UK Visa Sponsor Register - Skilled Worker Licensed Sponsors

Search and export the UK Home Office register of licensed sponsors — every organisation licensed to sponsor workers on the Skilled Worker route and the other Worker and Temporary Worker routes (Global Business Mobility, Creative Worker, Charity Worker, Religious Worker, International Sportsperson, Scale-up, Seasonal Worker and more). Each run reads the current register straight from GOV.UK, so you always get the latest version (the Home Office updates it most working days). No account, no API key, no browser.

Filter by organisation name, town or county, visa route and rating, and get clean JSON / CSV / Excel rows. Typical uses: checking whether an employer can sponsor a visa, building lists of sponsoring employers in a city or sector for job searches, and monitoring the register for a list of companies.

Quick start — verified input

{
  "maxItems": 100
}

An empty input {} does the same: the first 100 sponsors of the register (alphabetical order), in a few seconds.

More examples

Skilled Worker sponsors in Manchester:

{
  "towns": ["Manchester"],
  "routes": ["Skilled Worker"],
  "maxItems": 5000
}

Is this company a licensed sponsor?

{
  "organisationNames": ["rolls-royce", "google"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Every sponsor with a B rating (sponsors that must follow an action plan):

{
  "ratings": ["B"],
  "maxItems": 1000
}

The whole register:

{
  "maxItems": 1000000
}

Input

All fields are optional. Different filters combine with AND; values inside one filter are alternatives (OR).

Field	What it does	Example
organisationNames	Part of the organisation name (any case; accents, punctuation and "&"/"and" ignored).	["tesco", "nhs foundation trust"]
towns	Town/city or county, as whole words ("London" also matches "Greater London", not "Londonderry").	["Leeds", "Kent"]
routes	Words of the visa route. Shortcuts: GBM (Global Business Mobility), ICT, Minister of Religion, Sportsperson, Scaleup.	["Skilled Worker"]
ratings	A (A rating, including A (Premium) and A (SME+)), B, Premium, SME+, Provisional (UK Expansion Worker: Provisional).	["A"]
maxItems	Stop after this many rows (1 to 1,000,000). Default 100.	5000
proxyConfiguration	Not needed (GOV.UK serves the register to Apify datacenter IPs).	off

Routes seen in the register (October 2026): Skilled Worker; Global Business Mobility: Senior or Specialist Worker / Graduate Trainee / UK Expansion Worker / Service Supplier / Secondment Worker; Tier 2 Ministers of Religion; Creative Worker; Charity Worker; International Sportsperson; Religious Worker; Government Authorised Exchange; International Agreement; Scale-up; Seasonal Worker; Tier 2 General; Intra-company Routes; Intra Company Transfers (ICT). Health and Care Worker visas are part of the Skilled Worker route (the register does not list them separately).

Output

One row per register line (an organisation appears once per route it is licensed for):

{
  "organisationName": "Rolls-Royce plc",
  "townCity": "Derby",
  "county": null,
  "typeAndRating": "Worker (A rating)",
  "sponsorType": "Worker",
  "rating": "A rating",
  "route": "Skilled Worker",
  "registerDate": "2026-10-14",
  "registerUpdatedAt": "2026-10-14T10:57:11.000Z",
  "registerFileUrl": "https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6acf5ba471dbe79328fd44d4/SP_-_Worker_and_Temporary_Worker_Web_Register_-_2026-10-14.csv",
  "source": "Register of licensed sponsors: workers - UK Visas and Immigration (Home Office), published on GOV.UK",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/register-of-licensed-sponsors-workers",
  "license": "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. ...",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-10-14T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Field	Meaning
organisationName	Organisation name as registered (spacing tidied)
townCity, county	Town/city and county as registered (null when empty; many rows have no county)
typeAndRating	As published, e.g. "Worker (A rating)", "Temporary Worker (A (Premium))"
sponsorType, rating	The same split in two: "Worker" / "Temporary Worker" and "A rating", "B rating", "A (Premium)", "A (SME+)", "UK Expansion Worker: Provisional"
route	The visa route the licence covers
registerDate, registerUpdatedAt	The register version: the date in the file name and when GOV.UK last updated the publication
registerFileUrl	The CSV file the row came from
source, sourceUrl, license, retrievedAt	Attribution on every row

A RUN_SUMMARY record in the run's key-value store holds the register version, rows read, how many rows were left out (by rule — numbers only), repeats skipped, and whether the run was complete.

