Where the UK’s Visa Sponsors Actually Are — and What Each Town Hires For

The register of licensed sponsors records where every licensed employer in the UK is based. Read the geography carefully and two separate things fall out of it: a concentration far more extreme than the headline totals suggest, and a set of local specialisms that tell you what each place actually sponsors people to do.

All figures are from the register published on 10 November 2026, covering 127,640 sponsor records across 5,819 towns and cities. You can search it in our licensed sponsor directory.

The top of the table

London holds 28.7% of every sponsor record in the country. The top ten towns hold 39.9% between them, the top fifty hold 56.9%, and the top hundred hold 65.8%. Two-thirds of the UK’s sponsorship capacity sits in a hundred places out of nearly six thousand.

London is larger than the table makes it look

Ilford at number ten, Harrow at sixteen, and Croydon, Hounslow, Romford, Southall, Wembley, Barking, Dagenham and Uxbridge further down are all within Greater London. The register records the town as the sponsor wrote it, so London appears both as “London” and as several dozen of its own postal towns.

That means the 28.7% figure is a floor. It also means a search for “London” in any tool built on this file — ours included — will miss employers that put Ilford or Harrow on the form. If you are looking for work in the capital, search the borough as well as the city.

Outside England

Glasgow and Edinburgh together hold more licensed sponsors than Birmingham. Cardiff and Belfast each hold more than Sheffield.

One oddity worth flagging, because it shows how the file is maintained: Northern Ireland’s second city appears twice, as Londonderry (52) and Derry (36). Neither entry is wrong, and anyone searching one name will miss the other.

Counties in the town column

Several thousand sponsors did not enter a town at all. They entered a county.

“Essex” would rank 34th in the country if it were a town; “Kent” would rank 44th. There is no way to tell from the file where in Essex those 451 employers are. If you are searching by place and getting nothing, try the county name as well — it is a real entry in this dataset, not a mistake you can route around.

Every town hires for something different

This is the part of the register nobody seems to read. Nationally, 95.8% of sponsors hold Skilled Worker and the other routes are rounding errors. But the mix varies sharply by place, and the variation is not random — it maps onto what each town’s economy actually is.

Multinationals moving their own staff in

The Global Business Mobility: Senior or Specialist Worker route lets a company bring in employees from its own overseas offices. It is useless to an outside applicant and extremely revealing about a local economy.

Aberdeen, at more than double the national rate, is the oil and gas industry: international operators with Aberdeen offices and staff to rotate through them. Reading, Uxbridge, Guildford and Cheltenham are the Thames Valley and the M4 corridor, where a great many global companies put their UK headquarters. If you are an outside applicant, these are the towns where the licensed-sponsor count most overstates your chances.

Sport

Stoke-on-Trent has more than four times the national rate of International Sportsperson licences; Huddersfield, Oldham and Bolton are close behind. This is football and rugby league, and it is a reminder that a sponsor licence is often held for one specific category of person rather than for general recruitment.

Faith

Dagenham, Wolverhampton, Belfast, Swansea, Oxford and Bradford all run at two to three times the national rate for Minister of Religion licences. In most of these cases the licence holders are individual congregations, dioceses and mosques rather than large organisations.

Culture and charity

Belfast has the highest Creative Worker share of any large town in the UK, and the highest Charity Worker share by a distance — a film and television sector and a dense voluntary sector in one small city. Oxford’s charity share is nearly three times the national rate, which is what a city full of foundations, research institutes and university-adjacent bodies looks like in licence data.

And the towns that do only one thing

At the other extreme, several outer-London towns are almost purely Skilled Worker: Uxbridge (98.6% of its sponsors), Hayes (98.6%), Ilford (98.2%), Hounslow (97.9%) and Wembley (97.8%). These are the logistics, care, hospitality and small-business corridors around the capital — a lot of employers, nearly all of them licensed for the one route that an outside applicant can actually use.

Most of the map is close to empty

The median town on the register has exactly one licensed sponsor. Of 5,819 places, 3,205 have a single employer that can sponsor anyone at all, and 4,836 — 83% — have fewer than ten. Nine towns have a thousand or more.

Put the two halves of this article together and the shape of the problem is clear. Sponsored work in the UK is not distributed like the population. It is concentrated in London and a handful of regional cities, and where it does exist outside them it is often concentrated in one industry, sometimes in one organisation.

What to do with this

If you are geographically flexible, the top twenty table is your shortlist, and you should weight it towards places where the Skilled Worker share is high rather than places where the raw count is high.

If you are not flexible, search your own town in the directory and search the surrounding towns and the county name too. If the answer comes back in single figures, that is genuine information: it means a sponsored job in that place depends on a small number of specific employers, and you should be looking at them by name rather than scrolling job boards.

Method and source

Figures are from the Home Office Register of licensed sponsors (workers), file published 10 November 2026, containing 143,008 data rows. Towns were normalised to lower case with punctuation and accents removed, and sponsors counted once per organisation-and-town pair, so an employer licensed for three routes counts once in the town totals and once against each route. Route shares by town are calculated only for the 64 towns with at least 250 sponsors, so that small-sample noise does not produce spurious specialisms. The national comparison figures are the same calculation across the whole register.

For the register as a whole, see how many UK employers can sponsor a visa. This article is analysis of public data, not immigration advice.