Although demand for UK tier 2 work permits is still competitive, the salary threshold now appears to have lowered, according to a group of lawyers.
Demand for UK tier 2 work permits has reduced slightly as a result of various roles within the NHS being excluded from the UK immigration limit from June 2018. This was a result of restricted certificates of sponsorship being repeatedly oversubscribed during the first half of the year.
Although the minimum salary requirement for a UK tier 2 work permit is £30,000, the system increases the cap each time the cap is breached. This meant that previous salary caps had risen as high as £55,000.
As a result of the selected NHS roles being removed from the cap, lawyers have revealed that they have had UK visa applications approved with salaries that would have been too low before the exemption was put in place.
“We were anticipating it would be a couple of months to clear the backlog and the threshold would take time to go down, but we have already had one visa application approved that was over £10,000 lower than the £55,000 threshold,” said Karen Kaur, immigration analyst at Migrate UK.
“The process will be hit-and-miss for a while, because we do have applications we are yet to hear from before the August deadline, but it does look as though the salary threshold is starting to drop.” Kaur added.