Teacher Visa Sponsorship in the UK Explained (2026)

UK schools have recruited overseas-trained teachers for decades, and in shortage subjects — physics, maths, computing, modern foreign languages — international recruitment has become a routine part of how some trusts fill vacancies at all. What has not kept pace is clear, teacher-specific information about how the immigration side actually works. Most of what is written about Skilled Worker sponsorship is written for corporate employers sponsoring software engineers, and it leads with a £41,700 salary threshold that does not apply to teachers, quotes fees that changed in December 2025 or April 2026, and says nothing at all about QTS, the STPCD or what a multi-academy trust is.

This guide is the opposite of that. It follows the actual sequence a teacher goes through — from working out whether you need sponsorship at all, through finding a school that can give it, to the Certificate of Sponsorship, the visa application, the health surcharge and your family — and it says what each stage really involves in 2026. Where a rule is genuinely uncertain, or where the published government figures are visibly out of date, it says so rather than papering over it.

Who actually needs a Skilled Worker visa

Start here, because a meaningful number of people who assume they need sponsorship do not, and sponsorship is by some distance the hardest and most expensive way into a UK classroom. DfE's guidance to schools on recruiting teachers from overseas lists the immigration statuses that let someone teach in England without any sponsorship at all. If any of these describe you, stop reading about Certificates of Sponsorship — you can simply apply for jobs like any other candidate.

• Irish citizens, who have the right to live and work in the UK under the Common Travel Area arrangements independently of the immigration rules.
• Settled or pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme.
• Indefinite leave to remain or indefinite leave to enter.
• British National (Overseas) visa holders.
• A Family visa, including as the partner of a British citizen or settled person.
• A Graduate visa — the two-year (three for PhDs) post-study route, which is unsponsored and which a great many overseas teachers who trained in the UK use for their first job.
• A High Potential Individual visa, for recent graduates of qualifying overseas universities.
• UK Ancestry, the Youth Mobility Scheme, or the India Young Professionals Scheme.
• Being the dependant of someone on one of these visas — a dependant partner can work in almost any job, teaching included.

That list matters more than it first appears, because it changes the job search completely. A teacher on a Graduate or Youth Mobility visa can apply to every school in the country. A teacher who needs sponsorship can apply only to the subset of schools that hold a licence — and, as the next section explains, that subset is small. If you are currently in the UK on an unsponsored route and it is coming to an end, the single most valuable thing you can do is start looking for a licensed sponsor months before your leave expires, not weeks.

One route worth naming separately: if you are coming to train as a teacher rather than to take a qualified teaching post, the Skilled Worker route is usually the wrong one. Salaried training routes are sponsored employment and can work on a Skilled Worker visa if the school is licensed and the salary rules are met, but fee-funded PGCE and unsalaried School Direct places are study, and sit on the Student visa route with an accredited initial teacher training provider acting as the education sponsor. Those are different licences, different applications and different rules, and conflating them is a common and expensive mistake. Our becoming a teacher hub covers the training routes themselves.

Why so few schools sponsor, and how to find the ones that do

The honest headline is one that recruitment agencies rarely lead with: DfE's own guidance tells schools that there are only a small number of schools in England that sponsor visas. This is the practical bottleneck in the entire process, and understanding why helps you target a job search rather than firing applications into the void.

A sponsor licence is not a form you fill in once. It is an ongoing regulatory relationship. The school has to apply, pay, nominate named individuals to specific Home Office roles, prove it is a genuine organisation operating lawfully in the UK with the HR systems to monitor sponsored staff, and then keep discharging sponsor duties — reporting changes of circumstances, keeping prescribed documents, tracking attendance and absence — for as long as it sponsors anybody. It can be visited and audited. If it gets it wrong, the licence can be suspended or revoked, and every sponsored teacher on its books has their permission curtailed as a result. For a small primary school with one business manager, that is a genuinely serious undertaking to sign up to for a single hire.

