The Home Office publishes the Register of Licensed Sponsors as a raw CSV — a flat list of 130,030 organisation names. We matched it against the full Companies House register to answer the questions the CSV can't: which sectors sponsor, how young the companies are, where they are, and what state they're in.
Statistics computed 4 October 2026 · sources: Home Office, Companies House (OGL v3.0) · raw JSON · methodology
A sponsor licence covers one or more visa routes. The Skilled Worker route dominates — 124,604 of 130,030 licence holders (95.8%) hold it. Because one organisation can be licensed on several routes, the column below sums to more than the number of organisations.
| Route | Organisations | % of all licence holders |
|---|---|---|
| Skilled Worker | 124,604 | 95.8% |
| Global Business Mobility: Senior or Specialist Worker | 10,523 | 8.1% |
| Tier 2 Ministers of Religion | 1,973 | 1.5% |
| Creative Worker | 1,607 | 1.2% |
| Charity Worker | 1,557 | 1.2% |
| International Sportsperson | 1,473 | 1.1% |
| Religious Worker | 1,446 | 1.1% |
| Global Business Mobility: Graduate Trainee | 636 | 0.5% |
| Global Business Mobility: UK Expansion Worker | 450 | 0.3% |
| Government Authorised Exchange | 246 | 0.2% |
| International Agreement | 135 | 0.1% |
| Scale-up | 95 | 0.1% |
| Global Business Mobility: Service Supplier | 56 | 0.0% |
| Seasonal Worker | 6 | 0.0% |
| Global Business Mobility: Secondment Worker | 6 | 0.0% |
| Tier 2 General | 5 | 0.0% |
| Intra Company Transfers (ICT) | 1 | 0.0% |
| Intra-company Routes | 1 | 0.0% |
99.84% of the register is A-rated. That is by design, not an anomaly: a B-rating is a transitional state the Home Office imposes after finding compliance problems, and a B-rated sponsor either works its way back to an A-rating or loses the licence — at which point it leaves the register entirely. The register shows who holds a licence today, not who has lost one.
| Rating | Organisations | % of register |
|---|---|---|
| A-rated | 129,825 | 99.84% |
| No rating recorded | 122 | 0.09% |
| B-rated (downgraded, on an action plan) | 83 | 0.06% |
The register itself says nothing about what a licence holder does. Matching against Companies House SIC codes (98,788 organisations matched with sector data — see methodology) shows the register is not just hospitals and tech firms: alongside 4,697 care providers and 7,332 software developers sit 4,616 takeaways, 740 barbering and beauty businesses, 340 taxi operators and 133 tobacco and vape retailers. These are register facts about sectors, not judgements about any business — the Home Office licenses each of them individually.
| Sector | Licence holders | % of sector-matched | …incorporated in last 24 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software development & programmingSIC 62011, 62012, 62090 | 7,332 | 7.42% | 319 |
| Construction (all trades)any SIC beginning 41, 42 or 43 | 5,919 | 5.99% | 122 |
| Convenience & grocery retailSIC 47110, 47190, 47240, 47290 | 5,831 | 5.90% | 168 |
| IT consultancySIC 62020 | 4,991 | 5.05% | 147 |
| Takeaways & fast foodSIC 56103 (take-away food shops), 56102 (unlicensed restaurants & cafés) | 4,616 | 4.67% | 217 |
| Care homes & domiciliary careSIC 87100, 87200, 87300, 88100 | 4,697 | 4.75% | 67 |
| Licensed restaurantsSIC 56101 | 3,884 | 3.93% | 208 |
| Medical & health practicesSIC 86210, 86220, 86900 | 3,832 | 3.88% | 75 |
| Recruitment & staffingany SIC beginning 781, 782 or 783 | 2,319 | 2.35% | 41 |
| Warehousing, postal & couriersany SIC beginning 52 or 53 | 1,447 | 1.46% | 52 |
| Schools & education providersSIC 85200, 85310, 85410, 85421, 85422 | 1,188 | 1.20% | 13 |
| Vehicle maintenance & repair (incl. car washes)SIC 45200 — the code covers garages, MOT bays and car washes alike; see the name-match row for explicit car washes | 973 | 0.98% | 29 |
| Legal practicesSIC 69101, 69102, 69109 | 781 | 0.79% | 32 |
| Barbers, hairdressing & beautySIC 96020 | 740 | 0.75% | 32 |
| Private securitySIC 80100 | 529 | 0.54% | 9 |
| Religious organisationsSIC 94910 | 451 | 0.46% | 5 |
| Taxi operationSIC 49320 | 340 | 0.34% | 1 |
| Tobacco & vape retailSIC 47260 | 133 | 0.13% | 1 |
| Nail bars (name match within 96020/96090)SIC 96020/96090 AND "nail" in the registered organisation name — an undercount by design | 50 | 0.05% | 1 |
| Hand car washes & valeting (name match)"car wash" / "hand wash" / "valeting" in the registered organisation name — an undercount by design | 18 | 0.02% | 0 |
2,784 licence-holding companies (2.7% of those matched) were incorporated within the last 24 months — companies that gained a Home Office sponsor licence within roughly their first two years of existence. The register's centre of gravity is much older: 37% of matched licence holders are 10–25-year-old companies.
