UK Tech Visa Applications Fall as Firms Cut With AI

Overseas applications for UK tech visas fell 7 percent to 34,936 in 2025, the third annual drop since a 2022 peak of 53,729. RSM UK obtained the count from UK Visas and Immigration. That is a 35 percent fall from the peak, and it landed in a year when ministers were still selling Britain as an AI destination.

The shortage story is incomplete. The Home Office says tech recruitment cooled because demand cooled. RSM’s own survey of 300 tech leaders, taken in summer 2025, found 98 percent already using AI, and more than a quarter had cut staff in the past year.

Overseas Tech Visa Applications Fell Again in 2025

The 2025 total sits below 37,376 applications in 2024. Programmers and software developers still dominate the remaining flow, with IT architects close behind and cybersecurity a thin slice. The pipeline is smaller, and it is concentrated in roles that already clear high going rates.

TECH VISA APPLICATIONS BY YEAR

RSM’s earlier quarterly cut showed the slide inside 2025, not only at year end. Applications dropped from 8,739 in Q2 2025 to 7,768 in Q3, an 11 percent slide from Q2 into Q3, and 6 percent below the 8,233 recorded in Q3 2024.

CERTIFICATES ISSUED IN 2025

Cybersecurity, the specialty ministers treat as a security issue as well as a hiring one, accounted for 858 certificates. Network roles accounted for 310. The overseas intake is now a senior-heavy trickle, not a broad intake of mid-level staff.

A Home Office Note on Saturation and Demand

Separate Home Office figures track grants, not applications, and they cover a wider “IT professionals” group. Visas issued for those roles were down 18 percent to 9,671 in the year ending December 2025. That series is not the same as RSM’s occupation certificates, and it should not be added to them.

The department’s own write-up of those grants does not describe a country that simply cannot attract engineers. It describes a boom that ran hot after Brexit and the pandemic, then cooled.

Following the UK’s exit from the European Union and the COVID-19 pandemic there was a large increase in recruitment in the tech sector (mainly IT professionals), with falls since 2023 reflecting market saturation and falls in demand.

Home Office, Why do people come to the UK? Work, year ending December 2025

Across all work routes, 168,471 visas went to main applicants in that year, 19 percent fewer than the year before. Refusals rose as well, to 19 percent of applications from 7 percent in the year ending December 2023. Fewer people asked, and a larger share were turned down.

Why Are UK Tech Visa Applications Falling?

Policy did bite. The Restoring Control white paper of 12 May 2025 fed rule changes on 22 July 2025 that lifted the skill bar to RQF level 6, degree equivalent, and pushed the general pay floor to £41,700. More than 100 occupations left the route for new hires. Junior and mid-level jobs outside London, including some AI, cyber and data science posts, were the ones RSM said would feel it.

The whole Skilled Worker route, tech and non-tech together, kept shrinking after those changes. There were 26,900 Skilled Worker visa applications from main applicants in the year ending August 2026, a 43 percent fall on the previous 12 months. Dependants on that route numbered 36,300, down 24 percent from 47,800.

THE RULES THAT RAISED THE COST OF HIRING

1. 2023: General Skilled Worker pay floor sits at £26,200.
2. April 2024: Floor rises to £38,700.
3. 9 April 2025: Certificate of sponsorship fee for Skilled Worker rises from £239 to £525.
4. 22 July 2025: Floor rises to £41,700; skill bar moves to RQF 6; more than 100 occupations drop out for new hires.
5. 16 December 2025: Immigration Skills Charge rises 32 percent on new certificates.
6. 8 January 2026: English language bar on Skilled Worker moves from B1 to B2.

That is not a rounding error on a form. A sponsor now pays more to issue the certificate, more in the skills charge, and more in wages before a junior coder even clears the occupation going rate. The healthcare surcharge on the worker is £1,035 a year.

More Than a Quarter of Firms Cut Staff

RSM’s Technology Industry Outlook 2026 is the other half of the ledger. The 300 leaders, mid-market firms across the UK plus a 100-strong Ireland sample, were already living with AI on the job. James Bull, RSM’s technology industry senior analyst, warned that workforce would be one of the biggest challenges in the year ahead. His warning assumed firms still needed bodies. Many of the same boards had already taken bodies out.

WHAT 300 TECH LEADERS TOLD RSM

• AI use: 98 percent of the firms were using AI.
• Headcount: More than a quarter had cut staff in the past year.
• Main reason: 51 percent of those who cut cited roles augmented or replaced by AI; 23 percent cited economic conditions.
• Day-to-day friction: 22 percent named employee engagement as their biggest workforce problem, 19 percent the cost of UK talent, and 17 percent upskilling non-technical staff.