There is, however, a structural reason why the picture is better than it sounds, and it is one of the more useful things on this page. DfE guidance confirms that a multi-academy trust pays a single licence fee rather than one per school. A trust holding a licence centrally can sponsor into any of its academies. That is why sponsorship in England is so concentrated in large MATs and in London and the South East, and it is why the most efficient international job search is a trust-level search rather than a school-level one.

Three concrete ways to find licensed employers, in descending order of reliability:

• The Home Office register of licensed sponsors (workers) — a published list, updated frequently, of every organisation licensed to sponsor workers, with its route and rating. This is the authoritative source. Search for the trust name rather than the school name, because the licence is usually held by the trust or the local authority.
• DfE's Teaching Vacancies service — the free, official vacancy platform, which lets schools flag visa sponsorship availability on a listing. Filtering here is far more productive than trawling commercial job boards.
• Asking directly, early, in writing — before you invest in an application, email the school or trust and ask two questions: do you hold a worker sponsor licence, and would you be willing to assign a Certificate of Sponsorship for this post? A school that holds a licence will answer immediately; a school that has to go and find out almost certainly does not hold one.

The sponsor licence your school needs

Even though the licence is the school's problem rather than yours, it is worth understanding, because the answer to "how long will this take?" and "will they actually do it?" both live here.

A school applying for a worker licence pays an application fee that depends on its size and status: £611 for a small or charitable sponsor and £1,682 for a medium or large sponsor. GOV.UK's guidance for employers defines a small sponsor by the familiar Companies Act tests — meeting at least two of turnover of £15 million or less, total assets of £7.5 million or less, and 50 employees or fewer — and defines charitable status as including registered charities across the UK nations, excepted charities, exempt charities and ecclesiastical corporations established for charitable purposes.

That definition of "charitable" is worth pausing on, because academy trusts are exempt charities, and voluntary aided and voluntary controlled school governing bodies typically have charitable status too. On the face of the published definition, that places most academy trusts in the small-or-charitable category regardless of how large they are — which affects not just the £611 licence fee but, far more significantly, the Immigration Skills Charge discussed below. A local authority sponsoring into its own maintained schools is not a charity and would generally fall into the medium or large category. The sponsor has to declare its status through the Sponsorship Management System before assigning a Certificate of Sponsorship in order to get the lower rate.

On timing, GOV.UK states that most licence applications are dealt with in less than eight weeks, and that a priority service costing £750 for a decision within 10 working days is available but restricted and allocated first come, first served. UKVI may visit the organisation during that period. A licence, once granted, is what lets the trust issue Certificates of Sponsorship; there is no separate per-teacher approval beyond the certificate itself.

The practical consequence for a teacher is simple. If the school already holds a licence, your timeline is measured in weeks. If it does not and is willing to apply, add a couple of months and a real risk that it reconsiders once it sees what ongoing compliance involves. It is entirely reasonable — and quite common — for an overseas candidate to ask at interview stage whether the trust is already licensed, and to prioritise the offers where the answer is yes.

Does the job itself qualify?

Three separate tests have to be satisfied by the job, not by you: it has to be in an eligible occupation, at a high enough skill level, and paid enough. Teaching does well on all three, but for reasons worth understanding.

Occupation code. Every sponsored job is assigned a Standard Occupational Classification code by the sponsor. The school teaching codes are 2313 (secondary education teaching professionals), 2314 (primary education teaching professionals), 2315 (nursery education teaching professionals), 2316 (special and additional needs education teaching professionals) and 2321 (head teachers and principals). Further education lecturers sit in 2312, higher education lecturers in 2311, and teaching assistants in 3231, 6112 and 6113. Getting the code right matters because the code determines the going rate — and, as the next section explains, the teaching codes are treated quite differently from ordinary occupations.

