UK Update5 October 2026
Most people look for sponsored work the same way. They open a job board and they type the word sponsorship into the search box. It is the obvious thing to do and it finds almost none of these jobs.
We counted our own list this morning, Monday 5 October 2026. It holds 653 live jobs, every one at a company that was on the Home Office register of licensed sponsors today. Two of those 653 adverts say something about sponsorship in their own words. The other 651 say nothing about it at all, in either direction.
So the word is not in the advert. The licence is in the register. Those are two different places, and a search box only looks in one of them.
We cannot read an employer's mind, so take this as our reading of what we see, not as fact.
An advert is written for everybody who might apply. Most people who apply already have the right to work here, and for them a sentence about visas is noise. So it never gets written.
The same vacancy is also copied from board to board, and some boards cut the description short. A sentence that was in the original can be missing from the copy we read. And a licence is a fact about the company, held for years, while the advert is about one job this month. The two do not naturally end up in the same paragraph.
If you search for the word, you find the handful of employers who happen to write it. You will not find the rest, and the rest is nearly all of it.
The other way round works better. Start from the company. Take the employer name off an advert you like and check it against the register of licensed sponsors, which the Home Office publishes free.
That is the whole job our list does. We read adverts, we match the employer against the register, and we keep the ones that match. The edition behind this morning's list is the one published on 2 October 2026, which named 127,334 licensed sponsors.
People often picture one kind of work here. The list is not shaped the way most people expect, so here it is counted.
The 653 rows carry 371 different job titles between them, spread across 239 towns. 258 of those titles appear exactly once on the whole list.
That is the useful shape of it. A sponsored job is usually one post, in one place, with nobody else in the queue, and it is findable this week rather than next month.
192 of the 653 adverts carry a yearly figure we could read. 461 print no figure at all.
Of the 192, 184 are at £25,000 a year or more, 134 at £30,000 or more and 95 at £40,000 or more.
GOV.UK sets the Skilled Worker minimum as the higher of £41,700 a year and the going rate for that kind of work. It is not one flat number for everybody, and health, care and education jobs are measured against their own pay scales instead. Which is why the silence matters. Ask in your first message. What is the annual salary for this role, and does the company sponsor a Skilled Worker visa for it. A serious employer answers both halves.
The count of two is about wording, not about willingness. 651 employers staying quiet is 651 adverts we cannot read a promise into. A licence is permission to sponsor somebody. It is never a promise to sponsor you, for this job, this year.
The silence is measured by our own reading of the text, so it is our count and not a statement from the employer. If a sentence sits in a copy of the advert we never saw, we never saw it.
And 653 rows is more than 653 separate jobs. When an employer posts one vacancy once per town, it arrives as several rows. This morning one title sits on the list 25 times and another 24 times. 113 titles appear more than once, and together they cover 395 of the 653 rows.
Open the jobs page and read the newest first. This morning the Today button holds 23 jobs and This week holds 308.
Looking is free. There is no account and no password to look, and the town counts are counted from the database when you ask for them.
You apply direct to the employer, on the employer's own website. We never see your application and we never stand between you and the company.
We are a job alert service, not immigration advisers, and this is not legal advice. For your own case speak to a regulated adviser or a support organisation.
Where this comes from: GOV.UK: Skilled Worker visa, your jobGOV.UK: register of licensed sponsors, workers
5 October 2026 