Undefined Certificates of Sponsorship: British firms with Skilled Worker sponsor licences are experiencing an unprecedented 18-week wait for Home Office approval of routine requests for further ‘undefined’ Certificates of Sponsorship (CoS).
Immigration advice business Five Star International said today (20 July 2026) that sponsorship processing durations are now commonly running to four months or more for standard-service allocations that used to be turned around in two to four weeks.
Undefined CoS are the digital certificates of sponsorship used to extend the leave to remain of existing sponsored workers or to hire migrants already in the UK.
If a sponsor exhausts its annual allocation before it is allocated more, it cannot legally issue fresh CoS — bringing contract extensions, internal transfers and time-critical project hires to a halt.
Multinationals operating annual graduate intake plans have been forced to delay being able to on-board and SMEs say they are losing preferred applicants to rivals who are able to issue CoS instantly via the priority route.
The limited priority service, costing £200 per request with a five-working-day decision target, is released each working day at 9 a.m. and sells out in under three minutes.
If an employer fails, they have to wait until the next morning, a situation immigration attorneys refer to as “sponsorship roulette”.
The backlog is believed to be due to Home Office staff being redeployed to concentrate on clearing asylum casework and rolling out the new eVisa system although this has not been confirmed by officials.
HR and mobility teams are being advised by specialists to undertake a rapid examination of sponsored headcount and visa expiry profiles and submit their allocation requests at least six months in advance.
Companies with graduates starting this autumn are being told to apply immediately even if figures are not yet completed and to keep formal evidence (such as staff plans and recruitment pipelines) on file to validate the amount asked.
The delay adds to the cost and complexity of deploying UK talent, only three weeks after the latest Statement of Changes from the government raised salary thresholds for many Skilled Worker professions.
Mobility managers said the uncertainty risks harming the UK’s appeal as a place for regional headquarters and R&D projects that depend on quick intra-company moves.