Skill level. Since 22 July 2025 the Skilled Worker route has required the job to be at Regulated Qualifications Framework level 6 or above — degree level — rather than the RQF 3 that applied before, with narrow exceptions for occupations on the Immigration Salary List and the newer Temporary Shortage List. This change closed the route to a very large number of occupations. It did not affect qualified teaching, because the teaching professional codes are already graded at RQF 6. It did, however, affect school support roles: teaching assistant occupations are below RQF 6, which in practice means a school cannot sponsor a TA, cover supervisor or HLTA post on the Skilled Worker route now, even though those occupation codes still appear in the published pay scale tables. If you are weighing a support-staff offer as a way into the UK, that is the thing to check first.

Salary. This is the part everyone gets wrong, and it has a whole page to itself — see our guide to the Skilled Worker salary threshold for teachers. The short version: school teaching occupations are not tested against the general £41,700 threshold. They fall into a separate category of listed health and education occupations whose going rates come from national pay scales rather than from earnings survey data, and the general floor that sits alongside that going rate is £25,000. GOV.UK's published going rate for a qualified teacher is currently £31,650 in England outside London. England's confirmed 2026/27 STPCD starting salary is £34,069 on M1, rising to £52,835 at the top of the Upper Pay Range, so a teacher paid correctly on the national scale clears the going rate by a comfortable margin at every point.

QTS and the four-year rule

Immigration status and teaching qualification are two entirely separate systems, and a lot of confusion comes from treating them as one. Your visa is a Home Office matter. Whether you are allowed to teach, and on what pay scale, is a DfE and STPCD matter. You can have one without the other, and most overseas-recruited teachers begin with exactly that mismatch.

The bridge is what DfE calls the four-year rule. If you qualified as a teacher in a country outside the UK and completed recognised teacher training there, you can work as a teacher in England for up to four years without holding English QTS. That window is extended by any statutory leave you take — maternity, adoption, shared parental and so on — and it does not apply in pupil referral units or alternative provision settings, which require QTS from the outset.

Four years sounds generous and disappears quickly. Two routes exist to convert it into permanent QTS:

Why this matters financially as well as professionally: the published going rate for the "unqualified teachers and probationers" line is materially lower than for qualified teachers, and the STPCD unqualified scale starts at £23,732 in England outside London against £34,069 on M1. A school that places you on the unqualified scale while you work towards QTS is not necessarily doing anything wrong, but you should know which scale your contract puts you on, what triggers a move to the main pay range, and whether that trigger is written down. Our 2026/27 pay scales page has the full tables.

The Certificate of Sponsorship

The Certificate of Sponsorship is the pivot of the whole process, and it is worth being precise about what it is, because the name is misleading. It is not a paper certificate. It is an electronic record created by the sponsor in the Sponsorship Management System, carrying a unique reference number, describing the job, the occupation code, the salary, the hours and the start and end dates. You cannot get one yourself, you cannot buy one, and it only exists once a school has decided to employ you.

There are two kinds, and which one applies depends on where you are applying from:

• Defined Certificates of Sponsorship are for people applying for a Skilled Worker visa from outside the UK. The sponsor applies for each one individually through SMS, and gov.uk states that applications are usually approved within one working day, though they can take longer if additional checks are needed.
• Undefined Certificates of Sponsorship are for Skilled Workers applying from inside the UK. The sponsor estimates how many it will need, usually when applying for its licence, and draws them from that annual allocation. Requests for additional undefined certificates usually get a decision within 12 weeks, or within 5 working days for an extra fee.

Two timing rules follow from the certificate and catch people out every year. Once it is assigned to you, you must use it to apply for your visa within three months. And you must not apply more than three months before the start date shown on it. For teachers that is a real constraint rather than a technicality, because school appointments are frequently made in the spring for a September start — which is more than three months away. The standard answer is that the trust holds off assigning the certificate until the window opens, which means a March job offer may sit quietly until June before anything visible happens. If your school goes quiet after the offer, that is usually why.

