How to move to the UK
written on 26th June 2026
UK Skilled Worker Visa: The Complete Guide
Your Graduate visa has a clock on it. Maybe eighteen months left, maybe less, and the job you want to keep needs a Skilled Worker visa to make it permanent. So you go looking, and the first number everyone throws at you is £41,700. It's a real number. It's also nowhere near the whole story, and the people who treat it as the whole story are the ones who get refused after spending months and a few thousand pounds finding out.
What follows is the route as it stands in 2026, with the figures checked against gov.uk and the Home Office rather than half-remembered from a Reddit thread. What you need to earn, what it costs, and the order to do things in.
What this visa actually is
A Skilled Worker visa ties you to one employer who holds a Home Office sponsor licence. No licence, no sponsorship, no application. That's the first thing people get wrong: you can't apply off your own back, however good your CV is. The job has to come from a licensed company, and you can check whether a given company actually holds a licence on the register of licensed sponsors. Do that before you fall for an offer, not after.
The other thing that changed, and changed hard in 2025, is what counts as skilled. Roles now have to sit at RQF Level 6, which is degree level. A lot of technician and support jobs that used to qualify simply don't anymore unless they appear on a shortage list. If your role feels skilled in practice but isn't graduate-level on paper, that gap is where applications quietly die.
The salary, which is never one number
People want a single figure. There isn't one. Your application has to clear whichever is higher of two things: the general threshold, or the going rate for your specific job.
The general threshold is the famous £41,700, in place since 22 July 2025, up from the old £38,700 / year . But that's just the floor of the floor. Every eligible occupation has its own going rate set by the Home Office from earnings data, and you can find yours in the Appendix Skilled Occupations using the exact SOC code your employer will put on your Certificate of Sponsorship. For a lot of professional roles the going rate is the higher number. If a developer's going rate is £45,000, then £45,000 is your floor, and the £41,700 headline is irrelevant to you.
So work out both, and take the bigger one. You can't do that without knowing your SOC code, and your employer is legally expected to know it.
Now the part that matters most if you're switching from a Student or Graduate visa. The new entrant rules cut you real slack. Your floor becomes the higher of £33,400 or 70% of the going rate, and both halves bite, so the £33,400 still sits underneath the percentage as a hard minimum. You qualify if you're under 26, switching from a Student or Graduate visa, in a postdoc, or training towards a professional chartership like accountancy or architecture.
One thing nobody tells graduates until it's too late: new entrant status runs out. Four years total, and that four years counts the time you've already spent on a Graduate visa. When it ends, you're back to the full £41,700 and the full going rate at your next extension. It buys you a head start, not a permanent discount, so don't build a five-year plan on it.
Healthcare sits on its own scale, with thresholds often in the £29,000 to £31,300 range and as low as £25,000 for some Agenda for Change roles. And if your job is on the Immigration Salary List, the general threshold drops to £33,400, but, and this catches people, you still have to hit 100% of the going rate, unlike the new entrant route.
Last thing on salary, because it sinks more applications than it should. Only guaranteed basic pay counts. Discretionary bonuses don't. Allowances that aren't written into your contract don't. Tips, commission, equity, overtime you're hoping to do, pension contributions: none of it counts toward the threshold. If your offer only clears the bar once you add a bonus, your offer doesn't clear the bar.
What it costs
The money splits into what's legally yours and what's legally the employer's, and it pays to know which is which before anyone tries to blur the line.
Yours is the visa fee and the health surcharge. From outside the UK the fee is £819 for up to three years, or £1,618 for longer. Inside the UK it's £943 and £1,865. Roles on the Immigration Salary List come down to £628 or £1,235.
Then the surcharge, which is the one that stings. The Immigration Health Surcharge runs £1,035 per adult per year, paid in full upfront for the whole length of the visa, with under-18s at a reduced £776. That's £3,105 over three years, £5,175 over five, per person. For a three-year application from outside the UK, fee plus surcharge lands at roughly £3,924 for one applicant.
The employer's side is theirs by law, and they can't push it onto you. The £525 Certificate of Sponsorship fee and the Immigration Skills Charge belong to the sponsor, full stop. If a company asks you to pay back the skills charge, that's a compliance breach on their end, not a bill you owe. Before you pay anything, confirm the exact figure for your visa length and location on the gov.uk cost page, because both change the number.
