Skilled Worker visa reset forces UK hospitality to grow its own chefs
Home Office figures show sponsored visas for food preparation and hospitality trades have fallen 76% since chefs and hotel managers left the Skilled Worker list. Operators now have to build kitchen and management pipelines from the domestic workforce.
Sarah Shaw
7 min read
When the UK raised the Skilled Worker visa skill threshold to graduate level on 22 July 2025, hospitality lost its main route for sponsoring overseas chefs. Fourteen months on, official figures show how sharply that door has closed, and recruiters across hotels and restaurants are rebuilding their hiring plans around people already in the country.
What changed in the Skilled Worker visa rules
The Statement of Changes HC 997, which followed the May 2025 immigration White Paper, lifted the minimum skill level for new sponsorship from RQF 3 to RQF 6 and removed around 180 occupations from eligibility. The general salary threshold rose from £38,700 to £41,700, with a lower rate of £33,400 for new entrants.
For hospitality the effect was direct. Chefs, restaurant managers, catering managers and customer service managers can no longer be newly sponsored, and law firm Shepherd and Wedderburn lists hotel managers among the ineligible roles too. Workers who already held a Skilled Worker visa before 22 July 2025 can still be sponsored in those roles, including when they change employer, which has made the existing sponsored workforce unusually valuable.
Costs have risen as well. The Immigration Skills Charge went up from £1,000 to £1,320 a year per worker for standard sponsors from 16 December 2025, and new applicants have needed English at B2 level, rather than B1, since 8 January 2026.
The numbers behind the shift
The Home Office immigration statistics for the year ending June 2026 show Skilled Worker visas down 26% to 61,120 and main applicants down 30% to 26,894. The department said most of the fall in main applicants came from “fewer grants for food preparation and hospitality trades”, which dropped 76% to just 528.
There is no short-term relief in sight. The Temporary Shortage List, which runs until 31 December 2026, contains no hospitality roles. The Migration Advisory Committee’s Stage 2 report, published on 23 July 2026, recommended 28 of the 46 occupations that submitted jobs plans for 18 months of further access, mainly in construction, engineering and data. Hospitality was not among them.
Demand for staff has softened, which eases some of the pressure. The ONS put accommodation and food services vacancies at about 70,000 for June to August 2026, down 8,000 on the year, although the sector’s vacancy rate of 2.8% remains one of the highest of any industry.
How recruiters are responding
UKHospitality has long argued that the sector can fill more of its roles locally. When the rules changed, chair Kate Nicholls told the Morning Advertiser: “Hospitality recruits more than three-quarters of its workforce from within the UK.” She pointed to apprenticeship levy reform, foundation apprenticeships and pre-employment training as ways to go further.
Those tools are now arriving. A Level 2 Catering and Hospitality foundation apprenticeship, covering roles such as commis chef, bartender and waiting staff, opened for delivery on 1 April 2026 with funding of up to £3,500. For kitchen brigades, that points to a longer route to the pass: hiring at commis level, training in house and promoting sous chefs from within rather than recruiting finished chefs from abroad.
For employers who still sponsor, retention has become a recruitment strategy in its own right. Because pre-July 2025 visa holders keep their eligibility when they move jobs, experienced sponsored chefs are attractive to competitors, and operators that lose them cannot replace them like for like from overseas. Our guide to hiring internationally sets out the routes that remain open.
What this means for hospitality employers
The practical lessons are fairly clear. Workforce plans that assumed a steady supply of sponsored chefs need rewriting around apprenticeships, internal progression and better retention of the people already on the payroll. Pay, rotas and kitchen culture will matter more, because the domestic candidate pool is now the only one most operators can draw on.
The cost backdrop makes that harder. UKHospitality said in June 2026 that the sector had 120,000 fewer jobs after two Budgets, and that two-thirds of businesses said they could not afford to employ people. Recruiting at home is now the default, but funding the training that makes it work remains the sector’s central challenge. For more on building the pipeline, see our eight strategies to fix hotel recruitment in 2026.
