About

What RouteUK is and how it works

Finding a UK tech job that comes with visa sponsorship is genuinely hard — not because sponsors don't exist, but because there's no single place to find them. RouteUK fixes that.

The problem

The UK Home Office publishes a register of every company licensed to sponsor a Skilled Worker visa — over 124,000 organisations. But the register is a raw CSV with no scoring, no filtering by sector, and no signal of which companies are actually hiring right now.

At the same time, thousands of tech jobs are posted daily on Adzuna and Reed. Some explicitly advertise sponsorship. Most don't — even when the company would sponsor the right candidate.

The result: people spend weeks manually cross-referencing job boards with the government register, or apply blindly and waste everyone's time when the company can't sponsor.

How RouteUK works

01

Register sync

Every week we pull the latest Home Office licensed sponsor register and import every company into our database.

02

Job ingestion

Daily, we fetch hundreds of tech job listings from Adzuna and Reed and match them to companies in the register by name.

03

Sponsorship detection

Each job description is scanned for 30+ visa sponsorship signals — "Skilled Worker visa", "certificate of sponsorship", "COS provided" and more — while filtering out negative phrases like "no sponsorship available".

04

Scoring

Every company receives a sponsor score (0–100) combining register status, hiring volume, sponsorship mention rate, recency and role breadth. Scores update weekly.

What goes into the score

Each company is scored 0–100 from five weighted signals:

30%
Register status— Is the company on the Home Office licensed sponsor register?
25%
Posting volume— How many tech roles have they posted in the last 90 days?
20%
Sponsorship mentions— What share of their job ads explicitly mention visa sponsorship?
15%
Recency— How recently have they been hiring? Older activity scores lower.
10%
Role breadth— Do they hire across engineering, data, product and design — or just one area?

What the tiers mean

Scores are bucketed into four tiers for quick filtering:

4

Actively sponsoring

On the register and consistently posting roles that explicitly mention visa sponsorship. Strong signal of an open, repeat-sponsor culture.

3

Likely sponsoring

Licensed and hiring actively. Sponsorship language may not appear in every ad, but volume and recency of postings suggest real capacity.

2

Occasionally sponsors

On the Home Office register but limited recent job posting activity. Worth applying to, but may sponsor selectively for hard-to-fill roles.

1

Rarely sponsors

Register status unclear or no recent posting activity detected. Not impossible, but a lower-confidence sponsorship prospect.

Data note: RouteUK is not affiliated with the Home Office or any job board. Register data and job postings refresh on a rolling basis — scores reflect the most recent crawl, not real-time status. Always verify sponsorship directly with the employer before applying.