The Home Office can visit your organisation with little notice to check whether you’re meeting your sponsor licence duties. They assess your compliance across five specific areas — and failure in any of them can lead to licence suspension, downgrade, or revocation.

In 2024, the Home Office revoked or suspended 3,187 sponsor licences — a 252% increase from the previous year. This checklist covers everything you need to have in place.

The 5 Home Office Inspection Areas

The UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) compliance team assesses sponsors against these five core areas during an audit:

  1. Monitoring immigration status — Are you tracking visa expiry dates and work permissions?
  2. Maintaining migrant contact details — Do you have up-to-date addresses and phone numbers?
  3. Reporting duties (the 10-day rule) — Are you reporting changes to UKVI within 10 working days?
  4. Record keeping — Do you hold the required documents for each sponsored worker?
  5. General sponsor duties — Are you meeting the wider obligations of holding a licence?

Area 1: Monitoring Immigration Status

You must actively track the immigration status of every sponsored worker. This includes:

Common mistake: Relying on a single spreadsheet that nobody updates. If a worker’s visa expires and you haven’t noticed, you’re employing an illegal worker — which is a criminal offence carrying unlimited fines.

Area 2: Maintaining Migrant Contact Details

UKVI expects you to know where your sponsored workers live and how to contact them. You must:

Why it matters: If UKVI contacts you about a sponsored worker and you can’t confirm their current address, they may conclude you’ve lost track of them — a significant compliance failure.

Area 3: Reporting Duties (The 10-Day Rule)

As a sponsor, you must report certain changes to UKVI via the Sponsorship Management System (SMS) within 10 working days. Reportable events include:

Critical: Late or missing reports are one of the most common reasons for compliance action. The Home Office expects you to have systems that flag these events automatically — not rely on managers remembering to report them.

Area 4: Record Keeping

You must retain specific documents for every sponsored worker for the duration of their employment and for at least one year after they leave. Required records include:

For each sponsored worker:

Organisation-wide records:

Retention period: Keep documents for at least 1 year after the worker leaves or the sponsorship ends, whichever is later.

Area 5: General Sponsor Duties

These are broader obligations that underpin the whole system:

What Happens If You Fail a Compliance Visit?

The consequences depend on severity:

Outcome When it applies
Action plan Minor issues — UKVI gives you time to fix problems
B-rating downgrade Significant failings — you can’t sponsor new workers until issues are resolved
Licence suspension Serious concerns — a 20-day investigation period
Licence revocation Major or repeated failures — you lose your licence entirely

If your licence is revoked, all currently sponsored workers have their visas curtailed to 60 days — they must either find a new sponsor or leave the UK.

Your Monthly Compliance Routine

Build these checks into your monthly calendar:

  1. Weekly: Review upcoming visa expiry dates (next 90 days)
  2. Weekly: Check for unreported absences or leavers
  3. Monthly: Verify contact details are current for all sponsored workers
  4. Monthly: Confirm all required documents are on file
  5. Quarterly: Review and update your compliance procedures
  6. Annually: Audit your entire sponsored worker population against this checklist

How SponsorPro Helps

SponsorPro automates the compliance checks in this checklist. The platform:

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This checklist is based on the UK Visas and Immigration Sponsor Guidance published by the Home Office and is current as of February 2026. Immigration rules change frequently — always verify against the latest official guidance.