Top 50 UK Healthcare Employers Sponsoring Skilled Worker Visas in 2026

Healthcare sponsors more Skilled Worker visas than any other UK sector, and it is not close. Between the NHS, private hospital groups, mental health providers, and social care, health employers account for a large share of the roughly 120,000 organisations on the Home Office register. The list below is a curated starting point: 50 healthcare employers verified against the live register at the time of writing.

Always verify a specific employer on the gov.uk Register of Licensed Sponsors before applying. Sponsor status changes; an employer can lose its licence at any time. Lumina's "Visa sponsors only" filter does this check automatically for every job in your search.

Read this first: who the list helps in 2026

The July 2025 reforms closed the Skilled Worker route to new overseas care worker (SOC 6135) and senior care worker (SOC 6136) applicants. If you are applying from abroad for a care assistant role, a sponsor licence at a care home group no longer gets you a visa, and no list can change that.

This list is most useful if you work in a role that remains eligible: nurses, doctors, pharmacists, paramedics, midwives, radiographers and other allied health professionals, plus the clinical management, digital, data, and estates roles that large health employers also sponsor. Many of the roles below qualify for the Health and Care Worker route, which carries a lower salary floor (£25,000 or the going rate, whichever is higher), reduced visa fees, and a full Immigration Health Surcharge waiver. For a family, that waiver alone is worth five figures.

How this list was curated

The same three filters as our tech sponsor list:

Currently on the register at the time of writing. Every name below was cross-checked against the live Home Office register (the same data source behind Lumina's sponsor badge), on the Skilled Worker route, with an A rating.
Healthcare-led. Providers of care, not pharma manufacturers or health insurers without clinical operations.
Large enough to hire internationally at a meaningful rate. Single-site employers hold licences too, but the groups below recruit at scale.

A note on names: register entries follow legal entities, not brands. Circle Health Group appears as "BMI Healthcare Limited trading as Circle Health Group Limited". Care UK's licence sits with "Care UK Care Services Ltd". Anchor is listed as "Anchor Hanover Group". HCA Healthcare UK is "HCA International Ltd". Newcastle's trust carries a "The" prefix. If a register search comes up empty, try a fragment of the name first; our step-by-step register guide covers the search quirks.

NHS England: the big teaching trusts

NHS trusts are individual employers, each holding its own licence. The twenty below are among the largest and most internationally recruiting. All verified on the Skilled Worker route.

Barts Health NHS Trust (London; listed as "Barts Health National Health Service Trust")
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (London)
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (London; listed without the apostrophe)
Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust
Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Trust (London; children's)
The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust (London; cancer)
Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust
Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (Addenbrooke's)
The Christie NHS Foundation Trust (Manchester; cancer)
Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust (Liverpool)
Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust (Surrey/Berkshire)
Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

There are 241 NHS organisations on the register in total, so a trust not being named here means nothing. Check yours.

NHS Scotland and Wales

Scottish health boards and Welsh health boards sponsor as single large employers covering every hospital in their region:

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
NHS Lothian (Edinburgh)
NHS Grampian (Aberdeen)
Cardiff and Vale University Health Board
Swansea Bay University Local Health Board

Private hospital groups

Circle Health Group (national; legal entity: BMI Healthcare Limited t/a Circle Health Group Limited)
Spire Healthcare (39 hospitals nationally)
Nuffield Health (listed as "Nuffield Health - Hospitals Division")
HCA Healthcare UK (London; legal entity: HCA International Ltd)
Ramsay Health Care UK (Bedford HQ)
Bupa Cromwell Hospital (London; Bupa also holds group-level licences)
Cleveland Clinic London
Practice Plus Group (hospitals, urgent care, and rehabilitation entities all hold licences)

Mental health and specialist providers

Priory Group (search "Priory Group" specifically; the register has dozens of unrelated "Priory" entries)
Cygnet Health Care
Elysium Healthcare (Borehamwood HQ)
St Andrew's Healthcare (Northampton)
Turning Point (Manchester; social care and mental health)

Care home and social care groups

The care-worker route closure above applies here, but these groups still sponsor nurses, clinical leads, and home managers:

HC-One (Darlington HQ; the UK's largest care home operator)
Barchester Healthcare
Bupa Care Services (Leeds)
Care UK (legal entity: Care UK Care Services Ltd)
Anchor (listed as "Anchor Hanover Group")
Exemplar Health Care (Sheffield; complex care)
Hallmark Care Homes

Home care, community and hospices

Cera Care (technology-led home care)
City & County Healthcare Group (listed as "City and County Healthcare Group - (CCH Group)")
HCRG Care Group (community health; legal entity: HCRG Care Limited)
Marie Curie (hospice and end-of-life care)
Sue Ryder (listed as "Sue Ryder Care")

Also verified: dental and eye care

Not counted in the 50, but confirmed on the register and worth knowing if you are a dentist, optometrist, or ophthalmic clinician: mydentist, Portman Healthcare, Rodericks Dental Partners, SpaMedica, Optical Express, and the Newmedica network (which licenses through local entities, so search the city name too). Note that dental nurses (SOC 6133) lost sponsorship eligibility in July 2025; dentists did not.

How to use this list

Verify the employer on gov.uk first. The register changes daily and this post has a publication date.
Remember that sponsorship decisions are made per role, not per employer. A trust that sponsors hundreds of nurses can still decline to sponsor an admin post.
Check the salary maths before you invest time. The Health and Care floor is £25,000 with going rates on top; nurses' going rate sits near £29,970. Our salary thresholds breakdown covers the exceptions.
For everything not on this list, use Lumina's "Visa sponsors only" filter. It checks every job in your search against the same register, including the thousands of health employers we did not name.

What this list does not tell you

Whether they are hiring this week. Licences are stable; vacancies are not.
Whether your specific occupation is eligible. The 2025 reforms removed several health-adjacent SOC codes. Check yours in Appendix Skilled Occupations.
Whether the offer clears the threshold. Licence plus salary plus eligible SOC code, all three, or the application fails.

Mohammad Etminan is the founder of Lumina. He writes about the practical mechanics of the UK Skilled Worker visa job search and the data underneath it. This post is a starting point, not legal advice. For an application that depends on a specific outcome, talk to a regulated immigration adviser.