UK Scale-up Worker sponsorship: licence criteria, endorsing body pathway, PAYE salary thresholds, six-month sponsorship duties and procedure, with comparison to Skilled Worker
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The Scale-up route
The Scale-up route enables businesses that have posted strong recent growth to secure a Home Office sponsor licence so they can hire highly skilled non-British or Irish nationals who ‘have the skills needed to enable the Scale-up business to continue growing’. This is, at the outset, a sponsored and in name a points-based pathway, brought into the Immigration Rules, Appendix Scale-up, on 22 August 2022. To qualify for a Scale-up sponsor licence, an organisation must meet the core set of key requirements that it:
- has recorded annualised growth of at least 20% across the prior three-year period, measured by either employment (headcount) or turnover; and
- had a minimum of ten employees at the beginning of the relevant three-year period
Following limited uptake, on 13 April 2023 the Home Office introduced an ‘Endorsing Body Pathway’ for organisations unable to satisfy the above thresholds. Under this route, prospective sponsors may obtain an endorsement from a Home Office-approved endorsing body and include it with their licence application. At the time of writing, this seems to have made little difference, with only 73 sponsors appearing on the sponsor register as at 13 August 2025 (compared with 115,828 Skilled Worker licences on...
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Web page updated on 22/05/2026
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