sponsor-check

Can this UK employer sponsor my visa? Ask Claude, get an answer from the official Home Office register in seconds.

sponsor-check is an MCP server and command-line tool that checks employers against the Register of licensed sponsors: workers, which UK Visas and Immigration republishes almost every working day. It also checks a salary against the published Skilled Worker thresholds and going rates.

$ sponsor-check check "Synthesia"
YES: Synthesia / Skilled Worker (register 2026-09-28)
  Synthesia Limited  (London)  score 100
      - Skilled Worker  [A]

$ sponsor-check salary 45000 2136
YES: £45,000 for occupation code 2136 (IT quality and testing professionals)
  required: £41,700
  rule: Standard rate: the higher of the £41,700 general salary threshold and the £41,200
        going rate for occupation code 2136 (IT quality and testing professionals).

Why

Checking the register by hand means downloading a ~10 MB CSV and Ctrl+F-ing it for every application. That breaks in predictable ways:

• Trading names vs legal names. Job ads use the brand; the register uses the legal entity, often as LEGAL NAME LTD T/A Brand. sponsor-check indexes both halves.

• Inconsistent data entry. CAKE GLORY LTD LTD, F-Secure (UK) Limited, 2i Limited vs 2I LIMITED. Names are normalised (case, punctuation, legal suffixes, accents, &) before matching.

• One row per route. The same employer appears once per visa route. Results are grouped per organisation, with each route and its A/B rating.

• Downgraded licences. B-rated and provisional licences are flagged, because they change what you should ask the employer.

Related MCP server: SponsorFinder MCP Server

Use it from Claude

Claude Code

claude mcp add sponsor-check -- sponsor-check-mcp

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sponsor-check": { "command": "sponsor-check-mcp" }
  }
}

Then ask things like "Can Octopus Energy sponsor a Skilled Worker visa?" or paste a job ad and ask whether the employer is on the register.

All tools are read-only.

Command line

pip install git+https://github.com/sauravss98/sponsor-check
sponsor-check update                                   # download today's register
sponsor-check check "Octopus Energy"                   # exit code 0 only if licensed
sponsor-check check "Mode Agence" --route "Creative Worker"
sponsor-check search "octopus" -n 10 --json
sponsor-check salary 45000 2136                        # exit code 0 only if the salary meets it
sponsor-check salary 62000 1111 --new-entrant --json

The register is cached in ~/.cache/sponsor-check (override with SPONSOR_CHECK_HOME) and refreshed automatically when it is more than 24 hours old. If GOV.UK is unreachable, the last good copy is used.

How it works

GOV.UK Content API ──► find today's CSV URL ──► download (atomic swap)
                                                     │
                                                     ▼
                         parse ► group rows by organisation ► SQLite
                                        │
                           aliases: full name, legal part, trading part(s)
                                        │
query ► normalise ► exact alias lookup ─┴─► RapidFuzz WRatio over aliases ► verdict

• The CSV link changes with every publication, so it is discovered through the GOV.UK Content API, with an HTML fallback.

• Exact alias hits score 100. Fuzzy hits are capped at 99 so a guess is never reported as a confirmed licence; names that start with the query get a boost.

• Verdict bands: 100 = licensed, 90 to 99 = possible_match, below that = not_found (closest names still shown).

Salary thresholds

The salary requirement is the higher of a flat general threshold and the occupation's going rate, and both move with the Immigration Rules. No figure is hardcoded: they are scraped from the published GOV.UK guidance into src/sponsor_check/data/thresholds.json, which records the source URL and publication date of every table it used. Every answer repeats that date, names the rule that produced it, and lists the lower rates the job could qualify for, such as the new entrant, PhD, immigration salary list and temporary shortage list rates.

Refresh the data after a rules change with python scripts/refresh_thresholds.py, then commit the diff. The script fails loudly rather than writing a half-empty file if a page changes shape.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

Tests run against a fixture of real rows taken from the published register, plus clearly fictional Example ... rows for the B-rated case. They are offline: the salary tests read the committed thresholds file, and scripts/refresh_thresholds.py is the only thing that talks to GOV.UK at build time.

Roadmap

• Salary check against Skilled Worker thresholds by occupation code

• check_job tool: extract employer and salary from a pasted job ad, run both checks

• Companies House lookup to resolve brand names to legal entities

• Publish to PyPI and the MCP registry

Disclaimer

Not legal or immigration advice. A licence means an employer can sponsor, not that it will sponsor a particular role. Always confirm with the employer.

Register data and salary thresholds: UK Visas and Immigration, published on GOV.UK under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Code: MIT.