Data Methodology & Sources
How VisaSponsorUK collects, normalizes, processes, and matches UK sponsor licence data.
1. Sourcing from GOV.UK
Our primary data source is the official Register of Licensed Sponsors: Workers published by the UK Home Office (Visas and Immigration). This register lists every employer authorized to sponsor international workers.
The data is processed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0. We synchronize our system with the official GOV.UK register daily, ensuring that new licenses, rating updates, and removals are captured in near real-time.
2. Entity Deduplication and Company Profiling
The raw Home Office register lists license routes separately. If a company is approved to sponsor workers under both the Skilled Worker and Temporary Worker routes, they appear multiple times.
To prevent clutter, VisaSponsorUK groups all license routes under a single unified company profile page. This allows job seekers to see the company's full visa sponsorship capabilities in one view.
Furthermore, we match company records with Companies House using normalisation algorithms to retrieve additional business context, including registered SIC industry codes, creation dates, and current company status.
3. Location Normalization Dictionary
The Home Office register contains raw spelling variants and typos for UK towns and cities (for example, separate entries for Abbey Wood vs Abbeywood, or Abindgon vs Abingdon).
We run all city data through a location normalization dictionary. This dictionary resolves spelling variations, canonicalizes them to standard display formats (e.g. Abbots Langley), and groups all local sponsors onto a single canonical URL. This prevents duplicate indexation and consolidates search rankings.
4. Rating and Status Definitions
Sponsors are rated based on their compliance with UKVI guidelines:
- A-Rating: The default grade indicating full compliance with sponsor duties. The employer can freely issue Certificates of Sponsorship.
- B-Rating: Assigned when UKVI flags compliance concerns. The employer is placed on a corrective action plan and cannot sponsor new workers until they return to A-status.
- Provisional: Applied to specific routes where A/B compliance letter grades do not apply, such as the UK Expansion Worker route.
5. Known Limitations
Due to synchronization intervals, there can be a delay of up to 24–48 hours between an update appearing on the Home Office's internal systems and its publication in the GOV.UK register. Always cross-reference crucial status changes with official sources prior to signing a job contract.