Follow-Up Right to Work Checks: The Step Most UK Employers Miss

The penalty isn't usually about a missed initial check. It's about a missed follow-up.

Most UK employers know they have to check right to work at hire. Far fewer realise that, for any employee with time-limited permission, the obligation continues — and the moment that obligation lapses, so does their statutory excuse. Here is what the follow-up check actually is, when it applies, and the small number of practical steps that keep your defence intact.

This guide is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For advice on your specific situation, consult a qualified immigration solicitor.

What the statutory excuse is — and how follow-ups protect it

The "statutory excuse" is the defence that protects an employer from a civil penalty under Section 15 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. If you carried out the prescribed right to work checks at the right times and kept the right records, you have an excuse — and you cannot be fined, even if it later turns out the employee did not have the right to work.

For an employee whose documents prove permanent right to work (a UK or Irish passport, indefinite leave to remain), one check at hire is the entire process. The excuse runs continuously.

For an employee with time-limited permission — a visa, an eVisa, a Certificate of Application, a Positive Verification Notice — the excuse has an end date. To keep it, you have to run a follow-up check before that date. Miss it, and the excuse is gone. From that point on, every day you continue employing them is a day without a defence.

The Code of Practice on Preventing Illegal Working sets out the rules in detail. The maximum civil penalty under the current rates is £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach and £60,000 per worker for a repeat breach within three years (rates effective from 13 February 2024 — see the Home Office penalties page). For a small business with three visa-holding staff, a missed follow-up cycle is an existential financial risk.

When a follow-up check is due

The follow-up rules depend on what document the employee originally presented. Two main groups apply:

List B Group 1 — time-limited document with an expiry date

Examples: a passport with a current visa endorsement, a status letter, an eVisa with a stated expiry date.

Follow-up due: before the expiry date on the document or eVisa.

If the employee provides a fresh document showing later permission (a renewed visa, an extended eVisa), your statutory excuse continues from the new check date. If they cannot provide evidence of ongoing right to work, you must act through the 28-day grace period process or end the employment.

List B Group 2 — pending application or appeal

Examples: a Certificate of Application from the EU Settlement Scheme, an Application Registration Card, a Positive Verification Notice from the Employer Checking Service.

Follow-up due: every 6 months from the date of the Positive Verification Notice (or from the certificate date for EUSS Certificates of Application where applicable).

To run the follow-up, you contact the Employer Checking Service (ECS) with the employee's details. The Home Office will respond with either a Positive or a Negative Verification Notice. Each Positive Notice resets the 6-month clock.

The List A exception

Employees who present a List A document — a UK or Irish passport, a permanent residence document, indefinite leave to remain — have permanent right to work. No follow-up check is required. One initial check covers you for the duration of employment, including for British citizens (whom you must still check at hire).

Confusingly, this is also where many employers go wrong in the other direction: they assume "no follow-up needed" applies to anyone with a valid-looking document, missing that List B documents always carry a follow-up obligation.

What "compliant follow-up" actually looks like

A follow-up check follows the same prescribed mechanics as the initial check:

1. Obtain the evidence. Either the original physical document or — far more common since the BRP transition — a share code generated by the employee from their Home Office online account.
2. Verify it. For physical documents, you check the document is genuine, unchanged, and belongs to the person in front of you (in person or via live video link with the original held). For share codes, you use the online right to work checking service and view the result with the employee present.
3. Record it. Save a clear copy (or the online service confirmation), the date you carried out the check, and — for List B — the new expiry or next-follow-up date that the result generates.
4. Schedule the next one. Especially for Group 2 (6-month cycle) employees, set the next reminder before you close the file.

The mechanics are not new. The discipline of doing them on time, every time, for every relevant employee — that is the part where employers most often fail.

Why follow-ups are the most common failure point

In a small business, the initial check is concrete: there is a person in front of you on day one and a hire-pack to fill in. The follow-up is abstract — a date six or twelve months in the future, often during a busy period that has nothing to do with HR.

The most common failure modes we see in published Home Office enforcement summaries and immigration-law commentary:

• Visa expiry not recorded. Employer ran a compliant initial check but never wrote the expiry date anywhere actionable.
• Reminder set in the wrong calendar. A note on a personal phone calendar that gets lost when the device is replaced; a sticky note that was always going to fail.
• No clarity on who owns it. In an owner-managed business with 5–15 staff, RTW often has no named owner. Everybody assumed somebody else.
• Group 2 employees treated as Group 1. Six-monthly Positive Verification Notice cycles get forgotten because they don't feel like an "expiry" — there's no document expiring.
• Grace period misunderstood. The 28-day window is treated as a dismissal deadline rather than the period in which to verify status through the ECS — see our 28-day grace period guide for the actual procedure.

None of these is an exotic edge case. They are routine outcomes when a small employer runs RTW compliance on willpower instead of process.

How to keep your statutory excuse intact — a practical checklist

1. Maintain a register. For every employee, record the document type and list (A, B Group 1, B Group 2), the initial check date, and — for List B — the next follow-up due date. Our right to work checklist template gives you a starting structure.
2. Set the reminder when you do the initial check, not later. "I'll add it tomorrow" is the most common reason follow-ups get missed.
3. Use multiple reminders, not one. A 90-day, 30-day, and 7-day reminder is harder to ignore than a single notification on the day.
4. Review the register monthly. Ten minutes once a month — block the time, make it recurring. This is the single most-impactful step a micro-employer can take.
5. Do the check before the expiry, not after. A follow-up done the day after expiry has already broken your excuse. The 28-day grace period is for cases where an in-time application is pending, not a routine extension you forgot.
6. For Group 2 employees, calendar the 6-month cycle immediately. Each Positive Verification Notice you receive should generate the next follow-up reminder before you file it.
7. Document everything. Date, document type, check method, outcome. Keep records for the duration of employment plus 2 years after the employee leaves.

You can plan a full follow-up schedule for any employee using our follow-up check timeline calculator, and estimate your specific exposure if a check is missed using the penalty risk calculator.

What to do if you've already missed one

If you realise a follow-up is overdue:

1. Do the check now — same prescribed mechanics, same documentation. A current compliant check restores your excuse going forward, even though it does not retroactively cover the gap.
2. Document the gap honestly. Note when the original permission expired, when you carried out the late check, and the result. If the Home Office investigates, an honest record of a single late check is far better than a missing one.
3. If you cannot verify ongoing right to work, contact the ECS to request a verification notice. If that fails, take advice on the 28-day grace period and on next steps with the employee.
4. Review every other employee with time-limited permission today. A missed follow-up rarely sits alone in a system without process.

The risk you carry in the gap period is real. The risk of doing nothing once you have noticed is worse.

Where follow-up checks fit in the bigger compliance picture

Follow-up checks are one part of an ongoing compliance lifecycle that also covers initial checks, record-keeping, the 28-day grace period, and discrimination-safe processes. For the full picture, see our employer's guide to ongoing right to work compliance. For a sense of what gets enforced and how much it costs, our illegal worker fines guide walks through current penalty rates and recent enforcement patterns.

The follow-up check, on its own, is administratively trivial. The follow-up check programme — running every relevant follow-up on time, every time, with documentation — is what separates compliant employers from the ones who end up in the enforcement statistics.

Sources

• Code of Practice on Preventing Illegal Working (13 February 2024) — GOV.UK
• Employer's guide to right to work checks (26 June 2025) — GOV.UK
• Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, Section 15 — legislation.gov.uk
• Employer Checking Service — GOV.UK
• Penalties for employing illegal workers — GOV.UK