The 10-Year ILR Plan: What Earned Settlement Means

For most people on a Skilled Worker visa, the deal has been clear for years. Work for a licensed sponsor, keep your record clean, stay in the country, and after five years you can apply to settle. Indefinite leave to remain is the prize at the end of the route: no more visa fees, no more sponsor tying you to a job, and a year later the option of British citizenship.

The government wants to change the size of that prize and how long you wait for it. Under proposals consulted on over the winter, the standard qualifying period for settlement would double from five years to ten — and settlement would stop being something you simply reach by waiting. You would have to earn it.

Before anyone panics: none of this is law yet. No draft Immigration Rules have been laid before Parliament, the five-year route is still open, and any application is decided under the rules in force on the day it is made. But the direction of travel is unusually clear, ministers have signalled they intend to act this year, and the plan touches almost everyone the UK sponsor system is built around. It is worth understanding now.

Where this came from

The idea sits inside the May 2025 Immigration White Paper, Restoring control over the immigration system, which set out the government’s plan to bring net migration down and reshape the work routes. The skill threshold rising to degree level, the higher salary floor, the end of overseas care-worker recruitment — those were the first wave, and most are already in force.

Settlement was held back for a separate consultation. Earned settlement: a fairer pathway to settlement opened on 20 November 2025 and closed on 12 February 2026. It drew one of the largest responses to a Home Office consultation in recent memory, and the government is still working through the results before it publishes a formal reply.

What the plan actually proposes

Three ideas sit at the heart of it.

A ten-year default. The standard qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain would rise from five years to ten for most routes, including Skilled Worker. The consultation also floated a longer baseline — reported as up to fifteen years — for people in lower-skilled roles below the new degree-level threshold, though that is one of the points it explicitly asked for views on rather than a settled decision.

Settlement you earn down. This is the part that gives the policy its name. Rather than a flat wait, the plan would let people shorten the qualifying period through “contributions” — the consultation pointed to things like high earnings, work in public services such as the NHS, stronger English, and other forms of contribution. The exact menu and the size of each reduction are precisely what the consultation tested, so treat any specific number you read elsewhere as a proposal, not a rule. The principle is the firm part: time alone would no longer be enough, and the people the government considers higher contributors could settle faster.

A higher bar to clear. Alongside the wait, the criteria for settling would tighten. The consultation pointed to English at B2 (up from the old B1 standard), the Life in the UK test, a clean criminal record, no outstanding debts to public bodies such as the NHS, and a minimum level of earnings sustained over several years. The headline from ministers has been blunt: you should not be able to settle with a criminal record.

The fight is about who it applies to

The single most contested question is not the ten years. It is whether the new clock would apply to people who are already here.

The consultation framed the changes as potentially reaching migrants who arrived from 2021 onwards — a large group who came to the UK on the understanding that settlement was five years away, and who have been building their lives around that timeline. Applying a longer wait to people already partway through their route, rather than only to new arrivals, is what immigration lawyers call retrospective change, and it is where the strongest objections have landed.

In April 2026 the cross-party Home Affairs Committee published a report on the proposals and pressed the government on exactly this point, warning about the impact on people who have already put down roots and questioning the fairness of moving the goalposts mid-route. The government has said transitional arrangements are part of what it is consulting on. What those arrangements will look like — who is protected, and who is not — is the detail thousands of sponsored workers are waiting on.

What it means if you are on a work visa

If you are partway through a Skilled Worker visa, the honest answer right now is: keep going, and watch this space. The rules have not changed. People reaching five years today are still settling at five years.

The sensible moves are the ones that hold up whatever the final policy looks like:

Protect your continuous residence. Whether the route is five years or ten, long absences from the UK can break it. The current rule limits you to 180 days outside the UK in any rolling 12-month period. Our ILR 180-day absence calculator tests your travel history against that limit so a forgotten trip does not reset your clock.
Keep clean records. Earnings, payslips, dates of travel, and a clean record matter more under an “earned” system than under a simple time-served one. Hold on to the evidence.
Get the English and the Life in the UK test sorted early. Both already feature in the settlement route and both feature in the plan. Neither gets easier by leaving it late.
Think about citizenship timing too. If you are close to settling under the current rules, the year that follows leads to naturalisation, which has its own absence limits. Our British citizenship checker covers the 450-day and 90-day absence tests that apply there.

There is no advantage to rushing a weak application, and no need to. But there is value in being ready, because if the longer route does arrive, the people who kept good records and protected their residence will be in the strongest position to benefit from whatever transitional protection or earned reductions emerge.

What happens next

The consultation is closed and the government is analysing the responses. Ministers have indicated they want to set out the finalised policy later in 2026, with the autumn repeatedly mentioned, and any actual change would come through a Statement of Changes to the Immigration Rules with its own commencement dates. Until that happens, the existing five-year and ten-year routes remain exactly as they are.

For a product built around the UK sponsor register, this matters because settlement is the destination most sponsored workers are aiming at. A licensed sponsor gets you onto the route; the settlement rules decide how long that route is. We will update our settlement tools and write again once the government publishes its response and any draft rules.

This article is general information, not immigration advice. The earned settlement proposals are a consultation and are not in force; the rules that apply to any application are the ones in effect on the day it is made. Confirm the current position on GOV.UK and the House of Commons Library briefing on the white paper changes, or take professional advice, before making decisions about your stay in the UK.

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