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Right to Work Check Rules Change 1 October 2026

By Brian CrockerLast reviewed: 5 October 2026

The right to work checks October 2026 changes mark the point where the duty stops being an employment-contract question. Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 widens who counts as an "employer" for right to work purposes to include businesses engaging people under a worker's contract, businesses engaging individual sub-contractors, and online matching services that put service providers in front of customers. If you use casual staff, self-employed individuals, platform workers or sub-contracted labour, you are likely to be running checks on people you have never checked before.

The new rules have been in force since 1 October 2026, and none of the documents behind them is a draft any longer. The prescribed requirements and the revised Code of practice are in regulations made in June 2026 that took effect that day, and the Home Office published its replacement employer's guide in final form on the same date. This guide sets out what changed, who it now reaches, and what to do about it.

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 right to work checks October 2026 changes actually settle

Three things are hard law.

The Act. Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 amends the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 by inserting a new section 14A. Its operative words are the ones to read closely:

"In sections 15 to 24, a reference to a person employing another person includes a reference to— (a) a person ('person A') engaging an individual ('individual A') under a worker's contract, (b) a person ('person B') engaging an individual sub-contractor ('individual B'), and (c) an online matching service ('person C') providing the details of an individual who is a service provider ('individual C') to potential clients or customers."

Sections 15 to 24 of the 2006 Act are the illegal working provisions — the civil penalty, the statutory excuse, the objection and appeal machinery. Widening "employing" for those sections pulls the whole scheme across.

The commencement date. The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations 2026 are made, not draft. Regulation 2 says:

"Section 48 (extension of prohibition on employment to other working arrangements) of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 comes into force on 1st October 2026."

The prescribed requirements and the revised Code. The Immigration (Restrictions on Employment and Residential Accommodation) (Prescribed Requirements and Codes of Practice) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (SI 2026/700) are made too, and also took effect on 1 October 2026. They write into the legislation what a business must have in place for a statutory excuse against extended liability, rename the digital route's providers "RtW DVSP", and brought the revised Code of practice into force. They are specific about which text: the revised Code "issued by the Secretary of State on 24th June 2026 under section 19(1) and (3) of the 2006 Act and laid in draft before Parliament on 30th June 2026, comes into force on 1st October 2026".

Who becomes an "employer" from 1 October

Four categories, and most businesses will recognise themselves in more than one:

  1. Contract of employment — the existing category. A contract of service or apprenticeship. Nothing changes here.
  2. Worker's contract — someone who personally does work for you under a contract that is not a contract of employment, where you are not a client or customer of a business they run. Casual staff, zero-hours workers, and the people an employment business puts on assignment.
  3. Individual sub-contractor — an individual who contracts with you to do work, where you have contracted with a third party to provide that work but the individual has not.
  4. Online matching service — a business that keeps a register of service providers, lets customers submit enquiries to be matched with them, and charges a fee or commission for the match.

The fourth category is the one that surprises people. A platform is not merely facilitating an introduction for right to work purposes; it is treated as the employer of the individual it matched.

Categories 2 and 4 are where most day-to-day hiring decisions land, and the line between them and genuine self-employment is the part worth reading slowly: which engagements are in scope works through the casual, zero-hours and platform cases in detail.

The second route: extended liability

Section 48 also inserts a new section 15A into the 2006 Act, and this is a separate mechanism from the definition change above. It reaches businesses with no contract with the worker at all:

"…A is to be treated as employing any individual ('B') who personally provides the work or services (or any part of the work or services), including where— (a) A is not in a contractual relationship with B, or (b) A does not know that B is providing the work or services (or part of the work or services)."

In plain terms: if you are contracted to deliver work to a third party and you subcontract the labour, the person doing the work may be treated as yours for penalty purposes even though you have never met them, never paid them, and did not know they existed. The same applies where an online matching service made the introduction, and where a contract permits the worker to send a substitute.

Extended liability is not limited to the first contract in a chain — whether it applies depends on the specific contractual arrangements and how they operate in practice, not on how many tiers deep the work sits. If you buy or sell labour through sub-contracts, our guide to extended liability up the contract chain works through how far it reaches and what a main contractor can realistically do about it.

Who is not in scope

The change is broad but it is not universal. The guidance says it does not apply to individuals operating an independent business in their own name or through their own company who contract directly with clients or customers — including, it adds, "typical business to business contracts for the supply of services". A self-employed plumber who advertises to the public and works for many customers is buying-and-selling a service, not being employed. A designer engaged through their own personal service company on a business-to-business contract is in the same position.

Two cautions on that.

The label is not the test. The guidance says the answer turns on "the substance of the arrangements and how they operate in practice", and that "The contractual description or label adopted by the parties involved will not, by itself, determine" what responsibilities arise. Calling someone self-employed does not settle it. If you have been relying on a contractual label to stay outside the scheme, that label is not doing the work you think it is.