| Company age | Licence holders | % of matched |
|---|---|---|
| Under 2 years | 2,784 | 2.7% |
| 2–5 years | 17,043 | 16.7% |
| 5–10 years | 30,617 | 30.1% |
| 10–25 years | 37,723 | 37.1% |
| Over 25 years | 13,589 | 13.4% |
By the town each organisation gives on the register. London alone accounts for 28.5% of all UK licence holders — more than the next nineteen towns combined.
| # | Town | Licence holders | % of register |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | London | 37,037 | 28.5% |
| 2 | Birmingham | 3,136 | 2.4% |
| 3 | Manchester | 2,918 | 2.2% |
| 4 | Leicester | 1,444 | 1.1% |
| 5 | Glasgow | 1,388 | 1.1% |
| 6 | Bristol | 1,310 | 1.0% |
| 7 | Edinburgh | 1,186 | 0.9% |
| 8 | Leeds | 1,101 | 0.8% |
| 9 | Nottingham | 1,067 | 0.8% |
| 10 | Ilford | 951 | 0.7% |
| 11 | Coventry | 925 | 0.7% |
| 12 | Reading | 922 | 0.7% |
| 13 | Slough | 886 | 0.7% |
| 14 | Milton Keynes | 860 | 0.7% |
| 15 | Cambridge | 848 | 0.7% |
| 16 | Harrow | 829 | 0.6% |
| 17 | Bradford | 749 | 0.6% |
| 18 | Liverpool | 746 | 0.6% |
| 19 | Luton | 727 | 0.6% |
| 20 | Sheffield | 697 | 0.5% |
Of the 101,789 licence holders matched to a live Companies House record, 2,197 are not in a simple “Active” state — they are in liquidation, in administration, subject to a voluntary arrangement, or the registrar has proposed striking them off, while still appearing on the sponsor register. Counts only: this page names no organisation. (Fully dissolved companies drop out of the Companies House bulk file, so they cannot be counted here — see methodology.)
| Company status | Licence holders |
|---|---|
| Active - Proposal to Strike off | 1,311 |
| Liquidation | 680 |
| In Administration | 93 |
| Voluntary Arrangement | 75 |
| Open | 28 |
| Closed-on | 5 |
| Live but Receiver Manager on at least one charge | 4 |
| In Administration/Administrative Receiver | 1 |
Beyond single companies, the register has structure: many licence holders share one registered office, and one person can control several. These are aggregate patterns drawn from Companies House registered-office postcodes and persons-with-significant-control data. Every figure below is a count or a distribution — this section names no company, no address occupant and no person, and asserts nothing about whether any of them is compliant.
