Britain Granted 692 Work Visas to Portuguese Nationals in the Year to June, Half the 2023 Total and Fewer Than It Granted for Study

The United Kingdom issued 692 work visas to Portuguese nationals in the twelve months to June 2026. Three years earlier it issued 1,386. The count has halved almost exactly, and the Home Office's own entry clearance data, published alongside its latest quarterly immigration statistics, shows where the loss sits and where it does not.

Of the 692, 560 went to main applicants and 132 to dependants; three years earlier the same split was 1,122 and 264. The decline has been steady rather than sudden: 1,386, then 993, then 892, then 692.

The Fall Is Entirely in Sponsored Work

Broken down by route, the collapse has one address. Skilled Worker visas granted to Portuguese nationals fell from 894 to 350, down 61 percent. Health and Care Worker visas fell from 215 to 50, down 77 percent. The Senior or Specialist Worker route within Global Business Mobility, used by companies moving staff between offices, held up better, easing from 96 to 79.

Two categories moved the other way. Global Talent grants, which need no employer sponsor, rose from 28 to 47, and Frontier Worker permits from 18 to 47. Both are small, and both describe people whose access to the British labour market does not depend on a company being willing to sponsor them.

The most telling number is the one that did not rise. Work visa refusals for Portuguese nationals fell over the same period, from 67 to 41. Britain is not turning Portuguese applicants away in greater numbers. Far fewer are applying, because far fewer are being sponsored in the first place.

The policy history explains why. From 22 July 2025 the skill threshold for the Skilled Worker route rose to Regulated Qualifications Framework level 6, degree level, removing more than 100 occupations from eligibility outright. The general salary threshold rose in the same package from 38,700 to 41,700 pounds, having already been lifted to 38,700 from 26,200 in April 2024. Overseas recruitment of care workers ended, and the Immigration Salary List gave way to a narrower Temporary Shortage List. Each step removed a tier of the jobs that had carried most Portuguese workers into Britain after free movement ended.

Study Has Now Overtaken Work

While work grants halved, the other routes did not. Study visas issued to Portuguese nationals went from 697 to 749 over the same three years, and family visas nearly doubled, from 87 to 158.

The result is a reversal. In the year to June 2026, Britain granted more study visas to Portuguese nationals, 749, than work visas, 692. That is the first time the two have crossed since Portuguese nationals began needing visas at all, in 2021. In the year to June 2022 the gap ran the other way by more than five hundred; in the year to June 2023 by nearly seven hundred. Across every category, total grants fell from 2,361 to 1,764, a drop of a quarter, and work accounts for almost all of it.

One caveat matters. Entry clearance visas are issued to people applying from outside the United Kingdom, and say nothing about the large Portuguese population already settled in Britain under the EU Settlement Scheme, who need no visa to work and do not appear in this series at all. What the figures measure is the new flow: the route a Portuguese worker would have to use today to take a British job for the first time.

That flow is being redirected rather than stopped. Portuguese emigration overall runs at around 70,000 people a year, with Switzerland now the leading destination, and the pattern of 850,000 young Portuguese living abroad has not reversed because one country raised its salary floor. Britain has stopped being the easy option for the mid-skilled worker, much as Australia has stopped being an option at all for the working holidaymaker. Both doors narrowed for the same kind of applicant, within roughly the same eighteen months.