Stating Visa Status on a UK CV Without Losing the Job

By , founder of CVBooster · Published · Updated

12 min read

You have a UK CV, a real shortlist of roles, and one sentence you keep rewriting. Do you say you need sponsorship? Do you say nothing and hope the recruiter asks later? Half the advice online tells you to never mention immigration status because it invites bias. The other half tells you to always declare it because a wasted interview burns goodwill. Both camps are answering the wrong question.

The question is not what you should write. It is who you are writing to. A UK employer cannot sponsor you unless the Home Office has granted that employer a sponsor licence, and the list of every licensed sponsor in the country is published openly, updated almost every working day. Before you write a single word about your status, you can find out whether the company on the other end is even able to help you. That one check changes the wording, the tone and in many cases whether you apply at all.

The register that decides your wording

The document is called the Register of Worker and Temporary Worker licensed sponsors. It is published on GOV.UK as a plain CSV file at the page "Register of licensed sponsors: workers", and the Home Office replaces it with a fresh edition on most working days. The 31 July 2026 edition ran to roughly 142,000 rows covering close to 127,000 distinct organisations, because an employer that holds licences on several routes gets one row per route.

Five columns, and each one tells you something you can act on:

Skilled Worker dominates the register: it accounted for well over 120,000 of the rows in that July 2026 edition. But an employer that appears only under Creative Worker or Charity Worker cannot sponsor you into a permanent commercial role, and an employer that appears only under Global Business Mobility can generally only move someone who already works for the overseas group. Being on the register is not the same as being on the register for the route you need.

Tip: Download the CSV once and keep it locally. Open it in a spreadsheet, filter the Route column to Skilled Worker, then search employer names as you build your shortlist. It is far faster than searching the web page for each company, and you can re-download it monthly to catch new licences and revocations.

Being on the register is necessary, not sufficient

A licence lets an employer issue a certificate of sponsorship. It does not mean the specific job you applied for qualifies. Since 22 July 2025 the Skilled Worker route has required the occupation to be skilled to Regulated Qualifications Framework level 6 or above, which is degree level. Occupations at RQF 3 to 5, which sit in Table 1a of Appendix Skilled Occupations, are now closed to new applicants unless the role appears on the Temporary Shortage List or the Immigration Salary List. If you were already in the UK on a Skilled Worker visa granted under the older rules and have held continuous permission since, you keep access to those codes.

Salary is the second gate. Under the standard option, the job must pay at least £41,700 a year or the going rate for its occupation code, whichever is higher. Discounted options exist and each has conditions: PhD holders in a relevant subject, applicants on the Immigration Salary List, and new entrants, all of which currently key off a £33,400 floor with a reduced percentage of the going rate. Health and education roles on national pay scales sit on a separate, lower set of options. New entrant status is the one most graduates qualify for, typically because they are under 26 on the date of application or are switching from a Student or Graduate visa.

Read that as a filter, not as a formality. A licensed sponsor advertising a £29,000 marketing coordinator role cannot sponsor that role, no matter how much they like you. If you are targeting sponsorship, filter your shortlist by salary before you filter by anything else. It saves more time than any CV edit will.

Tip: One further timing rule worth knowing before you negotiate a start date: once an employer assigns you a certificate of sponsorship, you must apply for the visa within three months. A CoS that sits unused expires.

What actually goes on the CV, and what does not

A UK CV should carry one short factual line about your right to work, placed in the header block under your name and contact details, or as the first line of your personal statement. Never a section of its own. Never a paragraph. Never an explanation of your immigration history.

The reason for including it at all is that most UK application forms ask two questions anyway: whether you have the right to work in the UK, and whether you will now or in the future require sponsorship. Recruiters are trained to look for the answer, and an ambiguous CV makes them assume the more expensive answer. A single clear line takes the guesswork out and keeps your CV moving.

What does not belong on the page: your visa number, your BRP or eVisa details, your share code, your nationality, your date of birth, your passport number, or a photo. UK CV convention omits all of these, and the identity documents in particular should only ever be shared with an employer conducting a formal right to work check on a real offer. Sharing a share code with an unverified recruiter is a phishing risk with nothing to gain.

Four situations, four exact lines

Pick the one that matches your position. Adapt the phrasing to your voice, but keep the structure: the status, the practical consequence for the employer, and nothing else.

1. You have settled or pre-settled status, indefinite leave to remain, or British or Irish citizenship

Write: "Full right to work in the UK. No sponsorship required now or in the future."

This is the highest-value line in the whole article, because it is the one people with a foreign-sounding name or an overseas degree most often leave off. If your CV shows three years at a Warsaw company and a Polish university, a recruiter scanning eighty applications may quietly assume sponsorship is needed. One line removes that assumption. Do not write "EU Settlement Scheme, pre-settled" and leave it at that, because plenty of hiring managers do not know what pre-settled status permits. Say the consequence out loud: no sponsorship required.

