Almost every salary question an employer asks about the Skilled Worker route turns out to be two questions wearing one coat. There is a cash floor and there is a going rate, and a compliant offer has to clear both of them at the same time. Get that wrong at the offer stage and the visa is refused. Get it right at the offer stage and then let payroll drift, and you have a different problem, because since April the salary is checked pay period by pay period rather than smoothed across a year. This guide is written for the person who has to price the role and then keep it priced correctly for five years.
The test is two tests, and both have to pass
Start here, because almost every refusal on salary grounds comes from an employer who satisfied one half of the requirement and assumed that was the requirement.
The cash floor and the going rate
Every sponsored role is measured against a cash figure set by the route and a going rate set by the occupation code. You pay whichever is higher. There is no averaging between them and no trade-off.
Take a software developer under code 2136, where the going rate is £49,400. The general cash floor of £41,700 is irrelevant, because the going rate is higher, and £49,400 is your minimum.
Now take an estimator under code 3541, where the going rate is £35,300. Here the going rate is irrelevant and the cash floor binds, so you must pay £41,700 even though the published rate for the job is nearly seven thousand pounds lower.
Employers who have only ever hired in one of those two situations tend to build a mental model from it and then apply the wrong half to the next role. Check both figures every time, for every code.
Why one can be pro-rated and the other cannot
The going rate is expressed against a 37.5-hour week and is adjusted for the hours the worker actually does. The cash floor is not adjusted at all.
That single asymmetry has quietly ended part-time sponsorship at the standard option. A three-day-a-week hire still has to be paid £41,700 in actual gross salary, not £41,700 on a full-time-equivalent basis. Three days at a full-time-equivalent of £70,000 gets you to £42,000 and works. Three days at a full-time-equivalent of £60,000 gets you to £36,000 and does not, regardless of how comfortably the going rate is cleared.
Hours are also capped for the calculation at 48 paid hours a week. You cannot contract somebody for sixty hours and divide the annual figure by the larger number to make an hourly rate look compliant.
Getting the occupation code right before anything else
The code fixes the going rate, so the code is the first salary decision rather than an administrative afterthought. Codes sit in Appendix Skilled Occupations under the SOC 2020 classification, and the current going rates tables were last updated on 22 July 2025 using the most recent earnings survey data.
Choose the code from what the person will actually do, not from the job title on the offer letter. A misclassified code is the most common origin of a salary refusal and one of the more reliable triggers for a compliance visit, because the Home Office will compare the duties on the certificate against what it finds when it asks.
Where two codes could plausibly fit, document the reasoning at the time. A short note explaining why you chose one over the other is worth a great deal more than a reconstruction eighteen months later.
The salary options, and which one your hire fits
The route sets out a series of lettered options. Each pairs a cash floor with a percentage of the going rate, and the applicant has to qualify for the option before you can use it. Options A to E cover graduate-level roles in the main table. Options F onwards cover health and education occupations and the transitional cohort.
Option A and the graduate-level default
Option A is where most hires land. At least £41,700 a year and 100% of the going rate for the code, whichever produces the higher figure.
Since 22 July 2025 the role also has to sit at RQF Level 6, broadly degree level, and around 180 occupations left the route on that date. Roles below that level can only be newly sponsored where they appear on one of the shortage lists, and workers newly sponsored in those medium-skilled roles generally cannot bring dependants.
Overseas recruitment for care worker and senior care worker roles closed on the same date. In-country transitional arrangements exist for people already here, but the entry clearance route for those occupations is shut.
The PhD options
Two options recognise a doctorate relevant to the job. Option B applies where the applicant holds a relevant PhD outside science, technology, engineering and maths, and asks for at least £37,500 and 90% of the going rate. Option C applies to a relevant PhD in one of those subjects and asks for at least £33,400 and 80%.
Run the same code through both and the effect becomes clear. On our software developer at £49,400, Option B produces £44,460 and Option C produces £39,520. Both are below the Option A figure, so the discount is real. On the estimator at £35,300, both options fall under their own cash floors, so the floors bind and the discount is worth nothing at all.
