Scale-up

The Scale-up route permits UK businesses which have experienced recent high growth to obtain a Home Office sponsor licence to recruit highly skilled non-British or Irish citizens who ‘have the skills needed to enable the Scale-up business to continue growing’. It is an (initially) sponsored and nominally points-based route, and was introduced in the Immigration Rules, Appendix Scale-up on 22 August 2022.

The key eligibility criteria for an organisation applying for a Scale-up sponsor licence are that it must:

1. •

   have an annualised growth of at least 20% for the previous three-year period based on either employment (staff count) or turnover, and

2. •

   have had a minimum of ten employees at the start of the relevant three-year period

After a low take-up, on 13 April 2023, the Home Office launched an ‘Endorsing Body Pathway’ for organisations who do not meet the above eligibility criteria, because they have been established in the UK for less than three years and therefore do not have a sufficient HMRC footprint. Under this alternative, prospective sponsor applicants may apply for an endorsement from a Home Office-approved endorsing body and submit this with the licence application.

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