The fee for a Certificate of Sponsorship on the Skilled Worker route is £525. Since 31 December 2024 the Home Office sponsor guidance has prohibited sponsors from recouping that fee, or the Skilled Worker sponsor licence fee, or any associated administrative costs, from the sponsored worker by any means — and states that a licence will normally be revoked where a sponsor does. There is more on exactly what that covers, and what a school can ask you to pay, in our guide on teacher visa costs and who pays them.

The visa application itself

With a certificate assigned, the application is yours to make. It is an online form plus an appointment to enrol biometrics, and the documentary burden is lighter than most people fear — the heavy lifting has already been done by the sponsor.

English at B2 since January 2026

This is a recent change and it is the one most likely to catch out someone working from older guidance. On 8 January 2026 the English language requirement for new Skilled Worker applications rose from CEFR level B1 to level B2 — upper intermediate rather than intermediate — across reading, writing, speaking and listening. People extending or updating a visa that was granted before that date continue to be held to B1, but anyone applying afresh now needs B2.

For most teachers this changes nothing in practice, because the ways of proving it are broad and a qualified teacher almost always has one:

• Nationality — citizens of 17 listed majority English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the USA and much of the Caribbean, do not need to prove it at all.
• A UK degree taught in English, or a UK GCSE, A level or Scottish National Qualification at level 4 or 5 in English.
• A degree taught in English awarded outside the UK — which covers a great many overseas-trained teachers — but this needs an Ecctis assessment confirming that the qualification is equivalent to a UK bachelor's degree or above and was taught in English.
• A Secure English Language Test (SELT) from an approved provider, at B2 across all four components.

Two practical warnings. The Ecctis route takes time and costs money, so start it early if your degree is your evidence — it is not something to discover you need in the week the certificate is assigned. And a SELT must be taken with an approved provider at an approved centre: an ordinary IELTS taken for a different purpose is not automatically a SELT, and applications get refused on exactly this point.

The Immigration Health Surcharge

The Immigration Health Surcharge is the single largest cost in most teachers' applications, and the one that most consistently shocks people, because it is charged per person, per year, and in full at the point of application rather than monthly.

The rate is £1,035 per person per year for Skilled Worker applicants and their adult dependants, with a reduced rate of £776 per year for children under 18, students, their dependants and Youth Mobility Scheme visa holders. Paying it gives you access to the NHS on broadly the same basis as a UK resident for the duration of your leave — which is a genuine benefit, not merely a tax, though it is reasonable to note that a teacher paying it is also paying UK income tax and National Insurance like everybody else.

The arithmetic escalates fast with a family. A teacher applying for five years with a partner and two children under 18 pays £1,035 × 5 twice over for the adults and £776 × 5 twice over for the children — £10,350 plus £7,760, or £18,110 in health surcharge alone, before a single visa application fee. Add four application fees at £1,618 each and the family is looking at roughly £24,500 before it has bought a plane ticket.

One historical note, because it still appears in circulating advice: the DfE's International Relocation Payment, worth £10,000 in two instalments and explicitly designed to cover visa costs, the health surcharge and other relocation expenses, was a pilot for physics and languages teachers. That pilot has ended and is not continuing into 2026/27. The final application window, open until 30 June 2026, was for second instalments only, to teachers already in the scheme. If you are reading that the DfE will pay your visa costs, that is out of date.

Bringing a partner and children

Skilled Worker remains a route that allows dependants, which is not true of every work route — the newer Temporary Shortage List, for instance, does not permit them. For teachers, the dependant rules are relatively generous.

Your husband, wife, civil partner or unmarried partner can apply as your dependant, as can any child under 18, including a child born in the UK during your stay. Adult children already in the UK with permission as your dependant can usually continue. An unmarried partner needs to evidence having lived together in a relationship akin to marriage for at least two years — the documentation for which takes longer to assemble than people expect.

