The Home Office have announced fee increases affecting a number of visa routes and applications.
In a surprise announcement late on 19 March 2025, the Home Office published a table of upcoming fee changes taking effect from 9 April 2025. You can view the full table here, but we have outlined the headline points below.
For businesses:
For those businesses considering obtaining a sponsor licence to sponsor and hire migrant workers, the cost of submitting a sponsor licence application is increasing. For large sponsors, the fee will increase from £1,476 to £1,579, while for small sponsors the fee increase will be from £536 to £574.
Once you have a sponsor licence in place, you need to assign a Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) to each worker you want to sponsor – both when you first hire them and when they extend their visa. The fee to assign a CoS on most work routes was previously a relatively measly £239 – but this is set to more than double, with the new fee being £525!
For individuals:
The application fee for Skilled Worker visas is increasing by around 7% across the board, regardless of the length of the visa and whether the application is made from overseas or from within the UK. This means that the fee for a five-year Skilled Worker visa application submitted inside the UK is now £1,751.
The route to settlement and citizenship will also get more expensive – the indefinite leave to remain fee has crossed the £3,000 threshold, up from £2,885 to £3,029. And the fee to apply for naturalisation (or British citizenship) is increasing from the nice and round figure of £1,500 to a slightly less round £1,605.
Conclusion
Perhaps the one saving grace of these fee increases is that there are no planned increases to the Immigration Health Surcharge or Immigration Skills Charge – two fees which are charged per year of visa length, and can therefore rack up quite quickly, often forming the bulk of a sponsor or visa applicant’s costs.
In some ways, then, these fee increases are less damaging than the significant increase to the Immigration Health Surcharge in February 2024, when it rose from £624 to £1,035 for most applicants (representing a £2,055 cost increase over the lifetime of a five-year visa) – albeit sponsors and applicants have received far less warning in respect of these latest fee increases than they did for the Surcharge.
Still, if you were already interested in applying for a sponsor licence, assigning a Certificate of Sponsorship, or submitting a visa application in the near future, then you may want to consider accelerating your plans to give yourself the best chance of avoiding these higher fees.
If you would like support with sponsoring workers or applying for your visa, please do get in touch at [email protected]
