About SponsorMonitor

An independent record of every change to the UK Home Office register of employers licensed to sponsor overseas workers for visas.

The problem

Most UK work visas, including the Skilled Worker visa used for nurses, care workers, engineers, chefs and IT staff, cannot be applied for directly. The applicant first needs a Certificate of Sponsorship from an employer that holds a sponsor licence. The Home Office grants the licence, rates it, can suspend or revoke it, and publishes the list of current holders as the register of licensed sponsors. An employer that is not on the register cannot sponsor a visa.

The Home Office publishes that register as a spreadsheet most working days. Each edition replaces the last. It lists organisation name, town, county, licence type and rating, and visa route. It carries no licence number, no company number, no dates, and no indication of what changed since yesterday. Anyone who needs to know whether a sponsor has been removed, downgraded or renamed has to keep their own copies and compare them. That is what this site does.

What we do

We fetch each edition as it is published, keep it unchanged, and diff it against the previous one. We hold 1,145 editions from 23 Jun 2021 to 23 Oct 2026, covering 160,376 organisations, of which 127,836 are licensed today. Earlier editions came from the UK Government Web Archive. Before 23 June 2021 the register was published only as a PDF, which is why history starts there.

How entries are identified

The register has no identifiers, so an entry is its organisation name and town, as published, after trimming and case-folding. When an entry disappears and a very similar name appears in the same town on the same day, we record a rename and link the two. Weaker matches are shown as possible renames and the removal stands. Route labels the Home Office has changed over time, such as "Religious Workers" becoming "Religious Worker" and the Intra-company routes becoming Global Business Mobility, are mapped to current names so a relabel is not reported as a change.

What removal means

Only that the entry is absent from the published file. Licences are removed on revocation, when the sponsor surrenders the licence, when it expires, and sometimes temporarily while a licence is suspended. The register does not say which, and neither do we. A sponsor that comes back is shown as re-listed. The full explanation is in the guide.

Quality controls

An edition that would remove more than 3% of the register in one day is held back for review rather than published as changes; one such file, from 5 June 2026, was a truncated publication whose entries all returned three days later. Exact duplicate rows in the source are collapsed.

Data licence

Register data is Crown copyright, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. SponsorMonitor is not affiliated with the Home Office or UK Visas and Immigration, and nothing here is legal advice.

Contact

hello@sponsormonitor.com