From 1 October 2026 the right to work regime stops being a question about employees. Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 extends it to people engaged under a worker's contract, to individual sub-contractors, and to online services that match people to work. Liability can also travel up a contractual chain. For recruitment agencies, that is the whole business model.
Most agencies already run checks on the people they place. The change is not really about whether you check. It is about which engagements now sit inside the statutory scheme, who carries the civil penalty when a check was not done properly, and how far up the supply chain that exposure reaches.
What Section 48 Actually Changes
Until now the prohibition on employing someone without the right to work has attached to contracts of employment. An agency supplying a temporary worker on a worker's contract sat in an awkward space: good practice said check, but the civil penalty regime was built around employment.
The Home Office laid the implementing regulations before Parliament at the end of June 2026 and published its draft code of practice in July. The commencement date is confirmed. Three categories come into scope.
Workers Engaged Under a Worker's Contract
This is the category that matters most to employment businesses. If you supply temporary and contract workers under worker's contracts rather than contracts of employment, those engagements are now within the scheme. The check is not a nice-to-have attached to a client's audit requirement. It is the thing that gives you a statutory excuse.
Individual Sub-Contractors
Businesses that engage individuals directly to provide services, rather than employing them, are brought in. Construction, care, logistics and facilities management all rely heavily on this model, and in many cases the individual is engaged several steps away from the organisation whose premises they work on.
Online Matching Services
Platforms that match individuals to work are covered for the first time. If your agency runs an app or a portal where clients select workers directly, look carefully at whether you are operating a matching service as well as an employment business.
Liability Travels Up the Chain
The provision that should concentrate the mind is the extension of liability along contractual chains. An organisation that did not engage the individual directly can still be exposed where the engagement sits somewhere beneath it in a chain of contracts.
For agencies this cuts two ways. Your clients will start asking harder questions about the checks you hold, because their own exposure now depends partly on your files. And if you sub-contract supply to a second-tier agency, their failure becomes your problem.
Expect contractual change. Indemnities, audit rights and a right to see the underlying check evidence will start appearing in client terms. Agencies that can produce a clean, dated, complete check record on request will find those negotiations much easier than agencies that cannot.
What the Penalties Look Like
Penalty levels do not change on 1 October. The exposure is up to £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach and up to £60,000 per illegal worker where there has been a previous breach. What changes is how many engagements those figures can now attach to.
Two points are commonly missed. Knowingly employing someone without the right to work is a criminal offence, separate from the civil penalty. And for sponsor licence holders, a civil penalty can put the licence itself at risk, which would mean sponsored workers having to stop work. A single missed check on a temporary placement can therefore cascade into the loss of an entire sponsored workforce.
Enforcement is not theoretical. The Home Office publishes civil penalty data in its migration transparency releases, and reporting on the first half of 2026 put penalties issued to UK businesses in the tens of millions of pounds across more than a thousand employers.
The Statutory Excuse, and How Agencies Keep It
The scheme is built around a defence rather than a guarantee. If you carried out a prescribed check correctly before the engagement began, and retained the evidence properly, you hold a statutory excuse and you are not liable for a civil penalty even if the person turns out not to have had the right to work.
The excuse is fragile in predictable ways.
- A check carried out after the engagement started does not create an excuse for the period before it.
- A share code check must be completed through the Home Office online service, and the profile photograph must be compared against the person.
- Viewing a document by video call, or accepting a photocopy, does not satisfy the requirements for a manual check.
- Where a person has time-limited permission, a follow-up check is needed before that permission expires.
- Where status cannot be verified online or from documents, the Employer Checking Service is the route to an excuse.
Retention matters as much as the check itself. An excuse you cannot evidence is not an excuse.
Preventing Illegal Working Without Discriminating
There is a genuine tension here, and the Home Office addresses it in a separate draft code of practice on avoiding unlawful discrimination while preventing illegal working. The safe position is procedural consistency.
Check everyone. Do not vary the depth of a check based on a name, an accent, a place of birth or an assumption about nationality. Do not ask only some candidates for documents. Do not treat a British passport as the only acceptable evidence. Selective checking is both a discrimination risk under the Equality Act 2010 and a compliance risk, because inconsistent processes are the ones that produce gaps.
Write the process down, apply it to every engagement, and record that you applied it. Uniformity is the defence against both exposures at once.
