“what are skilled worker immigration trends in UK during 2020 to 2025?”
Annual Home Office figures for sponsored work visas granted to main applicants, calendar years 2020–2025 (year ending December), split between the Skilled Worker route excluding health and care and the Health and Care Worker sub-route. Grants are an administrative flow measure — not arrivals, employment or net migration.
The post-Brexit Skilled Worker route begins with a broader skills threshold and no annual cap; 2020 is also depressed by the pandemic and the Tier 2 transition.
Care workers join the Health and Care sub-route, driving the 2022–2023 surge to the 2023 peak.
Higher general salary threshold, care-worker dependants restricted, and tighter care sponsorship and compliance cut grants sharply.
From 22 July 2025 the skill threshold rises, over 100 occupations become ineligible, and overseas recruitment of care workers ends.
The Migration Observatory at Oxford and the National Audit Office independently confirm the care-driven 2023 peak: the NAO reports combined applications peaking at 509,100 in 2023 (383,700 of them Health and Care), and Oxford briefings put Health and Care main applicants at roughly 146,000 in 2023 — 64% of the Skilled Worker route in the year ending June 2023. These counts use slightly different definitions (applications, or periods ending mid-year), so they corroborate the pattern rather than add to the annual chart. nao.org.uk · migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk
Takeaway: 2020–2025 was a boom and correction driven almost entirely by one sub-route. Opening the Skilled Worker system to care workers in 2022 tripled grants within two years; closing it back down in 2024–2025 removed most of that growth, leaving non-care skilled migration on a gentler rise-and-ease path at about twice its 2020 level.
| Year | Skilled Worker excl. health & care | Health and Care Worker | Combined | Health & care share | Source |
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Caveat: figures are visas granted to main applicants — an administrative flow, not arrivals, long-term immigration, employment or net migration. The Health and Care Worker route is a sub-route of Skilled Worker, shown separately to reveal the main driver. 2020–2024 use the Migration Advisory Committee’s rounded series; 2025 uses the Home Office summary of latest statistics.
Data: 23 official and independent evidence rows (17 gov.uk, 6 Migration Observatory/NAO) on UK sponsored work visas, compiled from Home Office immigration statistics to year ending December 2025. Numbers measure visa grants to main applicants per calendar year; the chart uses the single rounded annual sequence to avoid double-counting duplicate presentations; exact-figure and application-count rows are cited in text instead of charted.