Community

The Home Office published its final decision on Earned Settlement today. The headline is that Indefinite Leave to Remain moves from five years to ten.

If you are on a Skilled Worker visa, that is the whole story, and it is less alarming than it sounds. Your years here still count. The finish line moved, not your start line. Four years in means six more to go, not nine.

But there is a second change underneath it that almost nobody is reporting.

The Government says the Long Residence route will close. Right now, ten years of continuous lawful residence qualifies you for settlement, whatever visas those years were spent on — student years included. Under the framework as announced, that route goes, and time on Student, Graduate, High Potential Individual, Youth Mobility, Seasonal Worker and several other temporary routes will not count towards settlement at all.

None of this is law yet. What was published today is a policy document, and it names no commencement date. Rules are expected to start being laid in December and to come in across 2027. Be careful with anyone claiming certainty on dates this week, including us.

If it lands as written, though, someone nine years into life here on a student visa goes from twelve months away from settlement to no qualifying residence at all.

The simplest way to work out where you stand: count only the years you have spent on a route that counts. That figure stands. Everything else is gone. So seven years of study plus two on Skilled Worker is not zero — but it is two years, not nine, and the wait goes from two more years to eight.

The document says nothing about people part-way through a Long Residence claim. But when the Home Office raised the settlement English requirement earlier this year, the drafting protected applications already made and keyed the new standard to the date you apply. That is how these changes are normally written. It is not a promise, and it is why you should apply as early as you lawfully can rather than wait and see.

Care workers: if you entered or switched into the route before May 2025, you keep the five-year path, provided you meet the £25,000 salary and sponsorship requirements. After May 2025, it is ten years. And from 1 February 2027, if your sponsor loses its licence, you get 120 days to find a new job offer and 180 days in total — longer than other sponsored workers.

Three things worth doing now:

• Work out the exact date your continuous lawful residence began, from your grants and travel history rather than memory. Gaps and absences have their own rules. People are often further along than they think.
• If you are close to ten years, treat it as a deadline and see a regulated adviser — not a forum, not us, and not anyone who messages you on WhatsApp offering to fix your status. Several charities advise free of charge.
• Book your English test and the Life in the UK test. This is the one firm date: B1 is enough if you apply before 26 March 2027, B2 from then, and that part is already written into the rules.

All four pathways, the earnings thresholds, the mandatory requirements and the four things still undecided: https://www.ukvisajobs.com/resources/uk-earned-settlement-what-the-new-10-year-ilr-rules-mean-for-you-1

Ask below if you are not sure which group you fall into. We will not guess at your case, but we can point you at the right part of the rules.

Source: A Fairer Pathway to Settlement — Government Response to the Consultation, CP 1707, Home Office, 2 November 2026. General information, not immigration advice.