Not every code is eligible for PhD points. Appendix Skilled Occupations marks this per code, so check before you build an offer around it.
New entrants, and the ceiling nobody plans for
Option E gives at least £33,400 and 70% of the going rate. It is available to applicants under twenty-six, recent graduates, people switching from Student or Graduate permission, and those working towards recognised professional qualifications.
On the software developer code that produces £34,580, which is nearly fifteen thousand pounds below the standard figure and makes graduate hiring viable. On the estimator it produces £24,710, well under the floor, so £33,400 applies.
The catch is the ceiling. Time on the new entrant option is capped at four years in total, and time already spent on a Graduate visa counts towards it. When that runs out the worker moves to the standard option, which on our software developer means a jump from £34,580 to £49,400 in one step. Budget for that at the point of hire rather than discovering it at extension.
List roles and the transitional cohort
Option D covers Immigration Salary List roles at £33,400 and the full going rate. There is no percentage discount attached, which surprises people who remember how the old shortage list worked. Option I is the equivalent for lower-skilled list roles at £25,000 and the full rate.
Discounts cannot be stacked. A role on a list can use the list option or the new entrant option, not both.
Options F to K carry lower floors of £31,300, £28,200 and £25,000 and mostly belong to health and education occupations on national pay scales, or to workers whose first certificate was assigned before 4 April 2024 and who have held continuous Skilled Worker permission since. That transitional cohort is shrinking and its members are worth identifying in your own workforce now, because the protection is tied to continuity and is easy to break.
One planning point for anyone using a list option. Both the Immigration Salary List and the interim Temporary Shortage List are currently due to lapse on 31 December. The Migration Advisory Committee reported in July recommending a set of occupations for provisional access from January, but recommendations are not rules until the government implements them. If your hiring plan for next year depends on a list role, build an alternative now.
What actually counts as salary
This is where good offers go wrong, because the number in the offer letter and the number that counts for immigration purposes are frequently not the same number.
Guaranteed basic gross pay, and nothing else
Only guaranteed basic gross pay counts towards the threshold. Bonuses do not, whether discretionary or contractual. Commission does not. Overtime does not. Tips do not. Allowances do not, including London weighting, car allowances and accommodation. Benefits in kind do not. Employer pension contributions do not.
So a package advertised at £45,000 made up of a £38,000 basic plus a £7,000 target bonus is a £38,000 salary for these purposes, and it fails at the standard option by a margin the bonus cannot close.
Restructure before you make the offer rather than after. Where the commercial logic of a role really does depend on variable pay, the basic has to be lifted to clear the threshold on its own and the variable element sits on top as genuine upside.
The hourly floor and where it bites
Alongside the annual figures sits an hourly floor of £17.13 for the main options, assessed against a 37.5-hour reference week.
It is worth seeing where that number comes from. Thirty-seven and a half hours across fifty-two weeks is 1,950 hours, and £33,400 divided by 1,950 is £17.13. The hourly floor is the discounted cash floor expressed by the hour, which is why it rarely troubles an Option A hire and regularly catches an Option C or E one.
Options F to K do not carry the hourly floor. If you are sponsoring on a national pay scale or under a transitional option, the annual arithmetic is what matters.
Part-time, shift patterns and irregular hours
Because the cash floor does not pro-rate, part-time sponsorship only works where the full-time-equivalent salary is high enough that a reduced fraction of it still clears the floor in actual cash.
Shift patterns bring a different problem. The going rate has to be met for the hours actually worked in the period, so a worker on a fixed monthly salary who puts in an unusually heavy month can drop below the hourly going rate for that month even though the annual figure is comfortable. A civil engineer under code 2121 on £68,000 against a going rate of £50,400 has plenty of headroom on paper, and can still fail a heavy month if the hours climb far enough.
Where hours really do vary, record them. The averaging provisions described below depend on being able to evidence the working pattern, and an assertion is not evidence.
