Visas for overseas care workers have all but stopped

The route that staffed care from abroad has nearly closed

Care providers in the UK have all but stopped hiring staff from abroad on work visas, a year after the government shut the route to new overseas applicants. In the year to June the Home Office granted 344 such visas to care workers, against 107,772 in 2023.¹

The wider Health and Care Worker route, which also brings in doctors and nurses, is down 95% from its peak.¹ Applications have kept falling since those figures: about 7,500 main applicants applied in the year to September, 63% fewer than a year before.⁵ It is part of a wider fall in arrivals that has slowed population growth, alongside a drop in student visas.

The fall is what ministers intended. They closed the route citing abuse of migrant workers by some sponsors, and want employers to recruit and pay staff at home.⁶⁸ For providers in England, who took on about 105,000 international recruits in 2023/24 alone, the question is now where staff will come from: they may sponsor only migrants already in the UK, and that option ends in July 2028.¹³

Most of the fall came before the ban, after a crackdown on sponsors

The collapse came in two stages. The first undid a surge. Care workers were added to the Skilled Worker route in February 2022, and in 2023 health and care accounted for 69% of the record number of Skilled Worker visas, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.¹⁴

From late 2023 the Home Office applied more scrutiny to care employers and took action against those breaking sponsorship rules, it says.¹ From March 2024 care workers could no longer bring dependants, and sponsors had to be registered with the Care Quality Commission.¹⁵ By the end of 2024, grants to main applicants on the route had fallen 81% in a year, to 27,174.² On the desk's arithmetic, 86% of the fall from the peak to today had happened by then.

Abuse drove that crackdown. Yvette Cooper, then home secretary, told MPs on 12 May 2025 that the care visa had brought "a shameful and deeply damaging increase in abuse and exploitation", with 470 providers' sponsor licences suspended once checks began.⁸ The government says 39,000 care workers were linked to sponsors whose licences were revoked between July 2022 and December 2024.¹⁴

The second stage was the ban itself. From 22 July 2025 providers could no longer sponsor care workers from abroad. People already in the UK can still switch into care jobs until 22 July 2028, if they have worked for the sponsoring provider for at least three months.⁶ The same rules raised the Skilled Worker skill threshold back to degree level, removing about 180 occupations from the route.⁶

Providers now hire migrants who are already here

Care providers have lost the source of most of their recent growth. Skills for Care, the workforce body for adult social care in England, counts 30,000 international recruits starting direct care jobs in 2025/26, down from 105,000 two years earlier. Only about 1,500 came on a Health and Care Worker visa; the rest arrived as dependants, family members or students.¹³ Of the 52,000 people who switched straight from a student visa to a Skilled Worker visa between 2021 and March 2026, 44% went into care, the Migration Observatory found.¹⁴

So far that has not shown up as empty posts. The sector's vacancy rate fell to 6.2% in 2025/26, about 96,000 posts on a typical day and the lowest since 2015/16, even as posts held by British nationals fell by about 40,000.¹³

Provider bodies describe a harsher picture. The Homecare Association said in October 2025 that 59% of the 450 home-care providers it surveyed employed sponsored workers. Jane Townson, its chief executive, said families "are waiting for care that simply isn't available in some places".¹⁹ Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, called the figures published in May "not a triumph; they are a warning", linking the shortfall to older and disabled people waiting for care and to patients stuck in hospital.¹⁸

For migrants already on the route, the numbers run the other way. Extensions of stay on the health and care route, including dependants, rose 19% in the year to June, to 336,215, which the Home Office attributes to the large intakes of 2022 and 2023.¹ Their next hurdle is settlement. The government has proposed that people in jobs below degree level, care work among them, wait 15 years rather than five. The Commons Home Affairs Committee said in March that this "is likely to increase in-work poverty for care workers".¹⁰

A sector short of staff, or one adjusting?

One reading is that both hold for now. The transition lets providers draw on migrants already in the UK, and the impact assessment itself expects that pool to shrink once it ends, projecting 21,000 fewer in-country care visas a year from 2029/30.⁷

A settlement decision this year, and a deadline in July 2028

The Home Office's next monthly visa applications figures are due on 12 November, and the quarterly immigration statistics for the year to September 2026 on 26 November.⁵¹²

The decision that matters most to care workers already here is on settlement. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, told the Home Affairs Committee on 15 September: "Later this year we will set out the new policy on settlement." She said it would come, with transitional arrangements, in good time before the first people affected qualify under the current rules.¹¹

On pay, the government plans an Adult Social Care Negotiating Body, due to be set up in 2026, to negotiate the first fair pay agreement for care workers, due in 2028 with £500m behind it.⁹

Then, on 22 July 2028, the transition ends and providers lose the last way to sponsor a care worker on a work visa.⁶ By then the first pay deal is due to be in force. Whether it draws in enough staff from home to replace recruits from abroad is the test the government has set for its policy.