Right to work checks and share codes

The duty is to establish, before employment begins, that the person has the right to do the work in question. It applies to every employee without exception, including British citizens, family members, and someone you have known for twenty years. It is not a check on people who might be foreign; it is a check on everyone.

Doing it correctly gives the employer a statutory excuse against the civil penalty for employing an illegal worker. The penalty is charged per worker, was increased substantially in 2024, and is issued by the Home Office rather than a court. The statutory excuse is the whole point of the exercise, and it exists only if the prescribed steps were followed and evidenced.

The excuse does not protect against the criminal offence of employing someone knowing, or having reasonable cause to believe, that they have no right to work. That is a separate matter and carries a prison sentence. Following the process protects against the penalty; deliberately ignoring what you know does not protect against anything.

Records must be kept. A clear copy of the documents or a copy of the online check profile, dated, retained for the duration of employment and for a period afterwards. A check with no retained evidence is, for practical purposes, a check that did not happen.

Where permission to work is time-limited, a follow-up check is required before it expires. Diarise the expiry date on the day the first check is done. An employer whose original check was faultless loses the excuse entirely if the follow-up is missed, and the person's status may have changed in the meantime.

Existing staff do not need retrospective checks if they were checked correctly under the rules in force at the time. Repeating checks on people whose original check was valid is unnecessary, and singling out particular employees for a repeat check is where discrimination claims come from.

The Home Office online check applies to anyone whose immigration status is held digitally — which now covers most people who are not British or Irish citizens, including those with settled or pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme, work and study visas, and anyone with an eVisa. The worker generates a share code, the employer enters it with the worker's date of birth on the employer checking service, and the result appears on screen with a photograph to compare against the person in front of them.

The digital identity verification route uses a certified Identity Service Provider to check a British or Irish passport, including an expired one, using identity document validation technology. The employer pays the provider, receives a digital identity verification output, and must still check that the photograph matches the person. This route exists precisely because British and Irish citizens have no digital immigration status and therefore cannot produce a share code.

The manual document check remains available and is the fallback. The employer must see the original document with the person present — in person or over a live video call while holding the original — check it appears genuine and relates to that person, and keep a dated copy. The lists of acceptable documents are prescribed: List A documents show a permanent right to work and need no follow-up; List B documents show a time-limited right and require a repeat check.

You cannot mix and match. Using the online service for someone whose status is not digital produces no result. Accepting a photocopy, a scan or a photograph of a document in a manual check gives no statutory excuse. And a biometric residence permit or card, which many people still hold physically, is no longer valid evidence — the holder must use their eVisa and produce a share code instead.

If a person cannot prove their status because of an outstanding application, an appeal or an administrative review, the employer can use the Home Office Employer Checking Service, which issues a Positive Verification Notice valid for a set period. This is the correct route rather than either refusing to employ or employing without a check.

Whichever route is used, the check must be completed before the person starts work, not on their first day and not during their first week. Timing is the most common technical failure.

Set up access to your eVisa first if you have not already. Your immigration status is held in a UK Visas and Immigration account, and you need to be able to sign in to it before you can prove anything. This requires linking your identity document and your account, and it is worth doing well before you need it rather than the night before a job starts.

Keep the account details current. If you get a new passport or a new national identity document, update it in your UKVI account. An out-of-date document in the account causes the share code to display details that do not match what you hand over, and that stops a check in its tracks.

Go to the 'prove your right to work to an employer' service on GOV.UK. Sign in, and generate a share code. It is free. There is no charge for a share code from any official service, and any site asking for payment for one is not the official service.

Give the employer the share code and your date of birth. They need both. The code alone does not open the check.

Watch the expiry. A share code is valid for 90 days from generation. Generating one 'in advance' at the start of a job hunt frequently means it has expired by the time an offer arrives. Generate it when an employer asks for it.

Use the right service for the right purpose. There are separate services for proving your right to work, proving your right to rent, and proving your immigration status generally, and the codes are not interchangeable. A right to rent code entered into the employer checking service will not work, and vice versa. This is the single most common cause of a check appearing to fail when the person's status is perfectly fine.

If you are a British or Irish citizen, none of this applies to you. You cannot generate a share code because you have no digital immigration status. Provide your passport — or, if you have never held one, a birth certificate together with an official document showing your National Insurance number, which is one of the prescribed combinations.

The lawful position is to check every new employee in the same way. The unlawful position is to check selectively, to ask for more documents from some people than others, or to prefer applicants who appear not to need a check.

The Home Office publishes a statutory code of practice on avoiding unlawful discrimination while preventing illegal working. It is not advisory in effect: a tribunal will take it into account, and an employer whose practice departs from it is in a poor position.

Common failures include asking about nationality or immigration status at application stage rather than at offer stage, declining to consider candidates whose visa would need a follow-up check, insisting on seeing a passport when the candidate has offered a valid alternative from the prescribed lists, and repeating checks on staff who were correctly checked but happen not to be British.

Refusing to employ someone because their permission is time-limited is direct discrimination risk with no compliance benefit — a time-limited right to work is still a right to work, and the compliance obligation is simply to diarise the follow-up check.

Race discrimination claims can be brought by job applicants as well as employees, there is no minimum service requirement, and compensation is uncapped and can include injury to feelings. The exposure is materially greater than the civil penalty the employer was trying to avoid.

The safe operating position is a written policy applied identically to everyone, checks carried out at the same point in the recruitment process for every candidate, evidence retained the same way, and follow-up dates diarised. It costs nothing and it defends both risks at once.

Right to rent is a separate scheme with a separate check, and it applies only in England. Landlords and letting agents in England must check that adult occupiers have the right to rent, using a different share code service. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not operate right to rent checks at all, which regularly surprises people moving between nations.

A DBS check is not a right to work check and does not substitute for one. Nor does a National Insurance number, which proves nothing about immigration permission — people have National Insurance numbers from previous permissions that have since expired, and the presence of one is not evidence of anything relevant.

A right to work check is also not a check on whether a person can do a particular job. Some permissions restrict working hours, prohibit self-employment, or limit work to a named sponsor. The online check result states these restrictions, and employing someone in breach of them is a breach even though the person does have a right to work. Read the conditions on the check result rather than stopping at the headline.

Sponsorship is a separate regime again. An employer who wants to sponsor a worker needs a sponsor licence and has its own compliance duties, including reporting changes and keeping records. The right to work check remains necessary alongside it.

For agency and contract workers, the duty sits with whoever employs the person, which is normally the agency rather than the end client. But end clients routinely require evidence, and a client that directs the work closely enough may find the picture less clear-cut than the contract suggests.

If your permission is about to expire and you have applied to extend it in time, you keep your existing conditions while the application is decided. Employers can confirm this through the Employer Checking Service. Do not simply stop working, and do not let an employer tell you that you must — an in-time application preserves the position while it is pending.