17 December 2025

The UK's Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) has published the recommendations of its review of salary thresholds and discounts for Britain's sponsored work visa routes. The MAC modelled how different minimum salary settings for Britain's most used sponsored worker route would affect migration volumes and public finances. The report cautions that simply raising salary thresholds to cut migration can be counter-productive from a fiscal and economic perspective.

The Migration Advisory Committee's proposals on salary thresholds and discounts at a glance

  • Reduce Skilled Worker going rates from the median back to the 25th percentile, as they were before April 2024, as this is sufficient to guard against undercutting the resident workforce. The general threshold could be maintained at around where it currently is (£41,700) and uprated annually in line with earnings as a means of reducing net migration. The threshold could even be raised a small amount without the economy suffering a fiscal cost.
  • Salary discounts should continue to be available for new entrants (such as young people and recent UK graduates) under the Skilled Worker route and the current four-year cap which is putting many hires off should be removed. This could conflict with the government's policy aim that full salary rules should be met for migrants to qualify for settlement (although proposed earned settlement rules for a longer qualifying period could allow employers longer to gradually increase salaries up to the necessary level for settlement, rather than within the current often unrealistically short four-year span). The MAC recommend that a single new entrant rate is set at £33,400, to ensure a typical graduate entrant can be employed using the immigration system whilst also being sufficiently paid to provide a net fiscal benefit to the UK over their lifetime.
  • The salary discount for sponsored migrants with a PhD should be removed.
  • The MAC once more rejects the often raised argument for regional variation in salary rules, insisting there are more difference in how much employers can pay within regions of the United Kingdom that between them.
  • The MAC recognises the importance of special treatment of roles on national pay scales, such as NHS workers and teachers. (Currently, the general threshold for pay scale occupations is set at 80% of the 25th percentile of all RQF 3+ occupations - which is £25,000 and occupation-specific thresholds are set according to national pay scales.) However, the MAC wants the government to recognise how this preferential treatment for the public sector means the immigration system supports the public sector while making talent less accessible for private sector firms facing far higher minimum salary thresholds.
  • Roles on the new Temporary Shortage List (TSL) should not have a discounted minimum going rate that must be paid, as the route is designed for fully qualified workers rather than a pathway for younger workers. The MAC suggests the median going rate. It suggests lowering the general threshold instead from £41,700 to at least as high as the 30th percentile of the UK’s full-time annual earnings distribution (approx. £30,900) if the TSL isn't a path to settlement. If the government wants to keep use of the route low, or to allow a path to settlement it could choose a higher threshold, but higher thresholds would hinder growth in Industrial Strategy sectors.
  • Global Business Mobility – Senior or Specialist workers should have the going rate increased from the current 25th percentile to the median, to reflect that the route is for senior specialists.
  • The MAC criticises the Scale-up visa launched by the last government as having little benefit and recommends against symbolic routes that do not fill a gap in the immigration system as a waste of public money. The committee recommends that the salary thresholds for the Scale-up route are aligned with those of the Skilled Worker route, while acknowledging that this will effectively eliminate the main incentive for an employer to choose the Scale-up route over the SW route, aside from the exemption to the Immigration Skills Charge, and may result in the route becoming dormant. The uptake of Scale-up sponsor licences has been limited largely as sponsored migrants can leave their sponsors to work elsewhere in teh UK job market after six months.
  • The MAC recommends that the government clarify for employers their legal obligations for job candidates who require sponsorship with regard to employment, equality and discrimination laws to help employers choose to prioritise candidates who will not require sponsorship.

NB: these proposals are not a programme for legislation, just recommendations from the government-commissioned review by the influential independent expert committee. They are likely to influence government policy decisions in the coming months, but just how remains to be seen.

You can read more about the recommendations here.