The true UK work visa cost sits far above the £819 headline figure: a Skilled Worker visa usually ends up costing the person moving closer to £4,000 by the time every line the Home Office actually charges has been added up. The application fee is the number every summary leads with, and it is also the smallest number in the stack. The gap between “£819” and “what you actually need in the bank before you fly” is where most people get caught out.
The application fee is the smallest number on the page
The Skilled Worker visa fee depends on two things: how long the visa is for, and whether your job appears on the Immigration Salary List (the list of occupations the government has decided are in shortage, which carries a lower fee as an incentive).
Applying from outside the UK, a standard Skilled Worker visa costs £819 for up to three years, or £1,618 for anything longer than that. Applying from inside the UK, to extend or switch into the route, the same bands cost £943 and £1,865. If your job is on the Immigration Salary List, the fee drops to £628 for up to three years or £1,235 for longer, regardless of where you’re applying from. These are the figures in the Home Office fee table effective 8 October 2026, which left the application, certificate and priority-service fees in this article unchanged from the 8 April 2026 table.
A separate, cheaper route exists that’s worth knowing about, even if it isn’t the subject of this article: the Health and Care Worker visa. It carries a lower application fee than the standard Skilled Worker route, and its holders don’t pay the Immigration Health Surcharge at all, which is the next section and the one that actually moves the total.
The Immigration Health Surcharge is the one that catches people out
This is the line most cost estimates understate, because it isn’t billed like a fee but is billed like a subscription paid in full on day one. The Immigration Health Surcharge, or IHS, gives you access to the NHS on broadly the same terms as a UK resident, and you pay for the entire length of your visa upfront, as part of the application, before a decision has even been made.
The standard rate is £1,035 per year of visa length. For a three-year visa that’s £3,105 in one payment; for the five-year maximum, £5,175. A discounted rate of £776 a year applies to students, their dependants, people on a Youth Mobility Scheme visa, and anyone under 18 at the time of application, none of which cover the ordinary Skilled Worker applicant.
Part-years are rounded in the applicant’s favour up to a point, then against them. Six months or less, applied for from outside the UK, is free; the same six months or less from inside the UK costs half a year’s rate. Anything from six months to a year is charged as a full year. Eighteen months or less overall is charged as a year plus a half-year, and anything between eighteen months and two years is charged as two full years. The mechanism matters less than the headline number: on a five-year visa, £5,175 is due before you’ve earned a single pound in the country you’re moving to.
You pay by debit or credit card as part of the online application, and you get a single-use reference number by email that you have to enter into the visa application itself. Here’s one genuinely useful piece of good news buried in the IHS rules, worth knowing now even though it belongs to a later stage of your UK life: if you’re eventually granted indefinite leave to remain outright, you don’t pay the surcharge again on that application. You only pay it a second time if the Home Office grants you limited leave instead of the settlement you applied for.
What your employer pays, and why they can’t ask you to cover it
Two costs sit entirely on the employer’s side of the ledger, and since 31 December 2024 a sponsor risks having their licence revoked if they try to pass either one on to you.
The Certificate of Sponsorship is the document your employer assigns you that proves the job offer is genuine. It costs £525 regardless of visa length or salary-list status. On top of that, employers pay the Immigration Skills Charge for the length of your sponsorship: £1,320 for the first twelve months from a medium or large employer (£480 for a small or charitable one), then £660 for each further six-month block (£240 for small/charitable). For a three-year Certificate of Sponsorship from a standard-size employer, that’s £1,320 for the first year plus £2,640 across the remaining two years, £3,960 in total, plus the £525 certificate fee. None of that is your bill, and none of it can legally become your bill.
The ban doesn’t cover the visa application fee and the IHS themselves. Nothing in UK law stops an employer offering to pay those as part of your package, and plenty do as a recruitment sweetener, but nothing requires them to either. Ask directly, in writing, before you accept an offer, rather than assuming either way.
Paying for a faster decision
If the standard processing time doesn’t work for your start date, you can usually pay for priority handling: £500 extra for a decision typically within five working days, or £1,000 extra for a decision typically by the end of the next working day. The application tells you which of the two is offered. Whether you or your employer covers the cost is a matter of negotiation, not regulation. Unlike the Certificate of Sponsorship and Immigration Skills Charge, there’s no rule saying who has to pay it.
Two real totals, not one misleading number
Put the worker’s-side costs together and the picture looks like this. A single applicant on the standard route, applying from outside the UK for a three-year visa: £819 application fee plus £3,105 IHS, £3,924 in total. The same scenario on the Immigration Salary List: £628 plus £3,105, £3,733. It’s worth noticing that the salary-list discount only touches the application fee, not the surcharge, so it saves less than it looks like it should. Stretch either scenario to the full five-year length and the IHS alone rises to £5,175. That pushes the standard-route total to £6,793.
None of these totals include what your employer separately owes the Home Office for sponsoring you. Keep the two ledgers apart when you’re planning your own budget; conflating them is how people end up either overestimating what they personally need to find, or underestimating what a job offer with sponsorship attached is actually worth to them.
