Most eligibility tools for the UK Skilled Worker visa check a single salary threshold. The actual Home Office decision involves a salary floor stack with three separate layers — and failing any one of them produces the same refusal, even if the applicant passed the mandatory points total.
This post documents the stack, because it keeps coming up when HR systems produce incorrect eligibility verdicts.
Layer 1: The National Minimum Salary Threshold
Since April 2024, the minimum salary for a Skilled Worker visa is £38,700 per year (for most roles) or the relevant going rate — whichever is higher. Before that it was £26,200 (and briefly £25,600 before that).
Simple enough. A salary input above £38,700 clears Layer 1. Most eligibility checkers stop here.
Layer 2: The SOC-Specific Going Rate
The Home Office publishes a going rate for each Standard Occupational Classification code eligible for the Skilled Worker route. These rates are set based on UK labour market data and are updated periodically.
For many SOC codes, the going rate is below £38,700 — so Layer 1 dominates. But for approximately 30–40 SOC codes, the going rate exceeds £38,700. When that happens, the going rate becomes the effective salary floor.
Example current going rates (2026):
- SOC 2136 (Programmers and software development professionals): £40,800
- SOC 1135 (Financial managers and directors): £47,700
- SOC 2211 (Medical practitioners): varies, often well above £38,700 (handled under separate NHS frameworks)
A salary of £42,000 clears Layer 1. If the applicant is sponsored under SOC 1135, it fails Layer 2.
HR systems that compare only against £38,700 will mark this applicant as eligible. They won't be.
Layer 3: Tradeable Points Salary Reductions
There's a downward exception in the other direction: tradeable points allow salary reduction in certain circumstances.
If a role is in a shortage occupation, an applicant can be paid 80% of the going rate (and 80% of £38,700 where that applies). If a role is with a recognised research body or a PhD-level job, similar reductions apply.
So the same salary might be ineligible under a standard SOC code, eligible under a shortage occupation exception.
The shortage occupation list in 2026 is not the same as it was in 2023 (it was significantly revised). HR systems that cached the old list will produce wrong verdicts for roles that were removed from the shortage occupation designation.
The SOC Code Mapping Problem
Underneath all of this is a categorisation problem that breaks the salary check before it starts.
SOC codes are taxonomic — they describe what a worker does, not what a company calls the role. Many real job titles map plausibly to two or three different SOC codes. Whether SOC 2135 (IT business analysts) or SOC 2136 (Programmers) is more appropriate often depends on how the actual duties split.
If a sponsor assigns SOC 2135 when SOC 2136 is more accurate (or vice versa), the going rate comparison uses the wrong baseline. Beyond that, some SOC codes are entirely ineligible for the Skilled Worker route — if a sponsor assigns one of those by mistake, the mandatory points check fails ("job doesn't meet the skill level requirement") even if the actual duties are skilled.
Eligibility logic that takes SOC code as an input without validating it against the eligibility list will produce confident wrong answers.
Practical Implications for HR Compliance Systems
A correct Skilled Worker eligibility check needs to:
- Validate the SOC code against the current eligible occupation list
- Look up the going rate for that SOC code
- Compare the salary against
max(£38,700, going_rate) - Check if the role is on the shortage occupation list; if so, apply the 80% reduction to the effective floor
- Note whether PhD or research-body tradeable points apply
- Flag any salary that passes the national threshold but fails the going rate — these are the cases most likely to produce incorrect results in legacy systems
The going rate and shortage occupation list are published by the Home Office in the official immigration salary list guidance document. As of 2026, the most recent version is the one that accompanied the April 2024 reforms. It's been updated once since. If your system is using a hardcoded table and hasn't been refreshed, it's probably wrong on at least some SOC codes.
ImmigrationGPT provides a tool for checking employer sponsor status and current salary thresholds by SOC code, which is useful for teams building right-to-work compliance into HR systems.
This is reference information, not legal advice. For specific compliance situations, consult a qualified UK immigration adviser.