Buying a service for your own use is different from passing it on. A retailer that contracts a facilities company to clean its own stores is purchasing a service for its own operations. A logistics company contracted by that retailer, which then outsources warehouse operations to a third party, is passing work down a chain. The first is out of scope for extended liability; the second is in.

The transitional limit most coverage misses

Liability for the new categories is not retrospective. The guidance and the revised Code of practice both state that for engagement under a worker's contract, as an individual sub-contractor, or through an online matching service, a civil penalty may only be imposed where the employment commenced on or after 1 October 2026. The Code adds that this applies both to liability arising directly under section 15 and to liability arising under the extended liability provisions in section 15A; the guidance frames the extended-liability side by contract date, applying the prescribed requirements "where the relevant contractual arrangements were entered into on or after 1 October 2026".

That is a meaningful boundary. It does not mean you can ignore long-standing casual arrangements forever, but it does mean the exposure starts with new engagements rather than reaching back across your existing contractor base on day one.

The penalties are unchanged — the population is not

Nothing in section 48 alters how much a penalty costs. The statutory maximum is still £60,000 per worker, set by the 2024 Maximum Penalty Amendment Order, which substituted £60,000 for the previous £20,000. The Code of practice on preventing illegal working in force since 1 October 2026 puts it plainly: "The starting point for the calculation of the civil penalty is £45,000" for a first breach, and £60,000 for a repeat breach within three years — the same figures as the 2024 Code it updates.

What changes is how many people that per-worker figure can be multiplied by. A business with eight employees and forty regular casual workers has moved from a maximum theoretical exposure across eight people to one across forty-eight. Our penalty risk calculator works on headcount without current checks, so it will already reflect the wider number once you include the newly in-scope engagements.

If a penalty has landed before, note that repeat breaches attract the higher £60,000 figure for three years afterwards.

What to do now

The three prescribed check methods are the same three as before: a manual document-based check, a Home Office online check, and a check using a registered right to work digital verification service provider (RtW DVSP). The final employer's guide to right to work checks lists them, and it lets a registered provider verify more document types than it could before. What changed most is who you run checks on, and what you have to be able to show about your contracts.

A sensible sequence:

  1. List every category of person who does work for you — not every person, every category. Employees, agency assignments, casual and zero-hours staff, individual contractors, sub-contracted crews, platform-sourced providers.
  2. Mark which categories you have never checked. This is the gap that 1 October created.
  3. Read your contracts for substitution clauses. A clause permitting the worker to send someone else in their place is one of the three routes into extended liability, and it is the one businesses most often have without noticing.
  4. Identify where you sit in a chain. Are you delivering work onwards to a third party, or buying a service for your own use? The answer decides whether extended liability can reach you at all.
  5. Decide who runs the checks and where the record lives before the volume arrives. A right to work record is only useful if it is dated, retrievable and tied to a named individual — see our record keeping guide for the standard the Home Office actually applies.
  6. Set the follow-up dates at the same time as the initial check. Newly in-scope workers have exactly the same time-limited permissions as employees do, and the same follow-up obligation. The follow-up check timeline calculator will generate the schedule.

What is now final

All of it. The prescribed requirements a business needs for a statutory excuse against extended liability — the written contractual terms, the substitution controls and the identity-verification duty — are set out in regulations made on 24 June 2026 (SI 2026/700), which came into force on 1 October 2026 alongside section 48. The same regulations brought the revised Code of practice on preventing illegal working: Right to Work Scheme for employers into force on that date: the version the Home Office laid before Parliament in draft on 30 June 2026, which GOV.UK republished without "draft" in its title on 1 October 2026. Its penalty amounts are unchanged (£45,000 first-breach starting point, £60,000 for a repeat breach, the same mitigation steps). It sets the penalty for breaches that occurred on or after 1 October 2026; the Code in force on the date of a breach is the one that decides the amount.

The Home Office's employer's guide to right to work checks is final too. GOV.UK published it on 1 October 2026 in place of the 11 September 2026 draft, and it states that it "came into force on 1 October 2026". It kept the two points on which the September draft had moved. It is guarded about platform and intermediary work, saying such individuals "may still fall within scope of the Scheme depending upon the nature of the arrangement". And it frames the extended-liability start date by when the contracts were entered into.

So the Act, the commencement date, the prescribed requirements, the Code and the guide are all in force. If you held back the written statement for supplier contracts while the guide was still in draft, there is no longer any reason to wait.

The bottom line

From 1 October 2026 the right to work scheme covers worker's contracts, individual sub-contractors and online matching services, and a new extended liability route can reach businesses that never contracted with the worker. Penalties are unchanged at £45,000 for a first breach and £60,000 for a repeat. Liability for the new categories applies only to engagements commencing on or after that date. The most useful thing you can do now costs nothing: work out which categories of worker you have never checked, and where in your contract chains you sit.

Sources

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