Issue #3: The busiest hiring week of the year so far, and the 31 December line

Our index of graduate and entry-level roles counts every new UK listing by the week it was posted. The run-up to September looks like this:

• Week of 27 July: 1,545 new listings
• Week of 10 August: 2,948
• Week of 24 August: 4,313
• Week of 31 August: 4,869, the highest weekly total we have recorded

The index now stands at 27,527 live listings from 4,646 employers, and 7,502 of those sit with an employer we have matched to a live sponsor licence, up from 6,945 a week ago. That is 897 licensed employers with something open right now.

What is being posted most in the last fortnight: finance roles lead by a distance (credit controller, finance assistant, assistant accountant and management accountant together account for over 260 new listings), followed by data engineer (61), quality engineer (58), quantity surveyor (55) and business analyst (36). Titles with "graduate", "junior", "trainee" or "entry level" in them: 1,187 live, of which 201 are with a licensed employer.

The practical read: about one in six explicitly entry-level roles sits with an employer that can sponsor. Work that shortlist first, before the generic boards. It is smaller, fresher, and far less crowded.

Whether a job can be sponsored on the Skilled Worker route comes down to salary, and the rule has two halves that people mix up.

• The general threshold is £41,700 a year. The offer must also meet the going rate for its occupation code, and the higher of the two applies.
• New entrants (which covers most people switching from a Graduate visa, and most under-26s) can be paid 70% of the going rate, with a floor of £33,400. This is the route nearly every graduate scheme relies on, and it caps your total time as a new entrant at four years, including time already spent on the Graduate visa.
• The going rate is per occupation code, not per job title. Software developers (code 2134) carry a standard going rate of £54,700; chartered accountants (2421) £49,200; management consultants and business analysts (2431) £50,200; quantity surveyors (2453) £48,600; data analysts (3544) £34,900. The employer decides which code goes on the certificate, so ask.

How the market lines up against those floors, from the 4,745 listings posted in the last 14 days that state a salary:

• 2,751 (58%) advertise at or above £33,400
• 1,387 (29%) advertise at or above £41,700
• Among listings from licensed employers that state a salary, 923 of 1,594 clear £33,400 and 457 clear £41,700

One more thing, because it keeps coming up: a £44,000 figure has been circulating. As of 7 September it appears only in a Home Office technical note on how thresholds are calculated. It is not in force. We re-check the published figures against gov.uk every Monday and show the date on the calculator.

Our daily mirror of the Home Office register of licensed sponsors, synced on the morning of 8 September:

• 126,631 organisations hold a licence, up 129 since 1 September
• 121,352 are licensed on the Skilled Worker route, up 119 in the week, roughly 17 a day against the summer's average of about ten
• 121,296 of those are A-rated. Only 54 are B-rated, and a B-rated sponsor cannot sponsor new workers until it has worked back up to an A rating, so a B next to a company's name is a genuine red flag for a new hire

London holds just over 35,000 Skilled Worker sponsors, but the next tier is deeper than most applicants assume:

• Birmingham 2,945, Manchester 2,742, Leicester 1,364
• Glasgow 1,278, Bristol 1,230, Edinburgh 1,100, Leeds 1,034, Nottingham 999

If your target city is one of these, you have more than a thousand employers who already hold a licence. The competition per seat is also markedly lower than in London. A search filtered to licensed employers in your city is a better afternoon than a hundredth application to a household name.

From the 2027-cycle dates published on employers' own pages. Sponsorship verdict in brackets is from our 212-scheme check.

• Macquarie (partial): 2027 applications opened 1 September and close 30 October
• A&O Shearman and Hogan Lovells (Hogan Lovells sponsors): vacation scheme windows run 1 September to 5 October
• CMS (partial): England opens 1 October and closes 22 November; Scotland opens 24 September and runs to 10 January
• Kearney (sponsorship not published): Business Analyst cycle reported closing 27 October
• Slaughter and May (sponsors, and uses no online tests at all): training contract applications open now, close 13 November
• Deloitte (sponsors UK-wide, but not if you have already held a Skilled Worker or Graduate visa): 2027 intake reported opening in waves, Scotland 21 September, Audit, Legal and Tax 28 September, Advisory and Consulting 5 October
• Forvis Mazars (partial): September 2027 start roles open in October

The Deloitte and Kearney dates come from an earlier pass and were not re-confirmed this month, so treat them as "expected" and check the live page before you plan a week around them. The rest were read from the employer's page directly.

Two habits that pay in this stretch. Do the sponsorship check before the application, not after the offer: 47 of the 212 schemes say no outright and 102 say nothing, and a silent page is worth an email to the early-careers team. And for anything reviewed on a rolling basis, a complete application in the first week of the window beats a polished one in the last.

The Graduate visa is the unsponsored window after your course in which to find an employer who will sponsor you. Its length now depends on when you apply for it:

• Apply on or before 31 December 2026: 24 months
• Apply from 1 January 2027: 18 months
• Doctoral graduates: 36 months either way

You can only apply once your university has reported your course as complete, so almost everyone finishing in summer 2027 lands on the 18-month version. Six months sounds small. It is not, because a graduate scheme typically takes three to six months from application to offer and can add another few months to a start date. On an 18-month clock, the first application cycle after you graduate is realistically your only full one.

What that changes, concretely:

• Apply during final year, not after it. The 2027 windows above are the ones that matter for a 2027 finisher, and most of them close by December.
• Filter for sponsorship first. On a shorter clock, a month spent on a scheme that was never going to sponsor is the most expensive mistake available.
• Know the new-entrant cap. Time on the Graduate visa counts towards the four-year new-entrant limit, which is exactly why Deloitte and BDO now decline applicants who have already used one. If you are already on a Graduate visa, aim for the switch early rather than late.
• If you are finishing in 2026, applying for the Graduate visa before the year end keeps the 24 months. Do not let the paperwork drift into January.

This is general information about published rules, not immigration advice. The rule is set out on gov.uk and our timeline guide walks through the sequencing month by month.