UK Earned Settlement: What the New 10-Year ILR Rules Mean for You
Reviewed by: UK Visa Jobs Editorial Team | Estimated reading time: 6–8 minutes
On 2 November 2026, the Home Office published its final decision on Earned Settlement. The standard qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain moves from five years to ten.
If you are on a Skilled Worker visa, your years in the UK still count. You are not starting again. The finish line has moved, not the start line. Four years in now means six more to go instead of one.
If you have built your time here on a Student or Graduate visa, the picture is different, and worse than the headlines suggest. The Government says the Long Residence route will close, and that time will no longer count towards settlement at all.
None of this is law yet. What was published is a policy document, not a change to the Immigration Rules. Rules are expected to begin being laid from the December 2026 Statement of Changes and to be implemented across 2027. The paper itself names no commencement date for anything. Treat every date below as the Government's stated intention, not a settled deadline.
The simplest way to work out where you stand is to count only the years you have spent on a route that counts towards settlement. Whatever that figure is, it stands. Time on routes that don't count is gone, no matter how long it was.
In This Article
- What was announced on 2 November 2026
- The four settlement pathways
- What everyone has to meet, whatever they earn
- The change almost nobody is reporting: Long Residence is closing
- If you are on a Skilled Worker visa
- Care workers and the May 2025 cut-off
- What is still undecided
- What this changes about your job search
- What to do in the next eight weeks
- Frequently asked questions
- Final thoughts
What was announced on 2 November 2026
The document is called A Fairer Pathway to Settlement: Government Response to the Consultation. It runs to 62 pages, and it is the final policy, not a proposal.
204,667 people responded to the consultation that preceded it. 84 per cent of individuals and 79 per cent of organisations disagreed with the changes. The Government has gone ahead with them.
The principle is that settlement should be earned rather than granted on time served. In practice that means a ten-year baseline, with shorter paths for higher earners and certain public service workers, and longer paths for anyone who has breached the immigration rules or is claiming public funds.
You can read the full government response or the consultation page on GOV.UK.
The four settlement pathways
"Years" here means the minimum qualifying period before you can apply.
| Pathway | What you need |
| 3 years — exceptional economic contribution | Earned £125,141 in three of the last four years, or qualify through the highest talent group |
| 5 years — higher earners, eligible public service workers, people with a British connection | Earned £50,271 in three of the last five years, or five years in an eligible health or education occupation, or a recognised British connection |
| 10 years — the new default for everyone else | Earned £12,571 in five of the last seven years |
| 20 years — a qualifying immigration breach, or continuing to claim public funds | Earned £12,571 in five of the last seven years |
The earnings thresholds are tied to income tax bands and will move whenever those bands move.
Earnings are assessed on a best-year basis, so a period of maternity leave, caring responsibility or illness does not by itself push you onto a longer path. A couple can also combine their income to meet a household threshold of £25,142.
The five-year public service route covers health and education roles paid on national pay scales at degree level or above. That includes doctors, all registered nurse grades, midwives, pharmacists, optometrists, dentists, radiographers, paramedics, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, psychologists, primary, secondary, further education, nursery and special needs teachers, head teachers and social workers.
Care workers and support workers are not on that list. Neither are nursing auxiliaries or teaching assistants, except under the transitional arrangement described below.
What everyone has to meet, whatever they earn
Five requirements are mandatory on every pathway and cannot be offset by a higher salary.
You must have no criminal record. This is much stricter than the current rule, which bites at a sentence of twelve months or more. Fines, cautions, community sentences and conditional discharges will all count.
You must have no outstanding debt to the Government, including NHS debt, unpaid tax and National Insurance.
You must demonstrate English at B2 level, up from B1 today. This one is already in the Immigration Rules: Statement of Changes HC 1691, laid on 5 March 2026, amends Appendix KOLL so that an applicant who applies before 26 March 2027 needs B1 and an applicant who applies on or after that date needs B2.
You must pass the Life in the UK test, which the Home Office is reviewing separately.
You must also not have claimed specified public funds in the five years before you apply. If you have, you are on the twenty-year path.
Volunteering was considered as a way to shorten the qualifying period, but it has been dropped. Holding C1 English rather than B2 earns you nothing either.
The change almost nobody is reporting: Long Residence is closing
At the moment, ten years of continuous lawful residence in the UK qualifies you for settlement regardless of which visas those ten years were spent on. Student years count. Graduate visa years count. The route exists precisely for people who have built a decade here without ever landing on a settlement visa.
Under Earned Settlement, the Government says that route will close.
Which routes stop counting
Separately, time spent on these routes will not count towards settlement at all: Visit, Student, Graduate, High Potential Individual, Youth Mobility, Seasonal Worker, Global Business Mobility, Overseas Domestic Worker, the Ukraine schemes and leave granted outside the rules.
The routes that do count are longer-term work, talent and family routes: Skilled Worker, Health and Care Worker visa, Global Talent, Scale-up, Innovator Founder, International Sportsperson, UK Ancestry, Minister of Religion, family partner and parent routes, and stateless person.
