How to download and track the UK Home Office visa sponsor list

The Home Office publishes a register of UK organisations licensed to sponsor workers on the Worker and Temporary Worker routes, including Skilled Worker. It is official, free, updated every working day, and released as a CSV under the Open Government Licence.

Being on the register means an organisation may sponsor a visa. It does not mean they are hiring, and it is not a job board. Treat it as a starting list, then check current vacancies and the organisation’s own careers pages.

This guide covers the official download, a simple way to track daily changes yourself, and an optional scheduled shortcut if you need a filtered feed every morning.

Where the official list lives

The source of truth is always:

Register of licensed sponsors: workers on GOV.UK, published by UK Visas and Immigration.

As of mid-November 2026 the CSV is about 10.4 MB and on the order of 140,000 rows. The file is replaced on working days. Columns are straightforward:

There is no company number, no industry code, no contact, and no “date licensed” field. The Home Office publishes a fresh full list, not a change log.

Free DIY: download and filter

For a one-off search, you do not need a tool.

1. Open the official register page.
2. Download the CSV.
3. Open it in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice (Sheets may struggle at this size; Excel or a local Python script is more comfortable).
4. Filter by town, route and rating. A text filter on Organisation Name works for “NHS”, “University” or “games”.

If you only wanted to check whether one employer is licensed, that is the whole job. Bookmark the GOV.UK page and re-download when you need a fresh copy.

Free DIY: track what changed since yesterday

The useful signal for recruiters, immigration advisers and researchers is not the 140,000-row snapshot. It is the delta: who was added, who dropped off, and who was downgraded from an A rating to a B rating.

Because GOV.UK does not publish a diff, you have to keep yesterday’s file and compare. Save each download with the date in the filename, then run something like this:

import pandas as pd

today = pd.read_csv("sponsors-2026-11-12.csv")
yesterday = pd.read_csv("sponsors-2026-11-11.csv")

key = ["Organisation Name", "Town/City", "Route"]
today["k"] = today[key].astype(str).agg("|".join, axis=1)
yesterday["k"] = yesterday[key].astype(str).agg("|".join, axis=1)

added = today[~today["k"].isin(yesterday["k"])].copy()
removed = yesterday[~yesterday["k"].isin(today["k"])].copy()

merged = today.merge(yesterday, on="k", suffixes=("_new", "_old"))
rating_changed = merged[
    merged["Type & Rating_new"] != merged["Type & Rating_old"]
]

print(f"Added: {len(added)}; removed: {len(removed)}; rating changes: {len(rating_changed)}")
added.to_csv("added.csv", index=False)
removed.to_csv("removed.csv", index=False)
rating_changed.to_csv("rating-changed.csv", index=False)

A few traps are worth knowing before you trust the output:

• Organisation names are not unique. Use name + town + route as the key, and still expect the occasional false add/remove when a town is typo-corrected.
• The download URL on GOV.UK changes every day, so a naive “always fetch this link” script will break. Resolve the current CSV from the publication page (or its Atom/JSON API) rather than hard-coding a file URL.
• Ratings sit inside the Type & Rating string (Worker (A rating)). Parse that if you want a clean A rating / B rating field.
• The first day you run a diff, you only have a baseline. Real “newly licensed” rows appear from the second register onwards.
• Some sponsors are sole traders. Their names are personal data; use the list in line with UK GDPR.

To enrich rows with a company number, status or incorporation date, use the free Companies House API. Budget for rate limits (600 requests per 5 minutes) and for imperfect name matching.

The shortcut: a searchable register plus a daily change feed

If you would rather not babysit file URLs, diffs and enrichment, UK Visa Sponsor Register is an Apify Actor that fetches the latest official CSV, filters it, and can emit only the changes. It is priced at $3 per 1,000 results, plus a $0.00005 start charge, with an optional maximum cost per run. A search for Skilled Worker sponsors in London whose name contains “games” looks like this:

{
  "organisationName": "games",
  "town": "London",
  "routes": ["Skilled Worker"],
  "maxResults": 500
}

For a daily change feed (schedule this on a working-day timetable):

{
  "changesOnly": true,
  "routes": ["Skilled Worker"]
}

The first scheduled run saves a baseline snapshot. From the next Home Office update you get added, removed and ratingChanged rows. An example change row:

{
  "organisationName": "505 Games Limited",
  "town": "Milton Keynes",
  "county": null,
  "typeAndRating": "Worker (A rating)",
  "sponsorType": "Worker",
  "rating": "A rating",
  "route": "Skilled Worker",
  "changeType": "ratingChanged",
  "previousRating": "B rating",
  "firstSeen": "2026-11-12",
  "snapshotDate": "2026-11-12",
  "companyNumber": "04123456",
  "companyStatus": "active"
}

firstSeen is the first register date this Actor saw the sponsor. For anyone already present in the baseline, that means “on or before” that date, not the date the licence was first granted. Optional Companies House enrichment (with your own free API key) adds company number, status, type, registered postcode and incorporation date.

Snapshots are kept for the last 10 register dates, so you can compare against an earlier day if you missed a run.

Which route should you pick?

• Check one employer, or browse a city once: download the official CSV.
• You are happy keeping yesterday’s file and running a script: the DIY diff is free and honest.
• You want a scheduled, filtered change feed, or company numbers attached: use the Actor.

In every case, confirm anything important on the current GOV.UK file before you act on it. The register is a licensing list, not a guarantee of vacancies.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Home Office, Register of licensed sponsors: workers (GOV.UK).