Briefing: How expensive are UK immigration applications and is this a problem?

The cost of making an immigration or nationality application has risen extremely steeply. Annual increases of 20% or 25% per year have become standard, but now we’re seeing increases of 120%. An example is the Certificate of Sponsorship fee, which rose from £239 to £525 on 9 April 2025.

The current cost of an application for indefinite leave to remain (aka settlement) is £3,029. The actual cost of processing such an application is £523, so the Home Office is generating considerable income from each application.

The cost of settlement is only one of the last steps in a long journey of applications, though. The total costs of applying to enter the UK as a spouse, for example, are far higher once all the different applications and fees are taken into account:

Fees were only introduced for in-country applications in 2003 and the increase only began in earnest in 2006/07 (in the very early days of this blog!), when for example a postal application for indefinite leave to remain was increased from £335 to £775 and an application for naturalisation as a British citizen from £200 to £575.

The power to charge fees sits in the Immigration Act 2014. It’s quite a straightforward process involving approval by both Houses of Parliament and a fees regulation, which is passed by a negative procedure (no vote needed). It requires the consent of the Treasury. In other words, it’s quite easy to change fees.

The updated list of fees for immigration and nationality applications that apply from 1 May 2025 shows no changes, but that’s because the fees were last updated 3 weeks earlier on 9 April 2025. Between April 2024 and April 2025, the cost of family visas increased by £92 and the cost of a settlement application increased by £144.  

The Government’s longstanding aim has been to have a largely self-funded borders and immigration system, with the idea being that those who use the immigration system should contribute to its cost. Particularly in the last few years, the maths doesn’t seem to add up and the justifications are incongruous.

In 2023, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury John Glen said that immigration fees should help (indirectly) fund a pay rise for the police!  

[The fee increases] will help to cover more of the cost of the migration and border system, allowing the Home Secretary to divert more funding to police forces to help fund the pay rise for the police.

In 2024 the NHS surcharge rose by a massive 66% to £1,035 per person a year (or £776 for students and children). The surcharge is particularly controversial as migrants pay the cost upfront when they pay for their immigration application, but then they also pay for the NHS through taxes. The revenue from the NHS Surcharge has been allocated to support healthcare funding in the UK.

There seems little doubt, however, that as far as Ministers are concerned a welcome side effect of the steep fee increases is that this “prices out” migrants of modest means. Those trying to find workarounds face economic hardship, and it becomes more and more likely that high fees push migrants into debt, making them vulnerable and at risk of exploitation.

For children, the cost of registering as a British citizen is £1,214 but the actual unit cost to the Home Office is £575. A watchdog report confirms that this is literally prohibitive for unaccompanied children who otherwise qualify for citizenship. The high cost can understandably deter parents who are struggling financially from making applications that would be in the best interests of their children.

The Government published a white paper on 12 May 2025 titled ‘Restoring Control over the Immigration System’. It sets out radical proposals to cut net migration by making changes to the immigration system and border security.

One of the proposals is to increase the Immigration Skills Charge by 32%. The skills charge was introduced on 1 April 2017 and is more explicitly and overtly aimed at reducing immigration. It was introduced at a level of £1000 per year per worker and will rise to £1,320. And where will the revenue surplus go? The white paper states:

ISC funding will be used at the oncoming Spending Review to support skills funding for priority sectors to upskill the domestic workforce and reduce reliance on migration over the medium term.  

But this is not the only cost. Employers also have to purchase and maintain a sponsorship licence and pay sponsor related fees for each worker they sponsor.

The direct costs soon mount up – figures underlined cannot be passed onto a sponsored worker and must be borne by the sponsor:

The indirect costs are also considerable. These fees omit several other elements of friction:

• the reference to the hundreds of pages of so called “SOC codes”, which impose a minimum salary for every conceivable job in the United Kingdom
• the fact the skilled worker will need to be sacked at the end of five years (or 10 years under the white paper) unless earning £38,700 (or slightly lower salaries in some cases, but salary discounts are also subject to review under white paper proposals).
• the administrative and financial cost of dealing with employment law issues arising from a business decision not to sponsor or to no longer sponsor, given the ever-rising unaffordability of the sponsorship system, and the doubling of the 5-year period to a 10-year period before a skilled worker can be released from it.
• the cost of onerous sponsor administrative and compliance duties imposed by the Home Office, which can be extremely time consuming but neglect of which leads to loss of the sponsorship licence and therefore current and future foreign workers.
• the commitment sponsors must make under the white paper to play a part in increasing recruitment for the domestic workforce.

The Immigration Skills Charge was, and still is, explicitly intended to make foreign workers uncompetitive in order to reduce immigration. The recent ban on passing on sponsorship and associated costs has made it even harder for businesses to afford hiring overseas talent. These are now a classic “tariff” in intention and effect. Like all tariffs, such misplaced protectionism is likely to have unintended consequences, including making us all poorer.

Imposing these tariffs on human beings in the form of onerous and — for some — unaffordable application fees as if they were widgets, whether for entry as family or as workers, is inhumane and is very poor policy indeed.

The white paper suggests extending the five year duration to settlement to ten years. If a sponsor could ever commit to a ten year period of sponsorship, the cost to the sponsor will be a disincentivising £15,304. The cost to the employee will be an inconceivable £18,384 (and that’s assuming they only have one entry-clearance and one permission to stay application). This doesn’t account for any of the skilled worker’s family member application fees.

The ban on passing sponsorship and associated costs onto workers took effect for Skilled Worker sponsors in December 2024 and was expanded to cover additional sponsor categories in April 2025 (though not all). Employers must also consider legal advice fees and other administrative expenses, which are restricted from being recouped in certain situations.

Sponsors must now exercise extreme caution when deciding whether to sponsor a worker and whether to implement a clawback or similar financial agreement to protect their investment. Such measures can trap workers, preventing them from changing jobs or leaving the country, heightening their vulnerability to exploitation and poor treatment.

This is addressed, to an extent, in the white paper. The Government is considering making it easier for workers to move between sponsors to reduce the risk of being trapped. Where abuse is identified, they propose to implement ‘innovative financial measures, penalties or sanctions’ imposed on sponsors. Although this probably has the desired effect of allowing for greater mobility and enhanced economic contribution on the part of the worker, arguably allowing for better integration into the labour market; it’s an extreme deterrent for sponsors who are already investing so much in filling a much-needed skills gap.

Shortly after the white paper was published, the Migration Advisory Committee updated their net migration report and concluded:

We would suggest that government should consider the total impact of a policy change, rather than simply its effect on net migration… Migration policy does not act in isolation.

Can we expect a further rise in immigration fees? I would say without a doubt. And lookout for Rachel Reeves multi-year spending review speech on 11 June 2025. There could be some indication of raising revenue from immigration fees in there.

This article was originally published on 3 August 2017 and has been periodically updated since then by Pip Hague. It is correct as of the new date of publication shown.