What changed after Brexit
Here’s the pivot point that shapes today’s debate: work visas for main applicants fell 36% in the year to June 2025, yet they still sit 33% above 2019. That drop came fast, after a two‑year surge. It shows how quickly policy tweaks can shift numbers, even when employers still need people.
Brexit ended free movement and pushed the UK onto a points‑based system built around sponsorship, salary floors, and skill levels. For years, most new workers came from EU countries. That’s flipped. Non‑EU citizens now drive work migration. Employers who once relied on EU recruitment have switched to sponsored roles, compliance checks, and longer lead times. The result is a tighter, slower pipeline.
Look at the totals. In the year ending June 2025, the Home Office granted 183,000 visas to main applicants across all work categories. That’s down by more than a third from the previous year. But compared with the pre‑pandemic year of 2019, it’s still a third higher. The system is smaller than the 2022–2023 peak, not small.
Two phases stand out. First, a rebound: as pandemic rules eased in 2021, demand snapped back. Employers tapped the Skilled Worker route for roles they struggled to fill, and the Health and Care Worker route took off. Then, a reset: rule changes landed in 2024 and 2025. Salary thresholds rose. Requirements tightened. By mid‑2025, the numbers fell hard, especially in care.
The source countries changed too. With EU free movement gone, the mix shifted to South Asia, Africa, and parts of the Middle East and East Asia, depending on sector. Sponsors got used to audits, record‑keeping, and right‑to‑work checks. Big employers adapted quicker. Small firms often found the process heavy and costly.
If you’re wondering why the drop feels sharper than the economy: policy works on trust and timing. Employers plan months ahead. When rules change—like salary floors or eligibility—the pipeline pauses. Offers get pulled. Start dates slip. That’s what you’re seeing in the 2025 data.
- Main applicants on work routes: 183,000 in the year ending June 2025
- Change from previous year: -36%
- Change from 2019: +33%
- Non‑EU citizens: now the main drivers of work migration
The political goal is clear: lower net migration. The economic goal is just as clear: keep the wheels turning. Those two aims now meet in the fine print of the work visa rules.
Care, seasonality, and the new pressure points
Health and social care turned into the backbone of the Skilled Worker system. Between October 2024 and March 2025, roughly a third of Skilled Worker visas went to this sector. Care workers were the single most common job. Then the brakes slammed.
In the year to June 2025, the Home Office granted only 21,000 Health and Care Worker visas to main applicants. Within that, Caring Personal Service occupations fell 88% to 7,378. Nursing professionals fell 80% to 3,080. Those are not small trims; they’re a new baseline.
Why the collapse? The Labour government announced further restrictions in May 2025, including closing the care worker route to new overseas recruitment. Home Office analysis said the package would cut around 98,000 visas. That’s the shift you’re now seeing in the data.
For providers, the immediate question is staffing. Social care had high vacancy rates even before these changes. Closing the route curbs a tool many care homes leaned on to keep shifts covered. Some will push more overtime. Some will turn to agencies, which cost more. Local authorities, already stretched, will face tougher commissioning decisions.
None of this means the old system had no issues. A steady stream of reports flagged exploitation risks—especially for care workers whose visas were tied to a single employer. When moving jobs is hard, bad bosses have leverage. That’s where underpayment and threats can creep in. The tighter the route, the more important enforcement becomes.
Enforcement is its own grind. Sponsor licences need audits. Worker complaints need fast responses. Fines have to bite. Without this, rules shape a workforce that is smaller but not safer. Stakeholders in care—providers, councils, unions—have asked for clearer oversight and faster action when employers fail their staff.
Hospitals face a slightly different squeeze. Nursing visas fell sharply, but NHS trusts still rely on international recruitment for certain specialties and hard‑to‑fill wards. If overseas hiring slows too much, trusts will chase the same small domestic pool, and waiting lists won’t shrink quickly. That’s the trade‑off policymakers know they are making.
Beyond care, the government is raising the bar on skill and pay. Proposals include higher minimum salaries for the Skilled Worker route and tighter skill level rules (degree level, RQF 6+). The message to employers is: pay more, train more, hire local. The pushback from firms is predictable: in many jobs below degree level, the people just aren’t there right now.
Ministers say they will create new time‑limited visas for lower‑skilled but strategically important roles. Details are pending. Design will decide whether these routes help or frustrate. A few choices matter:
- Portability: Can a worker switch employers quickly, or are they locked in?
- Wage floor: Is the pay high enough to avoid undercutting and reduce exploitation?
- Training tie‑ins: Are employers required to train local staff alongside overseas hiring?
- Caps and timing: Do quotas match seasonal and regional peaks?
Get these wrong and you repeat old problems—labour shortages on one side, worker mistreatment on the other. Get them right and you stabilize key supply chains without blowing past migration targets.
Seasonal farming shows what stability looks like, at least on paper. The Seasonal Worker visa stays capped at 45,000 places in 2025, with 2,000 for poultry. It allows up to six months in the UK. In the year to June 2025, Temporary Worker visas—driven mainly by the seasonal route—hit 78,000. That’s broadly flat for three years and about 90% higher than 2019.
Farms still depend on it. Pickers and packers arrive for short, intense bursts, then go home. The cap tries to balance supply with public concerns. It’s not a perfect tool. Complaints continue about fees, debt, housing conditions, and pressure to hit quotas. Oversight matters here too, because workers are far from cities, often on tied accommodation, and rarely know how to raise a complaint.