The pay-period rule that changed in April
This is the change that has caught the most employers this year, and it is not about the level of pay at all. It is about when the pay arrives.
What the rule does
A new provision was inserted into Appendix Skilled Worker by the statement of changes laid on 5 March and took effect on 8 April. Before it, compliance was assessed largely against the annual figure on the certificate, so an uneven month could be absorbed by the other eleven. That safety net has gone.
Two tests now run together. First, the salary paid in each pay period must equal or exceed the applicable going rate for every hour worked in that period. Second, pay across a defined averaging window must meet the required proportion of the annual salary.
The rule applies to assessments carried out from that date, including for certificates assigned earlier. A look-back across your existing sponsored payroll is the sensible first move rather than treating this as something that only affects new hires.
Three averaging windows, and which one applies
Which window you fall into depends on how often you pay and whether weekly hours are consistent.
Where the worker is paid monthly or less frequently and works the same hours each week, any consecutive three-month period must deliver at least a quarter of the required annual salary. Note the wording. It is any consecutive three months, rolling, not calendar quarters, so a bad month is tested against the two either side of it in several combinations.
Where the worker is paid weekly or more often and hours are consistent, the window is any twelve-week period, which must deliver at least twelve fifty-seconds of the required annual salary.
Where the working pattern is irregular in practice, a seventeen-week window may apply, requiring seventeen fifty-seconds of the annual figure, provided the pattern is properly evidenced.
Deductions, unpaid leave and the topping-up decision
The rule does contemplate legitimate shortfalls. Where pay in a period falls below the required level because of salary deductions that are permitted elsewhere in the route, you have to be able to show that the shortfall came from those deductions rather than from underpayment, and that gross earnings across the sponsorship will still meet the annual requirement.
Unpaid leave is the more common scenario and it is less forgiving. A worker who takes two unpaid weeks in a month drops that pay period below the required proportion, and the annual position no longer rescues it. Your options are to top the pay up, to report the reduction within ten working days, or to carry the exposure.
Remember the separate reporting trigger sitting alongside this. Absence without pay or on reduced pay totalling more than four weeks across a calendar year has to be reported, and it is measured cumulatively rather than in one block.
What to build into payroll
One control, configured once, handles most of the risk. Before each pay run is committed, compare every sponsored worker’s gross pay for the period against the required figure for their option, flag anything short, and record that the check happened.
Add the hours to it where you have workers on variable patterns, because the per-period going rate test looks at hours rather than at the annual salary. And keep the output, because a dated log showing you check every run is exactly the evidence a compliance officer is looking for and exactly what most sponsors cannot produce.
If you would rather have somebody map the codes, options and averaging windows across your sponsored population before setting the control up, our Skilled Worker visa support covers that as an exercise on your actual payroll rather than as general advice.
Expert note from the LawSentis immigration team
The question we get asked most is whether a salary can be structured to make a marginal role work, and the honest answer is that the room for cleverness has almost disappeared. Basic pay is the only lever. What is still worth doing, and what almost nobody does, is running the arithmetic across the whole life of the visa before the offer goes out. Price a new entrant at 70% and you have committed to a rise of ten or fifteen thousand pounds by the time the four years expire, and to the full going rate again at settlement. Price a role at exactly the going rate with no headroom and you have removed your ability to absorb a light month under the new pay-period test. Build in five per cent of margin at the offer stage and most of the problems in this article stop being problems.
Pricing the role over five years rather than five months
A sponsored hire is a five-year commitment with at least two further immigration decisions in it. The salary that works today has to work at extension and again at settlement, and the rules move underneath you in between.
Going rates move and your salary has to move with them
Going rates are periodically uprated against national earnings data. The current tables have been in force since 22 July 2025, which by the standards of recent years is a long time, and the Migration Advisory Committee has been commissioned to look at the whole thresholds regime, including whether the going-rate approach should change and how often the figures should be updated.
Practically, that means a role priced exactly at the going rate today is a role that will be underpaid the moment the tables move. It also means the salary review cycle for sponsored staff should be driven by the going-rate publication rather than only by your own annual review calendar.
