The Home Office have increased the number of available slots for the post-licence priority service, used for reporting changes in circumstances on a sponsor licence.
The Home Office has recently made changes to the post-licence priority service, used for reporting changes in circumstances on a sponsor licence.
By way of background, sponsors have a duty to report to the Home Office certain changes of circumstances to their organisation and individual sponsored workers. Failure to comply with this duty can lead to the suspension or revocation of the sponsor licence.
The standard processing time for reporting changes of circumstances is 18 weeks. These timescales can present problems for sponsors in cases where reports require prompt resolution – for example, where new key personnel are required on the licence or, in particular, where an additional allocation of Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS) is required. This latter issue can be especially time sensitive in circumstances where an employee’s existing visa is set to expire shortly, and a new CoS is required to extend their stay in the UK.
The priority service reduces the processing time for a change of circumstances request to five working days, for a fee of £350. However, to apply for this priority service, sponsors must submit a request for priority by email. As slots for the priority service are limited, and available only from 7am to 5pm Monday to Friday, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Home Office are inundated with priority service email requests at 7am each weekday, with sponsors scrabbling to get one of the few available slots. Very often, a request sent at 7:01am, for example, will be refused as all slots have already been used up.
Until recently, the number of priority slots was capped at 100 per day. However, on 27 April 2026 the Home Office confirmed that this had been increased to a minimum of 120 slots per day. The use of the word “minimum” is interesting, as it suggests that there may in fact be more than 120 slots available per day, although it is not clear in what circumstances more than 120 priority requests will be granted, nor what the maximum number is that can be approved in any one day (assuming that there is still some form of cap).
This increase in availability should improve access to the priority service and help sponsors ensure that changes to their circumstances are reflected on their licence more quickly. In particular, it should now be somewhat easier to obtain an allocation of CoS at short notice, although we would still recommend planning ahead and keeping track of when your sponsored workers’ visas are expiring to ensure that you have a sufficient annual allocation of CoS in place to renew visas.
That said, completing lifting the daily cap would have been preferable, and the somewhat clunky process for submitting a priority request remains less than ideal.
If you have any questions about this change, or if you require assistance with requesting a change of circumstances or an allocation of CoS using the priority service, please contact us at [email protected]