A Practical Readiness Checklist
If you place workers, the following is the short version of what needs to happen before 1 October.
- Map every engagement type you use. Employment, worker's contract, individual sub-contractor, platform introduction. Identify which now fall inside the scheme.
- Identify who in the chain is responsible for the check for each engagement type, and put it in writing with your clients and any second-tier suppliers.
- Audit your existing files for the engagement types newly in scope. Gaps found now can be remediated. Gaps found by an enforcement visit cannot.
- Fix the follow-up problem. Build a diary of expiring permissions with an owner and an escalation point.
- Train consultants on share codes, the Employer Checking Service and what a valid manual check requires.
- Review your platform, if you operate one, against the matching services provisions.
- Decide your retention schedule and make sure records survive staff turnover and system migration.
Where Screening Sits in This
A right to work check is an identity and status verification. It is not a CV assessment, and no screening tool performs it for you. The two processes do interact, though, and the interaction is usually where time is lost.
Agencies working at volume tend to discover eligibility problems late, after a consultant has already invested hours in a candidate who was never placeable. Reading eligibility signals early, at the point of sift, means the compliance conversation happens before the effort is spent rather than after. That is a sequencing gain rather than a compliance shortcut, and it is worth being precise about the difference: the statutory check still has to be done properly, by a human, before the engagement starts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does This Apply to Workers Already Engaged Before 1 October 2026?
The extension applies to engagements from commencement. Existing arrangements should be reviewed rather than assumed to be outside scope, particularly where an engagement rolls over, is renewed or changes character after that date. Take advice on your specific contract types.
If the End Client Runs the Check, Are We Still Exposed?
Possibly. Because liability can extend up a contractual chain, an allocation of responsibility in a commercial contract does not automatically remove statutory exposure. Document who checks what, and keep evidence you can produce.
Do We Need to Check Self-Employed Contractors?
Individual sub-contractors are brought into scope from 1 October 2026. A genuine business-to-business engagement with a company rather than an individual is a different analysis, and the distinction is worth taking advice on rather than guessing.
Is a Digital Identity Verification Service Enough on Its Own?
An identity service verification covers identity for British and Irish citizens holding valid passports. It is one route within the scheme rather than a universal substitute, and it does not replace an online status check for people whose right to work depends on immigration permission.
How Long Should Check Records Be Kept?
Records should be retained for the duration of the engagement and for two years after it ends, which is the period over which the excuse may need to be evidenced. Keep them in a form that survives system changes.
The Wider Point
The direction of UK labour market regulation through 2026 and 2027 is consistent: responsibility is being pushed onto the organisations that control supply chains. The umbrella company PAYE changes in April did it for tax. The Fair Work Agency did it for enforcement. Section 48 does it for immigration.
Agencies that treat compliance as a filing exercise will keep getting caught by the gaps. Agencies that can evidence a consistent, dated, documented process across every engagement type will find that the same records answer a client audit, an enforcement visit and a tribunal.
This article is general information about a change in the law, not legal advice. Take specialist immigration advice on your own contract structures before 1 October 2026.
Sources
The Stationery Office. Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, Section 48.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2025/31/section/48
Home Office. Draft Employer's Guide to Right to Work Checks: 16 July 2026.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/right-to-work-checks-employers-guide/draft-employers-guide-to-right-to-work-checks-16-july-2026-accessible
GOV.UK. Checking a Job Applicant's Right to Work.
https://www.gov.uk/check-job-applicant-right-to-work
Home Office. Extension of the Right to Work Scheme to Other Working Arrangements: Equality Impact Assessment.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-right-to-work-equality-impact-assessment/prevention-of-illegal-working-and-extension-of-the-prohibition-on-employment-the-right-to-work-scheme-to-other-working-arrangements-equality-impact
Home Office. Draft Code of Practice for Employers: Avoiding Unlawful Discrimination While Preventing Illegal Working.
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/right-to-work-draft-code-of-practice-for-employers-avoiding-unlawful-discrimination/draft-code-of-practice-for-employers-avoiding-unlawful-discrimination-while-preventing-illegal-working
GOV.UK. Employer Checking Service: Request a Right to Work Check.
https://www.gov.uk/employee-immigration-employment-status
Home Office. Workers and Temporary Workers: Guidance for Sponsors.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/sponsorship-information-for-employers-and-educators
The Stationery Office. Equality Act 2010.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents
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