United Kingdom: Work Visas

Planning to visit family or friends in the UK? Understanding the Standard Visitor visa requirements is essential before you travel. Our immigration solicitors break down who needs a visa, what evidence the Home Office requires to prove your genuine visitor status, and the critical factors that can make or break your application.

The Scale-up Worker visa offers UK fast-growing businesses a flexible immigration route to recruit highly skilled overseas workers. Unlike traditional work visas, this hybrid route requires employer sponsorship for only the first six months, after which visa holders gain unprecedented freedom to change employers or become self-employed while maintaining their immigration status.

The UK government is expanding right to work checks beyond traditional employees to include casual workers, contractors, and gig economy workers under the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025. This represents the most significant expansion of immigration compliance rules in decades, requiring employers to verify immigration status across a much broader range of working relationships including agency-supplied labour, self-employed contractors, and platform workers.