Everything on this site comes from one file: the Home Office Register of licensed sponsors: workers. It is authoritative, free, and almost unusable in its raw form. Here is how to read it properly.
What the register is
It is the complete list of organisations licensed to sponsor workers on the Worker and Temporary Worker routes. If an employer is not on it, that employer cannot sponsor anyone — no exceptions, no pending status that lets them proceed.
It is published as a CSV on GOV.UK and refreshed constantly as licences are granted, downgraded and revoked. There are currently over 125,000 records.
What each column means
| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Organisation Name | The legal entity holding the licence — often not the trading or brand name. |
| Town/City | The address the Home Office holds. Usually the head office, not necessarily where the job is. |
| County | Where given. Frequently blank. |
| Type & Rating | Licence category plus the compliance rating, e.g. “Worker (A rating)”. See what ratings mean. |
| Route | The specific route they can sponsor on — Skilled Worker, Creative Worker, Charity Worker, and so on. |
The three things that confuse everyone
1. Duplicate rows are not errors
The file has one row per route. A university licensed for Skilled Worker, Government Authorised Exchange and Temporary Worker routes appears three times. You are looking at routes, not companies.
2. The name is the legal entity
The restaurant chain you know by its brand may be licensed as “XYZ Holdings (UK) Ltd”. If a search returns nothing, try the parent company, the operating company, or a distinctive fragment of the name rather than the brand.
3. A licence is not a job offer
The register tells you an employer may sponsor. It says nothing about whether they are hiring, whether they will sponsor for your particular role, or whether the salary meets the threshold. Treat it as a filter on your job search, not a lead list.
Downloading the CSV
The official CSV is linked from the GOV.UK “Register of licensed sponsors: workers” page. Expect a file of well over 100,000 rows — it will open in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, but filtering it usefully takes some work. If you just want to answer “can this company sponsor me?”, the searchable version below is faster.
Searching without a spreadsheet
We rebuild the same data into something you can query directly:
- Full sponsor list — search by organisation name, filter by town, route, and type and rating.
- Sponsors by city — every town with licensed sponsors, with counts.
- Company directory A–Z — browse alphabetically when you are not sure of the exact legal name.
- Recently added sponsors — organisations newly granted a licence, often actively recruiting internationally.
How current is it?
Our copy is refreshed automatically from the official GOV.UK file, several times a day, so additions and removals flow through without manual updates. That matters: an employer downgraded to B-rated last week cannot assign you a Certificate of Sponsorship this week, and a stale third-party list will not tell you that.
Using it well
- Search the employer's exact legal name before an interview.
- Confirm the route matches the visa you need.
- Confirm the rating is A, not B.
- Check your occupation is eligible in the codes table.
- Estimate your costs with the calculator.