Asked what would help, 20 percent wanted better incentives for AI investment, and nearly 20 percent wanted a more open skilled immigration policy. Those two answers sat on the same questionnaire as the AI layoff numbers. Firms want cheaper capital and more visas. They are also using the tools they want capital for to do work that used to require the visas.

Confidence was not uniformly bleak. Among AI companies in the sample, 82 percent expected to grow under the current government. New UK tech incorporations hit 14,262 in Q2 2025, a record, up 16 percent from 12,318 a year earlier. The country is still forming companies. It is hiring overseas specialists at a falling rate, and it is thinning teams it already has.

The £41,700 Threshold and What It Shut

The general floor is the headline. For software, it is not even the binding number. Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Occupations lists a going rate of £54,700 a year for programmers and software development professionals, so a sponsored developer has to clear that rate, not only £41,700. Discounts exist, and they still sit well above the old £26,200 world.

RSM tracked the climb in the minimum salary for a skilled worker visa from £26,200 in 2023 to £38,700 in April 2024 and £41,700 from 22 July 2025, with discounts that once covered about one in three roles scaled back. Senior London posts still clear those lines. The rungs that train people for those posts do not.

PAY FLOORS ON THE SKILLED WORKER ROUTE

• General threshold: £41,700 a year, or the occupation going rate if it is higher.
• New entrant: At least £33,400, and 70 percent of the going rate.
• Relevant STEM PhD: At least £33,400, and 80 percent of the going rate.
• Other relevant PhD: At least £37,500, and 90 percent of the going rate.
• Software going rate: £54,700 a year for programmers and software development professionals.

That design does two jobs at once. It keeps low-paid sponsorship off the route, which was the political aim of the white paper. It also makes the first sponsored hire in a scale-up look like a finished senior, which is exactly the profile AI tools are supposed to stretch. The people who used to arrive at mid-level, learn the stack, and stay, now fail the arithmetic before a certificate is issued.

Software Owners Leave for the UAE, Spain and the US

The other outflow is at the top of the cap table. Analysis of Companies House filings commissioned by Rathbones from Beauhurst, covering 7.59 million UK business owners, found 5,940 business owners left between January 2024 and January 2026. In the same window 3,182 arrived, a net outflow of 2,758. Some 8,423 companies saw at least one owner go, because many names sit on more than one firm.

Software accounted for 10 percent of those companies, more than three times the next sector, property development, with marketing third. Nearly half the departures, 46 percent, were from London, and 14 percent from the South East. The most common destinations were the UAE, then Spain, then the United States, with Portugal and France next. Inflows were strongest from Hong Kong, Pakistan and France.

International mobility among business owners and wealth creators continues to accelerate, and these findings show a clear shift in where UK entrepreneurs choose to base themselves.

Michelle White, Head of Private Office, Rathbones Group

White told clients her team is speaking to more families, in particular younger owners, who want friendlier tax treatment and a clearer growth story. Visa rules are not the only lever in that choice, and they do not have to be. A founder who can hire in Dubai or Austin does not need a UK certificate of sponsorship for a mid-level engineer who no longer qualifies anyway. The visa fall and the owner fall are different series. They point at the same map.

Narayan Wants Engineers and a Contingency Plan

Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, has spent 2026 arguing that talent decides the AI race. On 6 August he amplified a Sovereign AI careers page for British startups and put the claim in one line.

Talent will decide who wins in AI.

That's why @UKSovereignAI is bringing some of the UK's most exciting AI roles into one place.

Apply to build the future of British AI! 🇬🇧 https://t.co/23VICkih4n

— Kanishka Narayan MP (@KanishkaNarayan) August 6, 2026

At a Labour conference fringe on 28 September he said there was still no evidence of an overall AI hit to jobs, then described a measurement problem. One tech firm had told him it hired fewer people because tasks had been automated, so surveys that ask about layoffs can miss the jobs that were never posted. He said the government should have a contingency plan if the hit arrives at scale.

That is the split in one brief. The minister wants more top engineers in Britain, and he is planning for a world in which AI takes work away. Ben Bilsland, RSM’s partner and head of technology industry, put the same tension in plainer operational terms after the 2025 FOI landed.

There’s currently nervousness among tech businesses to recruit, with employment costs now higher than ever, due to tax changes and the Employment Rights Act. Some businesses will undoubtedly lean on AI more to create efficiencies and boost productivity, but again, skilled individuals are needed to deploy AI safely and successfully.

Ben Bilsland, partner and head of technology industry, RSM UK

Bilsland said visa reform still has to be fast, and that the process has to work for firms of every size, because the published plans still lack operating detail. The next Home Office monthly visa release is due on 8 October 2026. It will not reopen the rungs shut on 22 July 2025, and it will not reverse a 35 percent drop from the 2022 peak. It will show whether 2026 is another down year in a system that asks for AI talent after pricing out the people who used to become it.