Two dates matter here, and they don’t line up. The overseas care worker visa route closed to new applicants in July 2025. The first Fair Pay Agreement for the sector, the policy meant to make domestic recruitment a real alternative, isn’t due to take effect until April 2028. That’s close to three years where one of the two main levers providers have traditionally relied on for workforce supply has gone, and the other hasn’t been built yet.
These dates sit underneath decisions you’re making now: the recruitment round you’re running this quarter and the rota gaps you’re covering with agency staff next month, long before either policy has had the chance to make a difference.
What’s actually changed on sponsorship?
From 22 July 2025, care providers in England can no longer sponsor new overseas applicants for care worker or senior care worker roles. The Home Office has confirmed transitional arrangements will run until 22 July 2028, allowing existing sponsored workers to extend their visas or switch employer, and reserving the right to bring that closing date forward. The effect on applications has been immediate: Health and Care Worker visa applications are down 54% year-on-year, and 92% below the November 2023 peak.
Workers already on these visas still cannot bring dependants, a restriction in place since March 2024 that continues to weigh on retention as much as recruitment. For providers, the practical position now is that overseas recruitment is limited to in-country switching: workers already here on other visa types who’ve worked for you for at least three months. Building a workforce plan around new arrivals from abroad is no longer realistic.
Why the Fair Pay Agreement fix is further off than it sounds
The Adult Social Care Negotiating Body, tasked with agreeing the sector’s first Fair Pay Agreement, is expected to be established via regulation later this year. Negotiations don’t start until autumn 2027 and the agreement itself isn’t due to take effect until April 2028.
The funding behind it raises its own questions. The £500 million committed so far works out at roughly 20p extra an hour per worker, according to Health Foundation analysis, against an estimate from the same organisation that £2.3 billion would be needed to bring care worker pay up to NHS Agenda for Change Upper Band 3 levels. Local authority staff are excluded from the agreement’s scope, which analysis from Personnel Today has pointed out sits awkwardly next to the Employment Rights Act’s stated aim of ending two-tier working practices in the sector.
None of this is an argument against the Fair Pay Agreement. Care work is low paid relative to its demands, and one in five residential care workers experience in-work poverty. The point is narrower: providers planning around 2028 as the date things improve should know how much weight that single year is being asked to carry, and how much of the detail is still unresolved.
Who picks up the bill if the Fair Pay Agreement funding gap isn’t managed well?
If the funding behind the Fair Pay Agreement turns out to be insufficient, the likely outcome is providers passing the cost on. The people most exposed to that are self-funders: residents and families paying privately for care, who have no negotiating body of their own.
The same pressure applies in the interim too. With overseas recruitment closed off, retaining staff and filling shifts increasingly means competing on pay in the local market, through agency use or local wage increases, before any sector-wide agreement exists to share that cost more fairly.
The three years between now and 2028 carry a real risk that the bill for both problems, recruitment and pay, lands on whoever is least able to query it.
Who picks up the bill if the Fair Pay Agreement funding gap isn’t managed well?
If the funding behind the Fair Pay Agreement turns out to be insufficient, the likely outcome is providers passing the cost on. The people most exposed to that are self-funders: residents and families paying privately for care, who have no negotiating body of their own.
The same pressure applies in the interim too. With overseas recruitment closed off, retaining staff and filling shifts increasingly means competing on pay in the local market, through agency use or local wage increases, before any sector-wide agreement exists to share that cost more fairly.
The three years between now and 2028 carry a real risk that the bill for both problems, recruitment and pay, lands on whoever is least able to query it.
What’s actually within your control right now?
Neither the visa closure nor the Fair Pay Agreement timeline is something a provider can change. What is within reach is staff retention and knowing your true cost to deliver care well enough to plan for what’s coming, rather than reacting to it.
That means having a clear, current picture of where staff time goes and what it actually costs to staff a rota properly, not an estimate revisited once a year. Providers who can see this clearly are in a stronger position to manage staff turnover now and respond to a future pay settlement with evidence rather than guesswork. This might mean absorbing the cost, adjusting fees with clear rationale or making the case to a local authority commissioner for a fairer rate.
Conclusion
The sponsorship route closing and the Fair Pay Agreement landing in 2028 happened on different timelines. The gap between them is where the pressure on providers will sit for the next three years. Providers who already have a clear picture of their costs and staffing will be in a stronger position to manage that gap than those still waiting for either policy to settle.
Where Certa fits into this
Certa is CACI’s all-in-one care management platform for adult social care providers. It is built on more than 30 years of CACI delivering workforce, case and financial management software to complex, high-accountability organisations, including the Care Quality Commission and Ofsted for inspection scheduling, alongside a long list of local authorities delivering adult social care directly.
Certa covers care planning and client records, rostering and workforce management, a mobile app for staff working in the field, a portal for clients and their families, and reporting and financial management, all from a single system.
A handful of those capabilities speak directly to the problem this piece has been describing.
On the cost side, real-time visit data captured through Certa’s mobile app, including arrival, departure and mileage, feeds directly into payable hours and timesheets without manual reconciliation. That is the staffing and time data providers need to model the cost of a future Fair Pay Agreement settlement, rather than finding out after it lands.
If that sounds like the clearer picture your service needs before the bill arrives, see how Certa can help.