Settlement is assessed at the full going rate
Here is the provision that catches employers who used a discount. At the settlement stage the going rate column applies and the reduced percentage columns do not. The seventy, eighty and ninety per cent figures simply are not available.
So a STEM PhD hire priced at 80% and a graduate priced at 70% both have to be on the full going rate, and at least the general cash floor, by the time they apply for indefinite leave to remain. On the software developer code that is £49,400 or whatever the table says by then.
Sponsors also confirm at that stage that there is an ongoing need for the role. A worker whose salary has been frozen for five years is a settlement refusal waiting to happen, and the person who carries the consequence is somebody you have spent five years training.
What the settlement proposals would add
One more layer worth having on the radar. The government published its earned settlement model in November 2025 and consulted until 12 February. Nothing has been laid before Parliament and the Home Secretary has indicated the rules will come later in the year, so the current five-year route still applies.
The design would raise the baseline qualifying period to ten years and then subtract time for particular attributes, including a five-year reduction for taxable income above £50,270 across three consecutive years.
If that lands as drafted, a sponsored worker on £41,700 sits below the line and a sponsored worker on £52,000 sits above it, with five years of difference between them. That is not a reason to inflate salaries today. It is a reason to know where your sponsored population sits relative to that figure before you are asked.
Budgeting the whole cost
Salary is the largest number but it is not the only one, and the split between what the employer must carry and what the worker may be asked to pay is set by rules rather than by negotiation.
What the employer pays and cannot pass on
The sponsor licence, at £611 for a small or charitable sponsor and £1,682 for a medium or large one since 8 April. The certificate of sponsorship at £525. The Immigration Skills Charge, which rose by roughly a third in December to £480 a year for small and charitable sponsors and £1,320 a year for larger ones, payable upfront for the whole sponsored period.
None of those may be recouped from the worker, along with any associated administrative costs. The prohibition has applied to Skilled Worker since the end of 2024 and to other routes since April 2025, and breaching it will normally cost the licence. Clawback clauses and training repayment agreements that recover the same amounts by another name are worth reviewing against this.
What the worker pays
The visa application fee and the Immigration Health Surcharge fall on the applicant by default, though many employers cover them as part of a relocation package and there is no rule against doing so.
Since 8 April the application fee is £819 from outside the UK for a grant of up to three years and £1,618 for longer, or £943 and £1,865 for an in-country application. The health surcharge stayed at £1,035 per adult per year and £776 for a child, payable upfront for the full period.
Across a five-year hire the government charges alone run comfortably past ten thousand pounds before anybody has been paid a salary, and more where dependants are involved. You can estimate licence, CoS and ISC fees against your own headcount and sponsor size rather than working from a published average.
Where employers underestimate
Three places, consistently. Employer National Insurance and pension contributions on top of a salary that has been set by immigration rules rather than by the market, which on a £41,700 role adds something in the region of five and a half thousand pounds a year before pension. The cost of the step up when a new entrant option expires. And the cost of the uplift needed to reach the full going rate at settlement.
Model all three at the point of hire. A role that is affordable at £34,580 and unaffordable at £49,400 is a role you should not be sponsoring on the new entrant option in the first place.
A working checklist for pricing a sponsored role
Three stages, and the first one carries most of the value because it is the only point at which changing your mind is free.
Before you write the advert
Fix the occupation code from the actual duties and write down why you chose it. Look up the going rate and the hourly rate for that code in the current tables. Establish which salary option the candidate profile could qualify for, and calculate the required figure under each one so you can see the range.
Then take the higher of the cash floor and the relevant percentage of the going rate, add a margin, and let that number set the advertised basic. Advertise the basic separately from any variable pay so the offer and the certificate say the same thing.
Before you assign the certificate
Confirm the salary on the certificate is guaranteed basic gross pay and matches the contract exactly. Confirm the contracted hours, and check the hourly figure against the floor where the option carries one. Confirm the role sits at RQF Level 6, or that a list option actually applies to it.