Once here, dependants can work in almost any job, with the sole occupational exception of working as a professional sportsperson or coach, and can study. They cannot claim most public funds or the State Pension. They can travel in and out of the UK. And they accrue their own time towards settlement. A dependant partner's right to work without needing their own sponsor is one of the most valuable and least understood features of the route — in a two-teacher household, it often means only one of you needs to find a licensed sponsor.

The catch is money. Each dependant pays the same application fee for the same duration as you, and the same health surcharge. There is no family discount. This is why the total cost of a family move is so much larger than the headline figures suggest, and why it is worth having the "will the school contribute?" conversation before you accept rather than after.

One restriction to check early: a partner or child who is already in the UK on a visit visa, or on certain other short-term permissions, generally cannot switch into dependant status from inside the UK and would need to apply from outside. Bringing family over on a visitor visa "to get settled" while your application is processed is a common and costly mistake.

What the visa lets you do, and what it does not

A Skilled Worker visa is tied to a specific job with a specific sponsor. That is the fundamental thing to internalise, because it shapes everything about how much freedom you have once you are here.

• You can work in the job described on your Certificate of Sponsorship, for the sponsor named on it.
• You can study alongside your job, subject to an ATAS certificate for certain sensitive subjects.
• You can take on a limited amount of supplementary employment in addition to your sponsored role — a second job in the same occupation code or in an eligible occupation, up to 20 hours a week outside your normal working hours. This is what makes paid examining, tutoring through an agency, or a weekend role possible for many sponsored teachers.
• You can do voluntary work for a registered charity or statutory body.
• You can travel abroad and return, and bring dependants as above.

• You cannot change employer, or move to a materially different job, without applying to update your visa first — and that means a new Certificate of Sponsorship from the new school and a new application fee.
• You cannot claim most public funds, including most benefits, or the State Pension.
• You cannot simply stay if your sponsorship ends. If you leave or lose the job, the sponsor must report it and your permission will normally be curtailed, typically leaving 60 days to find a new sponsor, apply to switch route, or leave.
• You cannot rely on your visa being unaffected if the school's licence is revoked — sponsored workers are curtailed when a licence goes, through no fault of their own.

The supplementary employment allowance is worth dwelling on, because it is genuinely useful to teachers and widely misunderstood. It permits additional work of up to 20 hours a week outside the hours of your sponsored job, in an eligible occupation. What it does not permit is self-employment in the ordinary sense — setting up as a private tutor trading on your own account is not the same thing as taking supplementary employment with an employer, and the distinction matters. Our guide to private tutoring rules for teachers covers the wider employment and tax picture; if you are sponsored, take specific immigration advice on top of it before you start.

Changing jobs, extending, and settling

Teaching is a profession where people move schools. On a Skilled Worker visa, moving is possible but never free and never instant.

Changing school means the new school must itself hold a licence, must assign you a new Certificate of Sponsorship, and you must apply to update your visa and pay the in-country fee — £943 for up to three years or £1,865 for more. You generally should not start the new job until the application is submitted; the rules on when you can begin work are specific, and getting them wrong puts both you and the new sponsor at risk. Practically, this means an internal move within a multi-academy trust that holds one central licence is vastly simpler than a move to a different employer, which is another reason large trusts dominate international recruitment.

Promotion or a change of role within the same school is usually fine if it stays in the same occupation code — moving from a classroom post to a TLR-holding head of department, for example. A move that changes the occupation code, such as into headship at 2321, needs reporting and may need a new certificate. Pay rises need reporting by the sponsor but do not need a new application. Our TLR payments guide covers what those responsibility payments are worth.

Extending is straightforward: you can hold Skilled Worker permission for up to five years before extending, and extensions are permitted without a cap on total time, provided you continue to meet the rules.