Time on a work route also cannot be combined with time on a protection or human rights route. If you move between those families, the clock for the new pathway starts when you move onto it.
If you are nine years in on a student visa
This is the group the headlines are missing.
Someone who has been in the UK for nine years on a student visa is, today, twelve months away from settlement through Long Residence.
Under the announced framework, they would have no qualifying residence at all. They would need to move onto a route that counts, and then complete the full qualifying period from that point.
The government response says nothing whatsoever about people part-way through a Long Residence claim. The only cohort cut-off anywhere in the document is May 2025, and it covers care workers and certain health and education staff.
That silence is not the same as the rules being silent, and this is the one piece of genuinely encouraging evidence we can point to. When the Home Office raised the settlement English requirement, it did two protective things in the drafting: it keyed the new standard to the date of application, and its implementation section provided that applications made before the change date would be decided under the rules in force the day before. That is standard practice, and it is recent.
So there are two live possibilities for this group, and nobody can currently tell them apart. Either the closing rules carry a similar provision, an application lodged before commencement is decided under the current rules, and nothing happens to you. Or they do not, or the closure commences before you reach ten years, and the time is lost.
That uncertainty argues for moving sooner rather than waiting. If you cannot know when the door closes, and an application made before it may well be protected, then reaching ten years and applying as early as you lawfully can is the safest course available.
If you are on a Skilled Worker visa
The position here is simpler and far less alarming.
Your existing time counts. The Home Office is explicit that the length of the qualifying period changes, not the start of your clock. Of the Skilled Workers forecast to settle between 2026 and 2030, 146,000 move to the ten-year path, 86,000 to the five-year path and 27,000 to the three-year path.
The practical consequence is that your salary now buys years, not just money. The gap between £50,271 and the band below it is the difference between five and ten years.
The fifteen-year pathway for workers in roles below degree level that appeared in the consultation has been dropped. Those workers are on the ten-year path, with the chance to move onto a shorter one if their earnings or occupation later qualify.
Care workers and the May 2025 cut-off
If you entered or switched into the care worker route before the Immigration White Paper was published in May 2025, you keep the existing five-year qualifying period, provided you meet the applicable salary of £25,000 a year along with the sponsorship and employment requirements.
If you do not qualify at five years, you can apply for a further five-year Health and Care visa restricted to genuine work in the sector, and try again. You would have no recourse to public funds throughout that period.
If you switched into the route after May 2025, the transitional arrangement does not apply, and you are on the standard ten-year path.
There is one clear improvement here. From 1 February 2027, a care worker who loses their job because their sponsor's licence was revoked will have 120 days to secure a new job offer and 180 days in total to resolve their status. That is longer than other sponsored workers get, and the Home Office has granted it because of the scale of sponsor failure in the sector.
Workers in health and education occupations below degree level that sit on national pay scales, such as nursing auxiliaries and teaching assistants, also keep a five-year route, but only if they arrived before May 2025. It is a one-off arrangement for the existing group, not a permanent pathway.
What is still undecided
This is a policy document. Several things that will determine real applications are still open.
When each part commences. The response names no date for anything. "Begin being laid" and "implemented over the course of 2027" both point to phasing, and the paper does not say which element arrives when.
Whether applications made before the rules change are decided under the old rules. A Statement of Changes normally says so expressly, and the most recent settlement change did. This document does not address it.
How anyone part-way through a Long Residence claim will be treated. The response is silent, and they are the group with the most to lose.
Whether the earnings test looks backwards. The test is framed as earnings in the years immediately before you apply, which for someone applying in 2029 reaches back to 2022, when no such requirement existed, and nobody was keeping records for it. The Home Office says only that further guidance will follow before implementation.
Which benefits count as public funds for this purpose, and what the exemptions will be.
Be careful with anyone claiming certainty on these four points this week. Nobody has it yet.
What this changes about your job search
This is the part most coverage will skip, and for anyone still looking for a sponsored role, it is the part that actually matters.
Salary now buys years, not just money
Under the current system, the difference between a £45,000 offer and a £52,000 offer is £7,000 a year. Under Earned Settlement, it is £7,000 and five years of your life, because £50,271 is the line between the five-year and the ten-year path.
That changes how a negotiation is worth approaching, and it changes which roles are worth the effort of applying for. If you are sitting just below the threshold, closing that gap is probably the highest-value move available to you, and it is worth more than most things people spend a year chasing.
Aim comfortably above the line rather than at it. The threshold is pinned to the higher rate of income tax and will rise, and you need to clear it in three of the five years before you apply, not once.
For some people, occupation beats salary
A nurse earning £37,000 would be on the five-year path. A marketing manager earning £48,000 would be on the ten-year path. The eligible health and education occupations qualify based on the occupation itself, regardless of pay.
So if you are already working in or near health or education, moving onto the qualifying list may be worth more than a pay rise, and it is often more achievable. It is the one place in this framework where a lower-paid job gets you there faster.
Check the route, not just whether the employer sponsors
This is new, and it is easy to miss. It is no longer enough to know that an employer will sponsor you. What matters is which route they sponsor you on.
