Changes to Work Visa and British Citizenship: The Home Office has announced updates to the Immigration and Nationality Fees Amendment Order 2025, introducing extensive fee increase that will affect everything from worker sponsorship to naturalization applications. Here are the key updates and what they mean for applicants, employers and also stakeholders.
Changes to Work Visa and British Citizenship
The first increase is for Electronic Travel Authorisation, which is ETA, which is increasing from £10 to £16. This alone change will give you an expected revenue boost of £140 million in 2025-26, but what is the ETA and does it impact you? Just stay with me till the end as I will be doing a deep dive on it later.
The second fee increases for sponsorship certificates cos and sponsor a worker which is skilled worker. Ministry of religion, Global Business, Mobility and International sportsperson 12 months. This fee is increasing from £239 to £525. Temporary worker route fees is increasing from £25 to £55. This is expected revenue boost of £111 million in 2025-26.
The third fee increases for naturalisation. British citizenship fees increasing from £1500 to £1605. British Overseas Territories citizenship is increasing from £1000 to £1070. Now can you guess the expected revenue boost just to do this increase? £18 million in 2025-26. That is huge.
The fourth increase is for other nationality service, which doesn’t impact my Readers, but I will cover that in detail later on. The expected revenue boost is just £1 million in 2025-26 due to this change. So you must be wondering what is the total change? In total, the government estimates these changes could generate additional to £69 million annually in the year 2025-26. These adjustments align with the UK’s plan for change, which seeks to streamline and digitise immigration processes.
But if you want to know how it impacts you. When is the start date of this change and what are the next steps? Make sure you stick with me till the end of this Article.
Now let’s get into the details of this Article. As you can see this Link (Next steps for a more efficient immigration system) is the UK government website where they updated this on 16th of Jan. On this article here you can see all the changes which I already mentioned in my introduction, where the cost is going up for almost everything, which is ultimately giving a revenue generation of £269 million in a year, which is huge. And there are various news articles as well about these changes.
So I’m going to briefly discuss through my points now for my new Readers Who doesn’t understand what is COS? COS means certificate of Sponsorship and this is a mandatory document which is issued by the employer. In fact, this is the first document which needs to be issued even before you can apply your work visa or skill visa and you have your unique number which needs to be attached while you apply for your skilled visa. And the current cost is 239. And like I mentioned already, this is the increase, the new cost. Of course you can see it is going up from 239 to 525.
ETA is going from 10 to 16. And just a quick reminder to people who don’t know what is ETA now ETA is not applicable for people like Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan or people from Bangladesh. Because when you travel to the UK, you already apply for a tourist visa. If you already have a tourist visa, you don’t require ETA. ETA are for people who don’t require visa to travel to the UK, but they still need to go to online portal and then kind of register in the electronic way. Then they are travelling to the UK. This is their passport and this is the travel date. This is the in date and out date. They have to do it and that is the fees. So it’s for people who are from US, European countries and many other countries who don’t require visa to travel to UK.
The next change is about the Naturalization fee. Now the process what happens? Example if you’re on a work visa, say five years, you stay on a skilled visa, then after that one year you apply for ILR. After applying for ILR, say you want to take a British passport to apply for a British passport, the first step is applying for And that naturalization cost has gone up, which is from £1,330 to 1605.
This is going to cost you now for £482 which was for £450. Certificate of amendment. It’s going to cost you now for £428, which is now 400 and right. A board documentation is going to cost you £589, which was 550 before. So the expected revenue is £1 million in 25-26. Now remember this are just the proposals which is submitted. This is not still approved and hence the date of this implementation is not yet published.
Now let’s see the impact to employees. If I look at the major change for my readers is basically the COS Cost. We already know when the last year when the changes were introduced. Employees in the UK are not willing to sponsor people because it’s cost for them. And also they have to kind of challenge why they really need those persons in the UK, why they want to not hire the local and hire immigrant. And now with the COS cost, which is kind of almost double, I don’t know what will be the impact. It’s not a huge impact of cost increase. But again employers need to think about the extra costs they have to bear. If they hire an immigrant. So definitely a new cost which is added in their list and you cannot pay for it. So it’s the employer’s cost. And legally none of the employees should be paying for the service. It needs to be for the employers, so they need to budget it accordingly.
I say this is too early to even talk about it, because it was already difficult to hire any immigrants in the UK. With the new COS cost doubling up, we will have to wait and see how much it will impact you . But again, I don’t see too much of change now in terms of implementation timeline. Like I said, this was just kind of laid before Parliament or 16th of Jan. They have not yet approved it and hence there are no dates. So the next step would be once it’s approved in the Parliament, then there will be a date of implementation. These are the new Changes to Work Visa and British Citizenship.
So I will say just keep your eyes open. Listen to the news, what’s happening. And I will definitely make a follow up articles when there are more details rounded. I hope you found this Article useful. Thanks for reading my article till the end.