What MAC’s work visa salary threshold review means for employers and immigrants

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 Labour government’s previous Home Secretary Yvette Cooper commissioned the review following a controversial leap in salary thresholds necessary to sponsor migrant workers under the previous Conservative government. The April 2024 hike in the minimum going rates payable for occupations sponsored under the Skilled Worker route from the 25th percentile of salaries to the median has created problems for employers seeking to hire workers on lower pay scales as well as international graduates.

The influential committee’s proposals today address many current problems for UK employers and new entrants to the UK’s job market. While the report is advisory rather than binding, it provides a strong indication of the direction of future policy.

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, this might involve a higher threshold. However, the MAC warns that 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.

Why salary requirements for work visas are being reviewed

The Home Secretary commissioned the review to assess whether existing minimum salary thresholds for work visas strike the right balance between:

• protecting domestic wages;
• ensuring migrants are paid fairly;
• supporting economic growth and skills needs;
• managing net migration;
• ensuring work immigrants are net contributors, maximising fiscal benefit to the UK.

Net migration and fiscal impacts of altering the Skilled Worker salary threshold

The MAC modelled how different minimum salary settings for Britain’s most used sponsored worker route would affect migration volumes and public finances.

• Keeping the general Skilled Worker threshold at £41,700 while lowering occupation-specific going rates to the 25th percentile produces an estimated net fiscal benefit of around £660 million per annual cohort of Skilled Worker migrants. This would add around 4,450 people to annual net migration.
• Raising the general threshold to around £48,400 could have a very minor effect on net migration numbers while remaining broadly fiscally neutral.
• More restrictive thresholds (around £52,500 or higher) would reduce migration further but at a greater projected net fiscal cost, as many economically beneficial workers would be excluded. £52,500 would lower net migration by between 2,900 and 5,100 annually, but at a cost to public finances of between £520 million and £710 million.

The report cautions that simply raising salary thresholds to cut migration can be counter-productive from a fiscal and economic perspective. It warns policymakers to closely monitor how their changes affect the flows of skillsets into the country and to be ready to act promptly if the response is substantially larger than anticipated.

Because recent significant increase in skills and salary thresholds have excluded lower-earning skilled workers from this immigration route, further increasing salary thresholds will be costly to the government by excluding workers who would be net fiscally positive. The MAC point out that the fiscal breakeven point for a main applicant in a route that allows dependants is roughly £29,000, so the average Skilled Worker is comfortably net fiscally positive. Evidence suggests that only a small portion of employers can raise salaries even further to meet higher thresholds and that this is likely to have become harder, so raising thresholds will have a negative impact on employers and on the exchequer.

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.

As ever, there will be trade-offs between the government’s stated ambitions of economic growth and a reduction in immigration numbers (currently projected to keep plummeting).