Time on Global Business Mobility, the temporary worker routes and seasonal work will not count towards settlement at all. Those roles can still be the right choice for other reasons, but they build nothing towards permanent status, and before Earned Settlement some of that time would eventually have counted through Long Residence.
Ask which visa route the sponsorship will be under before you accept, and treat a Skilled Worker or Health and Care sponsorship as materially different from the alternatives.
If you are on a Graduate visa, the switch date is your clock
Every month spent on a Graduate visa is a month that does not count. Your qualifying period starts when you move onto a route that does.
Taking a year to find the perfect role has always had a cost. It is now a much larger one, because that year buys you nothing towards settlement and the Graduate visa itself has a hard end date.
Employer stability matters more over ten years than five
If your path to settlement doubles in length, your exposure to a sponsor failing, losing its licence or making you redundant roughly doubles with it. Over five years you might have got through on luck. Over ten, the quality of the employer is part of the immigration plan rather than just a career preference.
That is worth weighing against salary. A slightly lower offer from an employer with a long sponsorship record and real hiring volume may be the safer ten-year bet than a higher offer from a company that has sponsored two people ever.
You can check an employer's actual sponsorship history, rather than just whether they hold a licence, in our sponsor directory before you apply. A licence says an employer may sponsor. The certificate figures say who actually did.
What to do in the next eight weeks
Work out the exact date your continuous lawful residence began, from your actual grants and travel history rather than memory. Absences and gaps have their own rules and can break continuity. People are often further along than they assume.
If you are close to ten years of lawful residence, treat this as a deadline. Find a regulated immigration adviser through the official register, or use one of the immigration charities that advise for free. Avoid anyone who approaches you on social media offering to fix your status.
Book your English test and the Life in the UK test if you have not already. This is the one firm deadline on the page: B1 is enough for a settlement application made before 26 March 2027, and B2 is required from that date, and it is already written into the rules rather than merely announced.
Check whether your occupation is on the five-year public service list. If it is, your pathway may be much shorter than the headlines imply, no matter what you earn.
And if your route to a shorter pathway is salary rather than occupation, the gap between pay bands is now worth years of your life as well as money. That changes which roles are worth applying for. You can browse sponsored vacancies on UK Visa Jobs to see what is currently available at each level.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does my time in the UK reset to zero?
Only if every year you have is on a route that will not count. Count your years on qualifying routes: that figure stands, and the qualifying period around it gets longer. Someone with seven years on a student and Graduate visa and two years on a Skilled Worker visa is not back to zero, but they do keep only the two years, so their remaining wait moves from two years to eight.
When do the new rules take effect?
Nobody can tell you precisely yet, because the response names no commencement date. The Government has said rules will begin being laid from December 2026 and be implemented across 2027. The one date already fixed in the Immigration Rules is the B2 English requirement for settlement applications made on or after 26 March 2027.
I am four years into a Skilled Worker visa. What happens to me?
You would need ten years rather than five, so six more years rather than one, unless you reach the £50,271 threshold in three of the five years before you apply or your occupation is on the public service list. Both of those put you on the five-year path.
Does this change how long it takes to become a British citizen?
The response does not change the citizenship rules themselves. But naturalisation usually follows settlement, so a ten-year route to settlement pushes citizenship out correspondingly.
Will my partner and children settle with me?
A partner who arrived with you can settle at the same time. A partner who joined later completes the same qualifying period from when they arrived. Children under 18 are exempt from the income, debt, English and Life in the UK requirements. Young adults aged 18 to 24 who still hold child dependant status can settle with the family, but from 25 they are expected to qualify in their own right.
Final Thoughts
For most people on a sponsored work visa, this is a longer wait rather than a lost one, and the lever you have is your salary and your occupation.
For a smaller group who have spent years here on student and post-study visas, it is a genuine cliff edge, and the next few months are when something can still be done about it.
The honest summary is the one the Home Office's own figures give: over 500,000 people will reach settlement later than they would have under the current rules. Planning around what is actually happening is more useful than planning around what should have happened.
We will update this page as the December rules are laid. For the underlying requirements as they stand today, see our guide to Indefinite Leave to Remain, and the GOV.UK settlement pages.
About This Guide
This guide summarises A Fairer Pathway to Settlement: Government Response to the Consultation, published by the Home Office on 2 November 2026 as command paper CP 1707. All figures and qualifying periods are quoted from that document. The policy it describes is not yet in force and the document names no commencement date; the Immigration Rules that implement it are expected from December 2026 onwards, and the detail may change before then. The one exception is the B2 English requirement, which is already in the rules through Statement of Changes HC 1691 of 5 March 2026. Where this guide says the Government "says" or "will", read that as stated intention rather than current law.
Disclaimer
UK Visa Jobs is a job board and information service. Nothing on this page is immigration advice and it should not be relied on as a substitute for advice about your own circumstances. Immigration rules, fees and thresholds change frequently. Always check the current position on GOV.UK and, for your own case, speak to an adviser regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority or to an immigration solicitor.
