Right to Work Checks: The UK Employer Obligations That Now Cost £60,000 to Ignore

In February 2024, the maximum civil penalty for employing an illegal worker in the United Kingdom tripled. A first breach now carries a fine of up to £45,000 per worker, with repeat breaches reaching £60,000. Two years on, those rates remain in force, and the Home Office is using them. In the third quarter of 2025 alone, 617 civil penalties were issued, recovering £34.2 million from 831 unauthorised workers. Enforcement raids have risen by more than three-quarters since the current government took office.

For most employers, this should mean only one thing: the right to work check, long treated as a low-status piece of HR administration, has become one of the most consequential compliance tasks a business performs. It is not paperwork. It is the legal defence that stands between a careless onboarding process and a six-figure liability per worker.

What the check is actually for

The right to work check has a specific legal function. Carried out correctly, it gives the employer a statutory excuse: a defence against civil penalty action where it later emerges, despite reasonable diligence, that an employee was not entitled to work. Without that defence, the employer is liable, regardless of intent. The Home Office does not need to prove that an employer knew. It needs only to show that the prescribed check was not properly done.

Three methods are recognised. A manual document inspection in person, with a copy retained on file. An online check using a share code, now the default route for any worker with digital immigration status. And a Digital Verification Service check, used for British and Irish citizens with valid passports, conducted through a certified identity provider. The check must be carried out before employment begins, and the obligation applies to every new hire without exception.

Where employers actually trip up

Most civil penalties do not come from deliberate wrongdoing. They come from small, ordinary administrative failures: a follow-up check missed because the diary date passed unnoticed, a document type accepted that is no longer valid, an inconsistent process applied across multiple sites, a third-party identity provider used in good faith without realising that liability never transferred.

The decommissioning of Biometric Residence Permits at the end of October 2024 caught a number of employers out. An expired BRP, even one held by a worker with continued legal status, is no longer acceptable evidence. The eVisa transition has produced similar uncertainty: workers may have set up their UKVI accounts, but employers need to verify status through a current share code, not whatever document the worker chooses to present directly.

When uncertainty creeps in over any of these points, particularly around a specific hire or a process that has not been audited in some time, a free consultation with an immigration lawyer can settle the question quickly, often before the question becomes a problem. Most penalties do not come from a single dramatic failure. They come from accumulated drift in a process that was once compliant and has not been reviewed since.

Where the costs really land

The £60,000 ceiling is the headline figure, but it is rarely the most damaging consequence of a breach. For sponsor licence holders, the real cost begins after the penalty is issued. A licence is likely to be reviewed, and depending on the seriousness of the breach, may be downgraded to a B-rating, suspended, or revoked. A revocation removes the ability to employ overseas workers under any sponsored route, curtails the leave of those already in post, and triggers a cooling-off period before any reapplication is permitted.

The reputational consequences matter too. Employers who fail to pay or who exhaust their objection rights are listed publicly in the quarterly Home Office naming reports. Civil penalties can lead to enforced debt action and County Court judgments, with knock-on effects for credit and director eligibility. In the most serious cases, where an employer is found to have known or had reasonable cause to believe a worker lacked permission, criminal prosecution becomes available, carrying a sentence of up to five years’ imprisonment.

The discrimination trap

There is a second regulatory regime running parallel to the right to work obligation, and it cuts in the opposite direction. Checks must be applied consistently to every hire. Carrying them out only on workers who appear foreign, who have non-British names, or who speak with an accent, is unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. The Home Office expects all employees to be checked at the same point in the recruitment process, using the same methods, with the same record-keeping standards.

This is the trap. An employer who under-checks is exposed to civil penalties. An employer who selectively over-checks is exposed to discrimination claims. The only safe ground is process consistency, which is harder to maintain than it sounds, particularly across multi-site operations and in businesses where individual managers recruit with little oversight.

The compliance habit

A right to work check is, in the end, a small administrative act. It takes a few minutes to complete properly. The cost of getting it wrong, set against the time required to get it right, is wildly out of proportion. The employers who weather this regulatory environment are not the ones with the best lawyers. They are the ones who treat the check as a discipline rather than a formality, who diary their follow-ups, train every manager who recruits, and audit their own files before someone else does.

The penalties exist to focus the mind. The mistake is letting them be the only thing that does.