Check the four-year new entrant ceiling if you are using that option, including any time already spent on a Graduate visa. Confirm no discount is being stacked on another. Check whether dependants are permitted for the role you are sponsoring.
Where the licence itself is new, or where the last review was some time ago, it is worth checking the sponsorship side at the same time, and our sponsor licence service runs the salary mapping and the compliance review as one exercise.
Every pay run after that
Compare each sponsored worker’s gross pay for the period against the required figure. Compare hours worked against the going rate where the pattern varies. Flag anything short before the run commits, decide whether to top up or report, and record the decision either way.
Once a quarter, re-check the going rate table against your sponsored population, review anybody approaching the end of a new entrant period, and look at how far each person sits from the figure they will need at settlement. Fifteen minutes a quarter prevents almost everything in this guide from becoming an urgent problem.
FAQ:
- Question — Can we advertise a role and make an offer before the sponsor licence is granted?
Answer — You can advertise and you can interview, but be careful how the offer is worded. A licence is needed before a certificate of sponsorship can be assigned, and a certificate is needed before the person can apply, so any offer has to be expressed as conditional on the licence being granted and the visa being issued. State the basic salary in the offer rather than a package figure, because that basic is what will appear on the certificate and any later mismatch between contract and certificate is a compliance point. Bear in mind that a licence application takes up to eight weeks on the standard service, or ten working days on the priority service where a slot is available, and the visa adds roughly three weeks from outside the UK on top of that.
- Question — One of our sponsored workers is being promoted. What do we have to do about the salary and the paperwork?
Answer — It depends on whether the new role stays inside the same occupation code. Where it does, and the permitted-change conditions are met, you report the change through the sponsorship management system within ten working days and make sure the new salary meets the requirement for the new role rather than the old one. Where the promotion moves the person into a different occupation code, that is a change of employment and needs a fresh application before the new duties start, not after. Salary increases themselves do not need reporting, with a narrow exception for pre-registration nurses and midwives, but a change of role or duties does. The point to watch is timing, because a person doing work that no longer matches the certificate is a mandatory ground for revoking the licence.
- Question — A sponsored worker wants to drop to four days a week. Can we agree to it?
Answer — Sometimes, and the arithmetic decides. Because the cash floor is not pro-rated, the reduced actual salary still has to clear the floor for their option in cash, and the going rate still has to be met for the hours worked. A worker on £55,000 dropping to four days lands on £44,000 and may well still qualify. A worker on £45,000 dropping to four days lands on £36,000 and does not. Where the numbers work, treat it as a reportable change to their employment details and check the new figure against the pay-period rules as well as the annual one. Where they do not, the honest answer to the employee is that the request cannot be accommodated on this visa, and it is far better to say that before the arrangement starts than to unwind it afterwards.
- Question — Are the salary rules different if we sponsor somebody already in the UK on a Graduate or Student visa?
Answer — The thresholds are the same, but two things work in your favour. Switching in-country is permitted from both routes, and a person switching from Student or Graduate permission is one of the categories that can qualify for the new entrant option, which brings the cash floor down to £33,400 and the going rate requirement to seventy per cent. Watch the timing rules on the certificate start date, which for a Student cannot be earlier than course completion, or the twenty-four month point for a doctoral student. And count the clock carefully, because time already spent on a Graduate visa eats into the four-year new entrant allowance, so somebody switching after two years on Graduate has two years of the discount left rather than four.
- Question — We think we have been underpaying somebody against the going rate. What now?
Answer — Establish the scope before you do anything else. Work out which periods were short, by how much, and whether the cause was the annual figure, the per-period test or a change of hours nobody adjusted for. Then fix it prospectively, decide on back pay, and take advice on the disclosure. Sponsors have an express duty to act honestly with the Home Office, and a shortfall you identify, correct and report sits in very different territory from one discovered on an unannounced visit with no evidence that anybody was checking. Remember also that the Home Office runs regular checks with HMRC on what sponsored workers are actually paid, so payroll data is not a private record.