The single most-used registered-office postcode — EC1V 2NX — is shared by 603 licence holders. A postcode like this is almost always a formation agent, accountant or serviced-office provider: a registered office is not a trading address, and the overwhelming majority of the companies at it are ordinary businesses that simply use the same incorporation service. These are counts, not judgements — no company is named.
| Licence holders sharing one postcode | Postcodes | Licence holders at them |
|---|---|---|
| 8 or more | 1,423 | 25,575 |
| 20 or more | 290 | 12,750 |
| 50 or more | 49 | 5,876 |
| 100 or more | 15 | 3,626 |
The Companies House bulk file lists live companies only, so a dissolved company simply drops out of it and can't be matched from it. We resolve the 13,591 unmatched licence holders whose registered name still contains “Ltd” or “Limited” against the Companies House search API. Of those resolved so far, 545 are recorded dissolved or closed at Companies House while still appearing on the sponsor register, and 569 were re-matched to a live company (raising the overall match rate). Count only — no organisation is named.
A single individual can be the person with significant control (PSC) behind several sponsor licence holders. Matching the register to Companies House PSC data surfaces how concentrated that control is — a legitimate aggregate question about the register, not a claim about any individual.
| Control footprint | People |
|---|---|
| Controls 3 or more licence-holding companies | 2,614 |
| Controls 5 or more licence-holding companies | 620 |
| Controls 10 or more licence-holding companies | 115 |
Of those, 1,834 control licence-holding companies registered at unrelated addresses — the pattern the register alone can't show. Aggregate counts only; this page never identifies a person or a company.
Your organisation is one of the 130,030 on this register. SponsorFlow turns the standing duties that come with that licence — right-to-work records, SMS reporting deadlines, per-pay-period salary monitoring, visa-expiry tracking — into a visit-ready evidence file.
Start free — see your register entry → What SponsorFlow does Compliance software, not immigration advice. Is this data about your organisation wrong? Email hello@sponsorguard.uk and we'll check it against the source registers.Sponsor register. The Home Office Register of Licensed Sponsors (Workers) — a public CSV of organisation name, town, route and rating. One organisation appears on multiple CSV rows (one per route/rating); we group those into one organisation record, giving 130,030 organisations in this snapshot. The register lists current licence holders only.
Companies House match. The register carries no company number, so we match each entry to the Companies House Free Company Data Product (the monthly bulk file of live UK companies) by postcode triangulation and fuzzy name match. 101,789 of 130,030 organisations matched (78.3%); 98,788 of those carry SIC codes. Unmatched entries include sole traders, partnerships, NHS bodies, charities and name/postcode mismatches — sector, age and status statistics therefore describe the matched subset, not the whole register, and every table states its denominator.
Sector groupings. Sectors are curated groupings of UK SIC 2007 codes (each table row states its codes). A company with several SIC codes can appear in more than one sector, so sector rows do not sum to the total. Two rows (hand car washes, nail bars) also require a name match because no SIC code isolates them — those counts are deliberate undercounts.
Company status. The Companies House bulk file contains live companies only; a fully dissolved company disappears from it (and our match keeps the last-seen status until the next refresh). The distress table therefore shows liquidation/administration/strike-off states we can positively observe, and cannot show dissolved-but-still-listed sponsors.
Network patterns. The registered-office concentration counts group matched licence holders by their Companies House registered-office postcode. A registered office is frequently a formation agent, accountant or serviced-office address shared by thousands of unrelated companies, so a busy postcode is a fact about incorporation services, not a signal about any company at it — the counts are published with that caveat and name nothing. The Ltd-unmatched resolution grinds licence holders whose name contains “Ltd”/“Limited” but which did not match the live bulk file against the Companies House public search API, classifying each as re-matched, dissolved, or still-unfound. The one-person-many-licences distribution matches the register to Companies House persons-with-significant-control (PSC) data; it is built by a background sweep and is shown only once a meaningful share (≥25%) of matched licence holders has been swept (currently 100%). All three are published as counts and distributions only — never a person, a company or an address occupant, and never a risk verdict about any of them.
Freshness. Register snapshots are refreshed on a rolling basis and diffed (additions, removals, route and rating changes). Statistics on this page are recomputed at most every 24 hours; this snapshot was computed 4 October 2026. The free JSON API serves the identical snapshot for citation and reuse.
What this page is not. It is not a per-company lookup, it names no organisation, and it makes no claim that any organisation is or is not compliant with its sponsor duties. Licensing decisions are the Home Office's alone.