108,099 to 11: How Britain ended care-worker migration in three years

108,099 care workers entered the UK on the Health and Care visa in 2023. In the first quarter of 2026, the number was 11.

That is a 99.99 percent fall from peak. It happened in three steps. None got the public attention they deserved.

Step one was February 2024. The Conservative government under Home Secretary James Cleverly banned dependants of Health and Care visa workers in Caring Personal Service roles. The peak year, 2023, had seen 108,099 main applicants in SOC 6135 “Care workers and home carers” alongside many tens of thousands of dependants. The dependant ban cut the route’s family appeal at the same moment as fee increases. Calendar 2024 main-applicant grants in the SOC 6135 unit group fell to 9,653. A 91 percent fall in one year.

Step two was March 2024. The same government required overseas care workers to be sponsored only by employers with a track record of UK care placements. The thinnest layer of new sponsors disappeared overnight.

Step three was 22 July 2025. The Labour government banned all international recruitment of care and senior care workers. No replacement scheme. No phase-down. The route was closed.

Calendar 2025 grants in SOC 6135 fell to 3,190. Quarter one of 2026 produced 11. The Home Office published the number on 21 May 2026 in the Occ_D02 dataset of the Immigration System Statistics for year ending March 2026.

The hole left behind

Skills for Care, the sector workforce body, reported in its April 2025 workforce survey that adult social care has 111,000 vacancies on a workforce of around 1.71 million posts. The vacancy rate sits at 6.9 to 7.0 percent. Care homes alone need 4.4 to 6.5 percent more staff to fill open roles.

Skills for Care also published the inflow drop directly. International joiners to the adult social care workforce fell from 105,000 in 2023 to 2024, to 44,000 in 2024 to 2025. The new recruitment ban, in effect from 22 July 2025, has now closed even the residual flow.

Skills for Care’s 2025 to 2040 projection requires an additional 470,000 posts in adult social care, a 27 percent uplift, to keep pace with the older population growing from 11.5 million in 2025 to 14.5 million in 2040.

What happens now

Three options, in plain language.

Pay more. The bottom-decile UK care worker wage in April 2024 was around £11.50 to £12.00 per hour against a National Living Wage that has since risen. Hospitality, retail and warehousing pay similar or slightly more for less physically and emotionally demanding work. Attracting a working-age British workforce to social care requires an estimated £4 to £6 per hour rise at the entry grade. That is a 30 to 50 percent uplift on a sector where local-authority commissioning rates have not kept pace with National Living Wage rises over the last five years.

Close beds. Care providers who cannot staff their homes have one structural option: reduce capacity. The Care Quality Commission has not yet published 2025 to 2026 capacity-loss data. Provider trade bodies have flagged it as the most likely outcome of the July 2025 recruitment ban.

Reverse the policy. The political cost of being seen to import care workers again is high. The political cost of older people not having a placement is also high. One of these two costs is paid first.

The 22 July 2025 ban was the largest immigration policy decision of the current Parliament that did not feature in any 2024 manifesto. It was announced as a fix. It is now a workforce gap of 111,000 with a 470,000 expansion target by 2040 attached.

Sources

The data in this article is drawn from:

• Home Office Immigration System Statistics, year ending March 2026 release (21 May 2026), Occ_D02 grants of entry clearance work visas by SOC2020 occupation
• Skills for Care, Adult Social Care Workforce Survey April 2025 (gov.uk publication)
• Skills for Care, “The size and structure of the adult social care sector and workforce in England” (2025 edition)
• Work Rights Centre, “International recruitment of care workers has ended” (October 2025)

The 108,099 peak figure is the count of SOC 6135 unit-group grants for calendar 2023. The 11 figure is the count for Q1 2026. Both are verified directly from the Occ_D02 dataset.