Personal names are left out

Some "organisation names" in the register are individuals — sole traders and partners (for example a person's name followed by "t/a" and a shop name). The Open Government Licence does not cover personal data, so this Actor leaves out every row whose name reads as an individual, and never shows those names anywhere (dataset, log or summary). It drops a row when the name:

• starts with a personal title (Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, Dr, Messrs, Sir, ...);
• contains "sole trader", "sole proprietor" or "self employed";
• contains "t/a", "T/A", "trading as" or a similar marker — unless the part before the marker is clearly a company or institution (it ends with Ltd, Limited, LLP, PLC, CIC, LLC, Inc, Trust, NHS, Council, University, School, Group, Holdings, ...) and the trade name after the marker passes the same checks (no personal title, no first name followed by another word, not two plain words that are neither a company nor a facility). Such rows are kept and shown as registered, "t/a" included, e.g. "Example Holdings Ltd t/a Riverside Pharmacy";
• has a person in brackets or after a dash;
• starts with a business word and "of" ("Firm of", "Partnership of", "Practice of", "Estate of", "Executors of", ...) followed by a person's name;
• is not a company or institution and starts with initials, a common first name or surname, or two plain words (the shape of "First-name Last-name Pharmacy"), or has no word that shows an organisation at all.

The check errs on the side of leaving rows out: on the 14 October 2026 register it left out 12,320 of 143,229 rows (8.6%), including some genuine businesses (for example small businesses named like a person, and companies whose trade name reads like one). Companies (Ltd, PLC, LLP, ...) and institutions (NHS trusts, universities, councils, schools, charities, clubs, churches) are kept. If you cannot find a small business, check the register on GOV.UK.

Exact repeats in the register (same name, town, county, type & rating and route, ignoring case) are returned once, and a town or county cell that holds a house number or postcode is left empty.

How it works, speed and cost

Each run makes two requests: the GOV.UK Content API entry of the register publication (to find today's file) and the CSV file itself (about 11 MB). The file is read as it downloads, filtered in memory (nothing is stored) and the download stops as soon as maxItems rows are found.

• Searches that reach maxItems early (the Quick start, broad filters) finish in about 3 seconds.
• A search that has to read the whole file but returns few rows (a name lookup, a narrow filter) also takes only seconds: the file is small.
• The full export (about 130,000 rows) takes about 4 minutes at the default 256 MB (measured in October 2026) — writing the rows to the dataset is the slow part. Memory stayed under 90 MB.

Empty results?

A run that finds nothing still succeeds with 0 rows and a warning in the log. Typical causes:

• The name is spelled differently in the register — try one distinctive word ("rolls" instead of "Rolls Royce Holdings").
• The town is filed under another name or only under the county — try the county, or leave the town out.
• The organisation's name reads as an individual's (see above) — those rows are left out by design.
• The organisation is not licensed for the route you filtered on, or it is on the separate student sponsor register (not covered).
• Too many filters combined — all of them must match.

Legal and attribution

• Unofficial tool. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration or the UK Government. It does not use their logos or crests and does not suggest any official status.
• It reads only the public register file published on GOV.UK and the public GOV.UK Content API, which GOV.UK documents for use by anyone ("Anyone can use this API for any purpose"), at a polite pace (two requests per run, robots.txt respected).
• The data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. If you publish or redistribute it, include the attribution statement "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0." (it is on every row in license).
• The register is a snapshot published by the Home Office "as is"; a sponsor's status can change at any time. Check GOV.UK before relying on a row for a decision.
• You are responsible for how you use the data, including UK GDPR / the Data Protection Act 2018 and the PECR rules on electronic marketing. Organisation names can still contain personal names (for example a company named after its founder); treat them accordingly.

Issues and feedback

Found a problem or need another filter? Open an issue on the Issues tab with the run ID.