How we verify sponsors
The “verified sponsor” badge is the core of this site, so it should be completely transparent how it’s earned. This page explains our data sources, how the matching works, how often everything refreshes, and — just as importantly — what a badge does not tell you.
The source of truth is the Home Office register. The UK government publishes the register of licensed sponsors — the official list of every organisation currently licensed to sponsor workers, along with the routes they can sponsor (such as Skilled Worker) and their licence rating. This public register, containing over 120,000 organisations, is the only authority on who can sponsor, and it is the dataset every check on this site runs against. We refresh our copy from the official publication weekly, so licence grants, downgrades, and revocations flow through to the site within days.
How the matching works. Job adverts rarely spell a company’s name the way its legal entity appears on the register — adverts say “Monzo”, the register says the registered company name. Our matcher normalises both sides (case, punctuation, suffixes like Ltd/PLC/Limited, common trading-name patterns) and then requires an exact match on the normalised name before a job is marked verified. Each verified job also records a confidence level, shown on the job page, reflecting how direct the name match was.
We deliberately prefer false negatives to false positives. If we can’t match an employer confidently, the job shows as unverified — even though some of those employers do in fact hold licences under a different legal name. We accept missing some genuine sponsors as the price of never labelling a non-sponsor as verified. In June 2026 we tightened the matcher and reclassified roughly 36,000 listings from verified to unverified for exactly this reason: an aggressive matcher was producing matches we couldn’t stand behind.
What a verified badge means. Three things, precisely: (1) the employer’s name matched an organisation on the Home Office register at our last weekly refresh; (2) that organisation is licensed for the visa route shown on the job page; (3) the match cleared our confidence threshold. Where we also link directly to the employer’s own careers site or ATS (Greenhouse, Lever, Workday), the job additionally carries an “official direct apply” badge, meaning the listing came straight from the employer rather than an aggregator.
What it does not mean. A licence is held by a company, not attached to a vacancy. A verified badge does not mean this specific role comes with sponsorship, that the employer will sponsor candidates at your salary level, or that a CoS will be issued. Budgets, internal policy, and role eligibility all sit with the employer. Treat the badge as “worth applying — sponsorship is possible here”, then confirm sponsorship for the specific role during the application process.
Corrections. If you believe an employer’s status is shown incorrectly — in either direction — tell us via the contact page with the job link. Register checks are automated, and edge cases (mergers, renames, group structures) are exactly where human reports help most. We investigate and correct within days.
You can browse all roles at register-matched employers in the verified sponsors section, or read how the Certificate of Sponsorship works to understand what happens after you get an offer.