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The cost of hiring an employee on a Skilled Worker visa is always either exaggerated or understated. The actual cost is not a blanket figure, and it varies by company and budget.

A UK employer who sponsors you on a Skilled Worker visa pays the Home Office roughly £4,485 for a three-year hire, before legal advice, before compliance time, and before they have paid you a penny.

You are likely to pay about the same again.

Almost every guide to sponsorship explains what you have to pay. Very few explain what the employer pays, which is the half that decides whether a vacancy is open to you at all. Here is the whole bill, split by who legally carries each part, with the figures checked on GOV.UK on 13 November 2026.

What the employer must pay, and cannot pass to you

👉 Certificate of Sponsorship: £525. One per sponsored worker. Sponsor guidance Part 2, paragraph S2.13, is explicit: the employer is responsible for the fee and "must not recoup, or attempt to recoup, by any means, any part of the CoS fee, or associated administrative costs" from a worker sponsored under Skilled Worker on or after 31 December 2024.

👉 Immigration Skills Charge: £1,320 for the first twelve months, then £660 for each additional six months. Over three years, that is £3,960 for a medium or large sponsor. Paragraph S5.7 is blunter still: an employer must not pass on any of it, and "if we find out that you have done so, we will normally revoke your licence".

Those two together are the £4,485. It is charged per hire, every time.

👉 The sponsor licence: £1,682 for a medium or large organisation, £611 for a small or charitable one. This one is different in kind — it is paid once, lasts ten years, and covers every hire made in them. It is the cost of being allowed to sponsor at all, not the cost of sponsoring you.

What is legally yours — but is often negotiated

These are the applicant's responsibility in law. Nothing stops an employer from paying them, and many do, in whole or in part. It is a benefit, not an obligation, and it varies by company and by seniority.

👉 The visa application fee. Applying from outside the UK: £819 for up to three years and £1,618 for more than three. From inside the UK, £943 and £1,865. If the occupation is on the immigration salary list, £628 and £1,235.

👉 The immigration health surcharge: £1,035 per year for most applicants, so £3,105 across a three-year visa. This is the largest single item on your side of the bill and the one most often split or covered.

👉 Money to support yourself: £1,270 held in your account, unless your employer certifies that it will cover your first month.

👉 Legal fees. Not every employer uses an immigration solicitor, and those that do are paying for their own compliance, which they cannot bill to you under the same rule that covers the CoS fee. Advice you take on your own application is your own cost.

Outside the UK, on a three-year visa, not on the salary list, that is £819 plus £3,105, or £3,924 — before maintenance funds.

Some employers cover all of it as policy, and their reasoning is worth knowing. If the candidate carries the £3,924, the job quietly goes to whoever can front it rather than to whoever is best at it. Sponsorship costs are a hiring filter nobody designed, and the employers who have noticed tend to remove it deliberately. An employer that has thought about this will usually tell you so unprompted.

Covering everything is not a small gesture. A first sponsored hire where the employer pays the lot comes to £10,091 — £4,485 of their own, £3,924 of yours and £1,682 for the licence — before any legal advice. Every hire after that is £8,409, because the licence is already bought. And if you are bringing a partner or a child, add £3,924 again for each of them: the visa fee and the health surcharge apply per person.

Why this matters

About £4,500 on one side of the desk and about £4,000 on the other. Which side pays the second figure is negotiable. Whether the first figure gets paid at all is a budget decision, and it is usually taken long before your application arrives.

That is the honest explanation for something most job seekers read as personal. A company that replies "we don't sponsor" is rarely telling you that you were not good enough. It is telling you that a licence costs £1,682, that every sponsored hire costs £4,485 on top of salary, and that none of it can be recovered from the person hired.

It also explains a number we published earlier: of roughly 143,000 organisations holding a sponsor licence, only 8,658 have a recorded Certificate of Sponsorship for 2025. A licence means an employer can sponsor. The bill is a large part of why most of them do not.

And this gets worse, not better. Under the settlement reform announced in November 2026, the standard route to settlement doubles from five years to ten. The skills charge and the health surcharge are both annual, so a ten-year route costs an employer roughly £6,600 more per sponsored worker and the worker roughly £5,175 more — before the extra Certificate of Sponsorship and visa application fee at every extension. The reform is not yet law, and the detail may change, but the direction is fixed: more renewals, more fees, on both sides of the desk.

Two caveats, stated properly

Small sponsors pay less. A small or charitable organisation pays £611 for the licence and £480 for the first twelve months of the skills charge, then £240 per additional six months — £1,965 across three years including the CoS fee, rather than £4,485. The size test is turnover of £15 million or less, assets of £7.5 million or less, or 50 employees or fewer.

Some occupations are exempt from the skills charge entirely, including chemical, biological, physical and social scientists, biochemists, research and development managers, other researchers and higher education teaching professionals. If you work in research or academia, the single largest employer cost does not apply to you, and that is worth saying out loud in an application.

All figures are the published Home Office fees in force on 13 November 2026, and they change, usually in April. Check GOV.UK before quoting them to an employer.

What to do with this

• Ask early and ask plainly. At offer stage, "which of the visa costs does the company cover?" is a normal question, and the answer tells you how practised the employer is at sponsoring.
• Do not read a refusal to sponsor as a judgement on you. Read it as a budget you were never shown.
• And spend your applications on employers that have sponsored recently, rather than on the full register of those merely licensed to. The cost is the reason that distinction matters so much.

What costs do you think the employer should cover?