How this data works

The source

The Home Office publishes the register of licensed sponsors: workers on GOV.UK, usually every working day. Each row gives a sponsor's name, town, county, licence type and rating, and one route. It has no addresses, no company numbers and no dates, and each publication replaces the previous one. It is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

What a listing means. An employer on the register holds a licence to sponsor workers on the routes shown. It does not mean the employer is hiring now, has a vacancy, or would sponsor any particular person — and MadyHR's sponsor licence register lists no jobs. MadyHR is independent of the Home Office: this is MadyHR's own record of the published register, not an official service.

How MadyHR records it

A scheduled job checks GOV.UK several times each working day. When a new file appears it is downloaded from GOV.UK only, its fingerprint is recorded (the same file is never applied twice), and the original bytes are kept. The file is then checked: the header must match the published format, every rating must be one the register uses, and it must not have lost a large share of rows or sponsors compared with the day before. A file that fails a check is held for a person to review and is never applied automatically.

History is only ever added to. Every exact register row, and every sponsor, is stored with the run of publications it appeared in, so “the register on a given date” is always what MadyHR recorded that day. Dates before MadyHR began recording are not available: nothing is reconstructed or borrowed from other sites.

What counts as a sponsor

A sponsor here is one entry on the register: a name and a town, compared without regard to capitals or spacing. A business listed in two towns is two sponsors; one holding several routes is one sponsor. The register's own rows — one per sponsor per route — are shown as route entries where that is the unit.

Changes, and the words used for them

• Added: an entry appears for the first time. It may be a new licence, a renamed entry or a new owner — the register does not say.
• No longer listed: an entry is missing from a publication. Under the Home Office sponsor guidance a suspended licence is removed from the public register while suspended and may reappear; surrendered and ended licences are removed; a licence cannot be transferred, so a change of owner shows as one removal and one addition. The register never says which applies, so MadyHR never describes an individual removal as a revocation.
• Returned to the register (“present again”): an entry reappears after being absent, with the number of days since it was last listed. No reason is implied — a lifted suspension is one possibility, never an assumption.
• Rating, route, licence type and county changes: a listed entry's details differ from the previous publication.
• Possibly the same sponsor: when an entry leaves and another with the same name arrives in a different town on the same day (a possible move), or one with a very similar name in the same town (a possible rename). These are suggestions, never merged.

The first publication MadyHR recorded is a baseline: it has no changes. Each Bulletin compares a publication with the one before it; where they are more than four days apart that is said, because the changes may cover several working days. “Usual” volumes are the median of up to 60 earlier publications, and a day is flagged as unusual only when it is at least three times that and larger by 30 or more.

Places on the map

The register gives a town, not an address, and not where anyone works. Each entry is placed at the most precise level that is genuinely known and never more precisely: a named town where the register's town is recognised; the region where only the region is known — every “London” entry, because London spans 33 boroughs; and “not on the map” where the town field holds something that is not a place. Towns with fewer than five sponsors are grouped rather than ranked.

On the map, each recognised town is one circle at that town's own grid reference in the ONS Index of Place Names — the town, not an address — and the circle's area is its number of sponsors. Far out, only places with more sponsors are drawn so the cities are not buried; smaller places appear as you zoom in, and every place is always in the counts and the lists. Entries the register places only in a region are a dashed badge on that region (“London, borough not stated”), never a circle. A town name that fits more than one place in its region (“Bolton”) is counted in the region until the right place is confirmed, and towns in Northern Ireland are counted but not drawn, because the place list the map uses covers Great Britain only. The map underneath is OpenFreeMap, built from OpenStreetMap data.

When the way towns are recognised improves, earlier figures are restated with the new method rather than jumping on the day it changed; the methodology version above records which method is in use.

Named individuals

Some register entries are people (“Mr A Smith”) or partnerships named after people. They are counted in every total and can be found by name, but they never have a page of their own, are never matched to other records, are not suggested as you type, and stop being named anywhere on these pages 24 months after they left the register. An entry is treated as a person when the register shows it: a title, a person trading under a business name (“A Patel T/A Corner Shop”), initials, or people's names joined. A name that only looks like a person's is not enough on its own, because most such names on the register belong to organisations. Anyone who objects to an entry being named can contact us; upheld objections are removed from every named view while still counted in totals.

Companies House and industries

Industries come from the first SIC code of a Companies House company that has been matched to a register entry and confirmed: either the register name contains that company's number and the names agree, or exactly one live company has the same name under Companies House's own “same as” rules. Everything else is shown as not classified, so every industry figure states how much of the view it covers.

MadyHR does not publish a count of “companies without a sponsor licence”: most companies never need one, and such a figure would imply otherwise.

Rules every number follows

• Every figure says which publication it describes; there are no undated numbers.
• Percentage changes are not shown where the starting figure is below 20.
• MadyHR's daily counts and the Home Office's quarterly statistics measure different things and are never combined.
• Summaries are written by MadyHR from the register data using fixed templates, not by AI.

Sources and attribution

• Register of licensed sponsors: workers — Home Office. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• International Territorial Level 1 regions — Office for National Statistics. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Index of Place Names and boundary data — Office for National Statistics. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Free Company Data Product — Companies House. Contains Companies House data.

MadyHR's sponsor licence register is an independent service. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration or Companies House. General information, not immigration advice. For advice about a particular person's situation, use a regulated immigration adviser.