Right to Work checks reach subcontractors on 1 October
Civil penalties run to £60,000 per illegal worker, and from next month the rules follow the work rather than the job title. Founders using agency or platform labour have weeks to map who is actually on site.
From 1 October 2026, Right to Work obligations extend beyond employees on the payroll to a wider set of working arrangements, under the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025.
The civil penalty is unchanged: up to £60,000 for each illegal worker, under the government's guidance on penalties for employing illegal workers. In the most serious cases the sanctions are criminal, with up to five years in prison and an unlimited fine.
What changes is the range of arrangements those penalties can attach to.
A business that treats a self-employed contractor or a subcontracted crew as outside the regime may no longer be able to do so. Liability can run along the labour supply chain, including to firms sitting further up it that have not put compliance measures in place.
Mandeep Khroud, head of immigration at law firm Irwin Mitchell, said the Home Office would look past the wording of contracts.
The Home Office published a draft employer's guide to right to work checks in July. It sets out how the scheme applies from 1 October to employment under a worker's contract, to individual subcontractors and to online matching services, and how businesses should handle contracts that let a worker send a substitute.
Irwin Mitchell says the obligations are expected to cover individual subcontractors, individuals engaged under worker contracts, certain outsourced labour arrangements, platform-based and online matching services, and contracts containing substitution rights.
On the firm's reading, establishing a statutory excuse against liability will require contractual controls, a process for verifying workers' identities, and a way of managing substitution.
The downside is not only financial. Irwin Mitchell lists suspension or revocation of a sponsorship licence and public naming by the Home Office alongside the civil penalty and criminal sanctions.
The direction of travel was signalled earlier, when the government set out plans to extend right-to-work checks to freelancers, a move that drew warnings that many small business owners had not registered it. Delivery platforms have already tightened up: Deliveroo has sacked more than 100 riders for sharing accounts with people who had no right to work.
Khroud said firms should be reviewing subcontractor arrangements, auditing onboarding and mapping their labour supply chains now, and that those leaving it until October risk financial and reputational exposure.
For a small company that buys labour through an agency, a subcontractor or a platform, the practical question is narrow and awkward. Who is physically doing the work, has a valid check been done on each of them, and which party in the chain is contractually on the hook for doing it.
Answering that takes a list of every contract that supplies people to your sites or projects, and a look at whether any of them allow substitution. Those are the ones where the person who turns up is not the person you checked.