Bringing a partner or children changes every number above. Talk to us on WhatsApp if you want a second pair of eyes on your own total.
What changes if you’re bringing a partner or children
Dependants are not a discount add-on to your application, but separate applications in their own right, each paying the full published fee and the full annual IHS rate. Gov.uk is direct about this: “You, your partner or children will each need to: pay the application fee, pay the healthcare surcharge for each year of your stay, prove you have enough personal savings.” Nobody in the household gets a family rate. Whether they can join you at all depends on your job: for care workers and for roles classed as “medium skilled”, a new applicant generally cannot bring a partner or children, so check gov.uk’s dependants page before budgeting for them.
Take a standard-route, three-year visa, applied for from outside the UK, for a main applicant with a partner and one child. Three application fees at £819 comes to £2,457. Three IHS payments at £1,035 a year for three years comes to £9,315. Add those together and the household is looking at £11,772 in application fees and surcharge alone, before anything the employer pays.
The savings requirement scales too, on top of the maintenance figure covered below: £285 for a partner and £315 for the first child, each additional child after that at £200. None of these numbers move if your job is on the Immigration Salary List. That discount only ever touches the application fee band, and only for the person whose job qualifies for it.
The savings you need to show, not spend
Separate from all of the above, most applicants need to show £1,270 sitting in a bank account for 28 consecutive days before they apply, unless their sponsor is certifying maintenance on their behalf instead. This is money you have to prove you have, not money you hand over, but it still needs to be sitting there, untouched, at exactly the right time. People who spend it down mid-window without realising the 28-day clock resets have to start again.
When to bring in an OISC-regulated adviser
Everything above is the standard-route arithmetic. It stops being simple arithmetic the moment your situation isn’t standard: dependants applying alongside you, switching from a different visa category rather than applying from outside the UK, or a genuine dispute with an employer over which of these costs they agreed to cover. That’s the point to bring in an OISC-regulated immigration adviser or a solicitor rather than trying to extend this article’s numbers to a case they weren’t written for.
If you’re weighing up a Skilled Worker offer against what comes after it, the milestone most people are actually working toward is indefinite leave to remain: the point where the visa fees and the annual surcharge stop altogether. And once you’ve landed, registering with a GP is worth doing in your first week, not your first illness. It isn’t part of the visa cost at all, which is exactly the confusion that trips people up. For everything else this site covers on moving to the UK, the United Kingdom hub is the place to start.
Once the visa’s budgeted, what about the move?
The visa total is one line in a bigger number. We can help you work out what shipping a household to the UK would actually cost.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a Skilled Worker visa actually cost in total?
For a single applicant on the standard route applying from outside the UK for three years, expect around £3,924: £819 in application fees plus £3,105 in Immigration Health Surcharge. A five-year visa on the same route comes to roughly £6,793. These figures don’t include anything your employer pays separately for sponsoring you.
Do I pay the Immigration Health Surcharge every year, or all at once?
All at once, upfront, as part of your application, for the entire length of the visa. There is no annual instalment option.
Does my employer pay for my Certificate of Sponsorship?
Yes. The Certificate of Sponsorship (£525) and the Immigration Skills Charge (from £1,320 for a medium or large employer’s first year of sponsoring you) are the employer’s costs, and since 31 December 2024 a sponsor risks losing their licence if they try to recoup either from you.
Is the visa cheaper if my job is on the Immigration Salary List?
The application fee is lower (£628 instead of £819 for up to three years), but the Immigration Health Surcharge is unaffected, so the overall saving is smaller than the headline discount suggests.
Can I pay to get a faster visa decision?
Usually, yes. Priority service costs £500 extra for a decision typically within five working days; super priority costs £1,000 extra for a decision typically by the end of the next working day. The application tells you which is offered. Either you or your employer can cover this cost: there’s no rule assigning it.
Sources
- Skilled Worker visa: overview, GOV.UK
- Skilled Worker visa: how much it costs, GOV.UK
- Pay for UK healthcare as part of your immigration application: how much you pay, GOV.UK
- Pay for UK healthcare as part of your immigration application: paying the surcharge, GOV.UK
- Pay for UK healthcare as part of your immigration application: who needs to pay, GOV.UK
- Get a faster decision on your visa or settlement application, GOV.UK
- Home Office immigration and nationality fees, 8 October 2026, GOV.UK
- The Immigration Skills Charge (Amendment) Regulations 2025 (SI 2025/1324), in force 16 December 2025, legislation.gov.uk
- Workers and Temporary Workers: guidance for sponsors, Part 3: sponsor duties and compliance (Annex C2), GOV.UK
- Immigration Skills Charge increase, NHS Employers
- Skilled Worker visa: your partner and children, GOV.UK
All sources re-checked on 9 October 2026. Immigration fees are set by statutory instrument and revised roughly annually; the Home Office republished its fee table for 8 October 2026 with no change to any application, certificate or priority fee used here. Check gov.uk directly before relying on any figure here, and speak to an OISC-regulated immigration adviser or solicitor about your own circumstances rather than treating this article as individual advice.
