Most of the wasted weeks in a care job search come from one missing check. An employer advertises, the advert says nothing about sponsorship either way, and the application goes in anyway. Weeks later there is either silence or a polite no, and neither tells you the thing you needed to know before you applied: whether that employer was ever able to sponsor anyone.
That is a checkable fact, and it is free to check.
The register
The Home Office publishes a register of licensed sponsors, updated regularly. Every organisation licensed to sponsor a worker is on it, with the route it is licensed for and the town it is registered in. At the time of writing it holds a little over 127,000 organisations. Anyone can download it.
If an employer is not on that list, it cannot sponsor you. Not "probably not", not "you would have to ask". It has no licence, so it has nothing to assign.
What the register does not tell you
Being on it means able to. It does not mean willing to, and the gap between those two is where most of the disappointment lives. An employer can hold a licence and still decide not to sponsor for a particular role, or have used its allocation, or simply prefer a candidate who needs no sponsorship. The licence is a precondition, not a promise.
It also will not tell you whether the organisation on the register is the one in the advert. Care providers trade under names that differ from the name they registered, groups hold several companies, and the register writes about a fifth of its entries in block capitals. "Sunrise Care" in an advert and "SUNRISE CARE HOMES (UK) LIMITED" on the register may or may not be the same body.
The second check: the care regulator
A licence is not the only public record. Care providers are also registered with a care regulator: the Care Quality Commission in England, the Care Inspectorate in Scotland, Care Inspectorate Wales, and the RQIA in Northern Ireland. Care regulation is devolved, so an employer is registered where it operates, and a provider operating in more than one nation appears in more than one register.
Checking both is what turns a name into a real organisation. A company that appears on the sponsor register and on a care regulator's register is a genuine care provider that is licensed to sponsor. A name that appears on one and not the other is worth a question before an application.
Doing it by hand
- Download the sponsor register from GOV.UK. It is a spreadsheet.
- Search it for the employer's name, then for any trading name in the advert, then for the name with punctuation and "limited" removed. All three, because any of them can be the one that matches.
- Check the route column says Skilled Worker, or the route you are on.
- Look the same organisation up on the relevant care regulator's public search.
- Read the advert again, in full, for the sentence that rules sponsorship out. It is usually near the bottom and it is usually one line.
That is maybe ten minutes for one employer, and it is worth doing before every application. It is also exactly what this service does, for every employer and every advert, which is what you are paying for if you decide the ten minutes each is not a good use of your evenings.
One thing to be certain about
Nobody may charge you for a Certificate of Sponsorship. Not an employer, not an agent, not a middleman. Charging a worker for one is illegal in the UK, and being asked to pay is a reason to walk away and report it, not a reason to find the money. The free organisations on our support page include the two you would report it to.
You can browse the care employers we have matched to a regulator free and without an account.