Visa sponsors by city: where the licensed employers are
London holds 29 % of the 127,800 licensed sponsors; the ten largest towns together, 40 %. Search an employer in your town below.
Search sponsors in a town
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Register of licensed sponsors published by the Home Office on 13 October 2026 (127,800 organisations), Open Government Licence v3.0. Searched in your browser. Not affiliated with the Home Office.
Published by Radif Partners · How we calculate · Home Office fees of 8 October 2026, rules checked 13 October 2026
The Home Office register of licensed sponsors gives a town for every organisation, which makes it possible to see where sponsoring employers are. In the file of 13 October 2026, 36,663 of the 127,800 organisations are registered in London, far ahead of Birmingham (3,095), Manchester (2,889) and Leicester (1,424). The ten towns with the most sponsors account for 40 % of the register, and the forty listed below for most of it. Two cautions apply. The town is the one the employer gave for its licence, often the head office, so a chain with branches across the country counts once, where its head office is. And a sponsor is an employer allowed to sponsor, not one that is hiring: the register says nothing about vacancies. The search above takes a name and a town and returns the licensed organisations that match, with their routes and rating.
The forty towns with the most licensed sponsors
| Town | Licensed organisations | Of which Skilled Worker | Share of the register | B-rated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| London | 36,663 | 35,307 | 28.7 % | 13 |
| Birmingham | 3,095 | 2,966 | 2.4 % | 2 |
| Manchester | 2,889 | 2,770 | 2.3 % | 2 |
| Leicester | 1,424 | 1,379 | 1.1 % | 3 |
| Glasgow | 1,377 | 1,294 | 1.1 % | 2 |
| Bristol | 1,290 | 1,227 | 1.0 % | 0 |
| Edinburgh | 1,181 | 1,113 | 0.9 % | 0 |
| Leeds | 1,085 | 1,038 | 0.8 % | 0 |
| Nottingham | 1,050 | 1,004 | 0.8 % | 3 |
| Ilford | 936 | 919 | 0.7 % | 0 |
| Coventry | 915 | 874 | 0.7 % | 0 |
| Reading | 914 | 884 | 0.7 % | 0 |
| Slough | 864 | 846 | 0.7 % | 3 |
| Cambridge | 842 | 811 | 0.7 % | 0 |
| Milton Keynes | 836 | 805 | 0.7 % | 1 |
| Harrow | 817 | 798 | 0.6 % | 0 |
| Bradford | 740 | 706 | 0.6 % | 1 |
| Liverpool | 735 | 705 | 0.6 % | 0 |
| Luton | 710 | 690 | 0.6 % | 0 |
| Sheffield | 691 | 654 | 0.5 % | 0 |
| Oxford | 629 | 601 | 0.5 % | 0 |
| Cardiff | 626 | 592 | 0.5 % | 0 |
| Bolton | 594 | 560 | 0.5 % | 1 |
| Southampton | 571 | 544 | 0.4 % | 0 |
| Croydon | 537 | 512 | 0.4 % | 0 |
| Belfast | 537 | 480 | 0.4 % | 1 |
| Northampton | 516 | 500 | 0.4 % | 0 |
| Derby | 515 | 491 | 0.4 % | 0 |
| Wolverhampton | 500 | 476 | 0.4 % | 0 |
| Aberdeen | 498 | 479 | 0.4 % | 1 |
| Hounslow | 491 | 481 | 0.4 % | 0 |
| Watford | 487 | 476 | 0.4 % | 0 |
| Essex | 457 | 448 | 0.4 % | 0 |
| Romford | 442 | 427 | 0.3 % | 0 |
| Southall | 425 | 411 | 0.3 % | 0 |
| Hayes | 421 | 415 | 0.3 % | 0 |
| Wembley | 418 | 409 | 0.3 % | 0 |
| Norwich | 405 | 388 | 0.3 % | 0 |
| Brighton | 400 | 383 | 0.3 % | 0 |
| Preston | 396 | 377 | 0.3 % | 1 |
What the figures say, and what they do not
The concentration in London reflects head offices as much as jobs: an organisation with a London head office and branches elsewhere appears once, under London, however many of its sponsored staff work in other towns. Outer London postal towns such as Ilford, Harrow, Wembley, Croydon, Southall, Hounslow appear separately because the register uses the postal town the sponsor wrote, not the borough.
Scotland's largest centres (Glasgow 1,377, Edinburgh 1,181, Aberdeen 498), Cardiff in Wales (626) and Belfast in Northern Ireland (537) matter for one reason beyond numbers: the Immigration Salary List and the national pay scales differ by nation, so the same job can have a different threshold in Glasgow and in Leeds. The Immigration Salary List page shows which entries apply only in Scotland.
The B-rated column counts organisations with at least one B-rated licence: they cannot assign new certificates of sponsorship until they complete an action plan, which matters if you are about to accept an offer from one of them. The rating is shown for each result of the search.
How the towns are counted
Each organisation is counted once for each name and town it is registered under, whatever the number of routes it holds; 143,218 lines of the register give 127,800 organisations this way. The town field is copied as the sponsor wrote it, with capital letters and spaces tidied, and nothing else is changed: that is why "Essex", a county, shows up in the list, written in the town field by some sponsors, and why a few London suburbs stand on their own. The table is rebuilt from the new file every working day, so the counts and the order of the towns can move slightly from one day to the next.
Before relying on any listing, compare the sponsor licence number printed on your certificate of sponsorship with the employer's details, and check its rating on the day you accept: a downgrade appears in the next day's file.
Searching by town
The search matches the town and the county fields of the register, so "Manchester" also finds sponsors whose town is a suburb but whose county is Greater Manchester, when the employer filled in that field. Spelling follows what each sponsor typed, which is why the search ignores capitals and accents. To find a particular employer, start with its name; to explore a sector, try a word that names it ("care", "dental", "engineering", "restaurant") with a town. The full register, without a town, is on the register search page.