Settlement is where teachers get a genuinely favourable deal, and where the position is also least certain right now. On the current published rules, indefinite leave to remain after qualifying time on a Skilled Worker visa requires you to be paid the higher of £41,700 or the standard going rate — except that for eligible healthcare and education roles the requirement is the higher of £25,000 and the going rate based on national pay scales. That is the same favourable treatment that applies at the visa stage, and it means a teacher on the national scale is not at risk of being blocked from settlement by a salary rule that catches many other sponsored workers.

The order to do things in

Pulling the whole thing together, this is the sequence, with the things most people get wrong flagged at each stage.

• Check whether you need sponsorship at all. Irish citizenship, EUSS status, a Graduate visa, a Family visa, UK Ancestry or Youth Mobility all mean you do not, and your job search opens up to every school in the country.
• Search at trust level, not school level. Use the Home Office register of licensed sponsors and DfE's Teaching Vacancies service, and confirm licensed status in writing before you invest in an application.
• Establish your English evidence early. If you need an Ecctis assessment of an overseas degree, or a SELT, start it before you have an offer, not after.
• Check the occupation code and salary on the offer. The code should be 2313–2316 for a classroom post, and the salary should sit on the STPCD (or the relevant national scale) at a point that clears both £25,000 and the published going rate.
• Expect a gap between offer and certificate. A certificate cannot be used more than three months before the start date, so a spring offer for a September start will sit before anything happens.
• Budget the full family cost in advance. Application fees and health surcharge for every person, paid up front, are the real number — not the headline single-applicant figure.
• Ask whether the sponsor will certify maintenance on the certificate, which removes the need to hold £1,270 plus dependant amounts for 28 days.
• Check whether the school is asking you to pay anything it should not be. The licence fee, the £525 certificate fee, associated administrative costs and the Immigration Skills Charge are the sponsor's by law.
• Plan your QTS route from day one. Four years is less time than it sounds, and the Apply for QTS service narrowed on 9 September 2026 for teachers who trained in Ghana, India or Nigeria.
• Keep every document. Certificate reference, decision letters, payslips evidencing the salary on the certificate, and your eVisa details — you will need them at extension and at settlement.

Sources and accuracy

Everything on this page is drawn from primary sources, and it is worth naming them so you can check the position yourself when it changes — which it will. The visa mechanics, fees, dependant rules and processing times come from the Skilled Worker visa guidance on gov.uk and the Home Office immigration and nationality fees table effective 8 April 2026. The salary rules come from the Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Worker, where the salary options including Option K for listed health and education occupations are set out, and from Appendix Skilled Occupations. The going rates for teaching come from gov.uk's published National pay scales for eligible teaching and education leadership occupation codes. The sponsor licence, Certificate of Sponsorship and fee-recoupment rules come from the Home Office's guidance for sponsors and its employer-facing pages on certificates of sponsorship and the Immigration Skills Charge. The QTS position, the four-year rule and the multi-academy trust licence point come from DfE's Recruit teachers from overseas guidance, last updated 21 January 2026, and from DfE's guidance for overseas-trained teachers applying for QTS.

Two honest caveats about currency. First, gov.uk's national pay scales document for teaching occupations was last updated on 9 April 2025, so the going rates it publishes reflect the teacher pay scales in force at that point rather than the 2026/27 scales; that works in teachers' favour, since the current STPCD figures are higher, but it does mean the published going rate is not the same number as your actual starting salary. Second, immigration fees and rules change several times a year — the Immigration Skills Charge rose by 32% on 16 December 2025, the English requirement rose to B2 on 8 January 2026, and the fee table was reissued in April 2026 — so a figure you read anywhere, including here, should be checked against gov.uk on the day you rely on it.

The teacher pay figures used for comparison are the confirmed 2026/27 STPCD figures for England that took effect on 1 September 2026, following the Government's acceptance of the STRB's 36th Report on 1 July 2026. Wales, which sets its own pay document, is covered separately on our Wales teacher pay scales page. This page is independent guidance, not regulated immigration advice, and is not affiliated with the Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration, the Department for Education or any school, trust or recruitment agency.