The Immigration Skills Charge (Amendment) Regulations 2022 came into force on 1 January 2023.

The Immigration Skills Charge Regulations 2017 provide that a sponsor, subject to certain exemptions, must pay a charge each time it assigns a certificate of sponsorship to a skilled worker – the Immigration Skills Charge (ISC). These amendment regulations add exemptions to the requirement to pay the ISC in respect of sponsored workers on the Scale-up route and also specific EU national intra-corporate transferees on the Global Business Mobility (Senior or Specialist Worker) route who are covered by a commitment in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Sponsors of the latter will be exempt from paying the ISC if all the following apply:

• the certificate of sponsorship is assigned on or after 1 January 2023
• the worker is an EU national or Latvian non-citizen (but the exemption does not apply to nationals of Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland)
• the worker is being assigned to the sponsoring UK business by an EU-based company within the same sponsor group 
• the assignment is for no more than 36 months, as confirmed by the certificate of sponsorship start and end dates.

Source: New feed