Bringing your family
If a partner or children are coming with you, count them as separate applicants from day one, because the total climbs fast here. Each one pays the same application fee you do, plus their own surcharge: adults at £1,035 a year, children under 18 at £776. A partner and two kids on a five-year visa can push the combined bill past £15,000 once you stack it all up.
There's also a savings test. Unless your employer certifies maintenance on your Certificate of Sponsorship, you have to show £1,270 for yourself, then £285 for a partner, £315 for a first child, and £200 for each child after that. The money has to sit in the account for 28 days in a row, ending shortly before you apply, and dipping below the line even once during those 28 days fails it. Set this up early. People lose applications to a badly timed bank transfer, which is a maddening way to fail.
Why 2026 is a year to move deliberately
Two changes are worth building your timing around.
First, English. From 8 January 2026, new applicants have to prove English at CEFR B2 across all four skills, reading, writing, speaking and listening. That's up from B1, so an old B1 result you've been counting on may no longer cut it. You can meet it with an approved Secure English Language Test, a degree taught in English and verified by UK ENIC, or by being a national of a majority English-speaking country. Settlement still sits at B1 for now but moves to B2 from 26 March 2027. If your evidence is old or marginal, deal with it before you apply, not in the final fortnight.
Second, a payroll rule almost nobody has heard of. From 8 April 2026, under a new paragraph called SW 14.3B, the Home Office can look past your headline annual salary and check whether you were actually paid enough across each individual pay period. If your pay moves around month to month, this is a live risk, and it can help to get your Certificate of Sponsorship allocated before 8 April, since earlier cases tend to be decided under the older rules. It bites hardest on variable pay sitting close to the threshold.
Settlement is moving too. Five continuous years on the route gets you to Indefinite Leave to Remain, but you'll have to meet whatever rules are in force on the day you apply, including the salary test, the Life in the UK test and the residence requirement. The government has floated stretching that qualifying period from five years to ten for most work routes. As of early 2026 it was still a proposal, not in the rules, so plan around five but watch the news.
What to actually do, in order
- Pin down your SOC code and confirm the role is genuinely RQF Level 6. Ask your employer outright which code goes on the Certificate of Sponsorship. If they can't tell you, that's a red flag, because sponsors are supposed to know. Look the code up in the Appendix Skilled Occupations and read off the title, level and going rate.
- Work out your real floor. Higher of £41,700 or the going rate. If you're a new entrant, higher of £33,400 or 70% of the going rate instead. Then measure your offer against it counting only guaranteed basic pay.
- Check the sponsor licence on the public register. An offer at the right money means nothing if the company can't sponsor.
- Sort your English now. Approved test, ENIC-verified degree, or eligible nationality. Don't leave it.
- Get the Certificate of Sponsorship issued, then read every line on it. It's a digital reference number carrying your job title, SOC code, salary and hours. Confirm the SOC code is the one you agreed, because mistakes here cause a big share of refusals.
- Budget the whole thing upfront: fee, full surcharge for the visa length, any dependants, maintenance funds. Then the bits people forget, English test fees, a TB certificate if your country needs one, document translation. You can apply up to three months before your start date.
- Mind the clock if you're switching in-country. Moving from a Student or Graduate visa means applying from inside the UK before your current leave runs out. Letting that date slip is one of the most avoidable ways to lose everything.
The five ways solid candidates still get refused
Most refusals aren't bad luck. They repeat.
Wrong SOC code on the Certificate of Sponsorship, which drags the going rate off and can sink a strong case. Pay that doesn't count, where someone builds their salary figure on a bonus or an allowance the Home Office ignores. A missed English bar, usually an old B1 result against a B2 requirement. An employer who turns out not to hold a sponsor licence, which no amount of salary fixes. And timing, applying after the new entrant clock has run down or after current leave has lapsed, when moving a few weeks earlier would have kept the door open. Run through all five before you submit. It's a ten-minute check that saves a year.
Where this leaves you
The route is harder than it was, dearer than it was, and unforgiving of a vague plan. It's still the main door into a long UK career, though, and the people who get through it usually aren't the ones with the flashiest CV. They're the ones who knew their SOC code, their actual salary floor and their real deadline before they started.
That's the bit GetHiredInX is for. The rule itself is the easy half. The hard half is knowing what it means for your country, your role and your timeline, and what to do about it this week. That's where we come in.