If you zoom out, the UK is saying yes to temporary labour at scale, no to open‑ended pipelines, and maybe to targeted lower‑skilled routes. That mix lowers long‑term inflows without crashing the harvest. But it also keeps risks where they have always been highest: short‑stint, employer‑tied work in isolated places.
Education sits in the middle of all this. The Graduate Route lets international students work after finishing their degrees. Since Brexit, more graduates are staying longer, sometimes using that time to move into long‑term work visas. Universities like it; it makes the UK a more attractive study destination. Employers like it; they can try before they sponsor. The government eyes it warily because it adds to net migration, even if temporarily.
So far, the data shows more students moving into jobs rather than leaving right away. That helps sectors that need junior hires with language and tech skills—think IT support, lab roles, and analyst jobs. If rules tighten, you’ll see a quick drop in student‑to‑work transitions. If they hold steady, expect a slow, managed flow into Skilled Worker roles that meet pay and skill rules.
Another number you might miss matters a lot: extensions. Grants to extend stay on work routes rose 23% in the latest year. That’s a cohort effect. People who arrived in 2022 and 2023 are now eligible to extend, and many are choosing to stay. Even as new grants fell, the pool of workers already here became stickier. Employers benefit from that stability; turnover is expensive.
Under the hood, three frictions keep showing up in interviews with sponsors and HR teams:
- Timing: Hiring windows in health, construction, logistics, and hospitality don’t match visa processing peaks.
- Cost: Sponsorship, legal advice, and compliance audits add up. Small firms feel it most.
- Uncertainty: When the rules move fast, job offers stall or fall through.
These frictions don’t argue for open borders. They argue for predictable rules. If thresholds rise, give notice. If a route closes, phase it. If a new route opens, publish clear guidance early. That’s what helps employers plan and protects workers from last‑minute, risky decisions.
On exploitation, the pattern is consistent across sectors. Risk climbs when visas are tied to a single sponsor, when wages sit near the legal floor, and when the job is done far from public view. Care checks all three boxes. So do parts of agriculture and food processing. Reports describe withheld passports, inflated recruitment fees, and threats around accommodation. The fix isn’t just tougher rules. It’s faster enforcement, worker mobility, and better signposting so people know their rights and can act on them.
Mobility might be the sleeper issue. If workers can change employers quickly within the same route, bad actors lose leverage. It’s that simple. Portability also helps honest employers who can bring stranded workers into compliant jobs. With the care route closed to new recruits, mobility for those already here could be the difference between stabilizing the workforce and pushing people into the shadows.
You can also see the UK trying to pull domestic levers: more apprenticeships, return‑to‑work schemes, and training subsidies. Those matter, but they take time. Social care pay has to be high enough to lure people from retail or hospitality. Construction needs guaranteed hours and safety. Logistics needs planning for driver rest stops and shift patterns. Immigration rules can buy time. They can’t fix job quality by themselves.
There’s also a geography story we don’t talk about enough. Labour shortages don’t hit evenly. Coastal towns struggle to staff care homes. Rural firms can’t match city pay. A one‑size national threshold can lock some areas out of recruitment they badly need. Devolved governments and local leaders keep asking for targeted flexibility. So far, the answer is a cautious no. The fear is leakage—if you relax rules in one place, people will move. The counterargument is simple: the status quo leaves services understaffed where they’re needed most.
Employers are adjusting in practical ways. Some are redesigning roles to meet higher skill levels, bundling tasks to clear RQF 6. Others are raising salaries to hit the threshold while cutting other perks to keep budgets balanced. A few are reshoring training pipelines: paying for qualifications up front, then securing retention with bonuses rather than visa ties. Those that plan early look less exposed to sudden rule changes.
Where does this leave the big picture? With a smaller, stricter system than the 2021–2023 surge, anchored by health and social care, buffered by seasonal farming, and nudged by the Graduate Route. The headline numbers are down, but the reliance on overseas workers hasn’t vanished. It has concentrated in the pressure points.
Watch these indicators over the next year:
- Care vacancies and agency spend in local authorities
- Sponsor licence suspensions and revocations
- Visa refusal rates for Skilled Worker and Health and Care routes
- Student‑to‑work switching under the Graduate Route
- Uptake of any new time‑limited visas for lower‑skilled roles
Each will tell you whether the balance is holding or slipping. A steady system will show fewer new grants, more extensions, and stable service delivery. A strained one will show rising waiting lists, higher agency costs, and more stories of workers stuck in bad jobs.
One last thing about numbers: they don’t move in lockstep. You can lower main applicant visas and still see high demand for seasonal workers at harvest time. You can cap care recruitment and still need nurses from abroad in certain specialties. This is a mixed system by design. It was built to allow some movement while blocking scale. That’s why 183,000 looks both big and small depending on where you sit.
For people navigating the system—sponsors, applicants, students—the best guide is simple. Check the latest salary floor, confirm the skill code meets the current rules, and be ready for timelines to slip. For policymakers, the test is even simpler: if the aim is lower net migration, can you still keep hospitals staffed, crops picked, and care homes open? That tension isn’t going away.
In short, UK work visas now run through a narrower funnel, with fewer routes, higher bars, and sharper trade‑offs. The early data shows the reset is working on its own terms. The real test will be whether services hold—and whether workers, wherever they’re from, are protected on the job.
