against the register.

Method, and what we cannot prove

The only source is the Home Office publication Register of licensed sponsors: workers, the free CSV at gov.uk. We download it every morning at 05:30 London time and keep every copy. gov.uk publishes one file and replaces it, so the comparison below cannot be made from the live file. It can only be made from a store of dated copies, and this is ours.

We read 31 files in this period. The first was read on 1 October 2026 and the last on 31 October 2026. The Home Office publishes on working days only, so a Saturday, a Sunday and a Monday morning all read the file published on the Friday. Those repeats are listed below with the rest, because leaving them out would make the record look tidier than it was.

What counts as one company. The register lists an organisation once for every town it is registered in, so we group the listings by the organisation name first. A company counts as added when its name first appears in any file we read inside the period. It counts as removed when it appears in a file inside the period and in no file we have read since. A company that changes town therefore counts as neither, which is the point.

What the dates mean. The date against each company is the register edition it was last listed in, taken from the date in the gov.uk filename. We began storing that filename on 14 September 2026. Before that we recorded the morning we read the register but not which file it was, so 0 of the 928 companies below carry the morning we read instead. Those two are usually one working day apart and after a weekend they are three.

How accurate the count is. Every run writes down how many listings it found missing that morning. Over the 58 runs from 3 September 2026 to 31 October 2026 our runs logged 2,333 listings gone at the time, and 2,251 of them are still gone today. So 82 came back onto the register later, about 3.5 in every hundred.

The four things we cannot tell you. First, why any licence went, because the register does not say. Second, anything before 26 August 2026, which is the day we started keeping copies. Third, a company that left and rejoined before we published this, because it is on the register again and so it is not counted as gone. Fourth, two different organisations whose names match once normalised are counted as one company, which makes both figures slightly low rather than slightly high.

Every file we read in this period

Rows in the file is every line of the gov.uk CSV, one per organisation per route. Listings after is what our copy held once the file was merged, one per organisation per town. Neither is the number of companies, which is 126,830.

Questions, corrections and data requests

If a company below believes its listing is wrong, write to us and we will check our copies against the register and correct the page the same day. The register itself is the Home Office’s, and only they can change it.