Right to work checks extend to contractors and platform workers on 1 October 2026

What is changing

Since 2008, the Right to Work Scheme has applied to contracts of employment. If you carried out the prescribed check on an employee before they started, you held a statutory excuse against a civil penalty if that person turned out to have no right to do the work. Engage the same person as a self-employed contractor rather than an employee, and the duty did not bite.

Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 closes that gap. It is commenced on 1 October 2026 by the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations 2026 (SI 2026/683), which was made on 24 June 2026.

Section 48 works by amending the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 — the Act that carries the illegal working prohibition and the civil penalty regime. It inserts a new section 14A, which sets out how sections 15 to 24 of that Act apply to the additional working arrangements, and a new section 15A, which extends liability along contractual chains. Section 25 is modified to match.

A second instrument, the Immigration (Restrictions on Employment and Residential Accommodation) (Prescribed Requirements and Codes of Practice) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (SI 2026/700), comes into force on the same date. It updates the mechanics — amending the Immigration (Restrictions on Employment) Order 2007, the Illegal Working Compliance Orders Regulations 2016, and the Immigration (Residential Accommodation) (Prescribed Requirements and Codes of Practice) Order 2014 — so that the prescribed checks and the statutory codes of practice cover the new arrangements.

Who is newly in scope

Section 48 brings three categories of working arrangement inside the prohibition, in addition to contracts of employment:

• Workers' contracts. People engaged under a contract to perform work personally who are not employees — the middle category between employee and genuinely self-employed. Casual staff, zero-hours staff, and many people described in a contract as "self-employed" fall here.
• Individual sub-contractors. Where work is sub-contracted to an individual who has not contracted directly with the end client. This reaches down labour supply chains — the new section 15A extends liability along the chain rather than confining it to whoever signed the final contract.
• Online matching services. Platforms that supply the details of service providers to potential clients or customers for remuneration. If your business model is connecting a customer to somebody who will do the work, you are in scope in your own right.

The Home Office has identified construction, food delivery, courier services, warehousing, and beauty salons as sectors where the change will be most keenly felt, because engagement by contract for services rather than by employment contract is common in all of them.

What a check gives you, and what it costs to skip

The point of a right to work check is the statutory excuse. Carry out the prescribed check correctly before the person begins work, keep the evidence, and you are protected from a civil penalty if that person is later found to have no right to do the work. Miss the check and you have no protection, whether or not you knew.

Under the current code of practice, the penalty starting point is £45,000 per illegal worker for a first breach and £60,000 per illegal worker for a repeat breach, in each case before reductions. Mitigating factors — reporting suspected illegal working and cooperating actively with the Home Office — can each reduce the figure by up to £5,000 per worker. Penalties are assessed per worker, so a single enforcement visit at a site using several unchecked sub-contractors compounds quickly.

How long the excuse lasts depends on the check:

• Manual check against List A documents — a continuous statutory excuse for the duration of that person's engagement. No repeat check needed.
• Manual check against List B documents — a time-limited excuse. You must carry out a follow-up check when the person's permission expires.
• Online check — an excuse for the period the online check confirmed the person is permitted to do the work in question.

Which engagements are caught, and from when

The revised code of practice governs work beginning on or after 1 October 2026. Checks you carried out before that date, under the code in force at the time, remain valid on their own terms — you are not expected to re-run historic checks on your existing employees because the Scheme has widened.

The practical risk sits with engagements that begin on or after 1 October 2026 in the newly covered categories, and with rolling or repeatedly renewed arrangements. If you take on casual staff shift by shift, or re-engage the same sub-contractors on each new job, treat the start of a new engagement on or after 1 October as the trigger for a check.

Always use the version of the code of practice in force at the date of the check. The Home Office publishes the codes in its illegal working penalties collection; confirm you are working from the current version before you finalise your process.

What to do before 1 October 2026

1. Map everyone who does work for you outside a contract of employment. Casual and zero-hours staff, freelancers engaged personally, individual sub-contractors, and anyone you introduce to customers through a platform. This list is the scope of your new duty, and for most businesses it is longer than expected.

2. Settle each person's employment status. The distinction between an employee, a worker, and someone genuinely in business on their own account decides whether the duty applies and what else you owe them. Status is determined by the reality of the arrangement, not by the label in the contract.

3. Extend your existing check process rather than building a second one. If you already run right to work checks on employees, the prescribed check is the same. What changes is who it is applied to and at what point in onboarding.

4. Move the check to before work starts. The statutory excuse only exists if the check precedes the work. Contractor onboarding is often looser than employee onboarding — someone starts on site before the paperwork catches up. That gap becomes a £45,000 exposure per person on 1 October.

5. Fix responsibility in your sub-contracting chains. Where you engage a sub-contractor who brings in individuals, agree in writing who checks whom, and how evidence reaches you. Section 15A extends liability along the chain, so "the sub-contractor handles that" is not by itself an answer.

6. If you run a matching platform, treat this as a duty on the platform. Online matching services are named in scope in their own right, not merely as a route through which someone else's duty operates. Build the check into onboarding for service providers.

7. Diarise follow-up checks. List B checks give a time-limited excuse. If you are extending checks to a large contractor population, you also need a system that tells you when each excuse expires.