2. You are on a Graduate visa

Write: "Currently on a UK Graduate visa, valid until [Month Year]. Unrestricted right to work with no sponsorship required for this period; eligible to switch to Skilled Worker sponsorship in-country."

The Graduate visa is unsponsored, carries no salary floor and no occupation restriction, and cannot be extended. Length depends on when you apply: two years for applications made on or before 31 December 2026, and 18 months for applications made on or after 1 January 2027, with three years for those who completed a doctorate. If you are planning around the boundary date, that difference is worth six months of runway.

State the actual expiry month. "Graduate visa" alone tells the employer nothing about how long they get before a decision is due, and hiring managers who have been burned before will assume the shorter answer. Naming the date also frames the conversation: an employer who is nervous about sponsorship still hears that they have a year and a half of no-cost, no-paperwork employment before the question arises, and by then you will have proven yourself.

3. You have a dependant, spouse or partner visa

Write: "UK dependant visa with unrestricted right to work, valid until [Month Year]. No sponsorship or certificate of sponsorship required."

Dependant partner visas on the Skilled Worker and most work routes carry no employment restriction, and the same is true of leave granted as the partner of a British citizen or settled person. Recruiters frequently do not know this, and the word "dependant" alone reads as a complication. The phrase "no certificate of sponsorship required" is the one that lands, because CoS is the specific piece of admin the hiring team is trying to avoid.

4. You need sponsorship

Write: "Requires UK Skilled Worker sponsorship. Currently based in [City, Country] and available from [Month Year]."

Say it plainly and say it early. The alternative, burying it and hoping to charm your way past it at second interview, costs you a company you might have converted and costs a hiring team a slot they will remember. If you have checked the register and the employer holds a Skilled Worker licence, you can go one step further and show that you have done the homework, which separates you from every other applicant who applied blind.

A stronger version for a confirmed sponsor: "Requires UK Skilled Worker sponsorship. [Employer] holds a Home Office Skilled Worker sponsor licence; role and salary meet the route requirements." That belongs in the cover letter rather than the CV header, and only when you have verified both halves of the claim.

Tip: Do not write "Tier 2". That route was replaced by Skilled Worker at the end of 2020, and the only Tier 2 label still current on the sponsor register is Tier 2 Ministers of Religion. Writing "Tier 2 sponsorship" on a 2026 CV signals that your research is five years stale.

How a right to work check actually works, and why it matters to your wording

Employers do not verify your status from your CV. They run a formal right to work check, and understanding its mechanics tells you exactly how much detail your CV needs, which is very little.

The check is a compliance step tied to an offer, not a screening step tied to an application. That is why your CV line should be a summary and never a document dump. It also explains why employers ask the sponsorship question on the form: they are budgeting and planning, not verifying.

What an employer may and may not ask

The Home Office publishes a Code of practice for employers: avoiding unlawful discrimination while preventing illegal working. It was updated on 30 June 2026, with a revised version taking effect on 1 October 2026 to reflect digital checks and eVisas. The principle running through it is that employers must apply right to work requirements consistently and must not treat applicants differently on the basis of nationality, ethnicity or perceived immigration status.

In practice this means two things for you. First, an employer asking every applicant "will you now or in the future require sponsorship?" is on solid ground, because the question is applied to everyone. Second, an employer who asks you specifically about your nationality, demands documents from you and not from other candidates, or rejects you for offering an immigration document rather than a share code is not. If you experience that, it is worth knowing the code exists and that the relevant regulator is not the Home Office but the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Where the line goes, physically

Placement matters more than most people expect, because UK CVs are scanned in a fixed reading order and the first third of page one carries most of the weight.

One more structural point. If you are on a Graduate visa or a dependant visa, keep your UK address and a UK mobile number in the header. An overseas number next to a "right to work in the UK" line creates a contradiction the reader has to resolve, and readers under time pressure resolve contradictions by moving to the next CV.

A short workflow that beats rewriting the sentence for the tenth time

The candidates who struggle most in the UK market are rarely the ones who need sponsorship. They are the ones who already have the right to work and never said so, and the ones who needed sponsorship and spent three months applying to employers who were never able to give it. Both problems are solved by the same fifteen minutes of checking and the same single line of text.

Rules on this route move fast, and they have moved twice in the last two years. Before you rely on any figure here, confirm it against the current GOV.UK pages for the Skilled Worker visa, the Graduate visa and Appendix Skilled Occupations, and download a fresh copy of the sponsor register on the day you build your shortlist. This article is general information about UK hiring convention and CV practice, not immigration advice for your circumstances.

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