The UK government’s Earned Settlement announcement on 2 November 2026 offers a conditional reprieve to migrant care workers. The government has abandoned the proposed 15-year settlement wait. Workers who entered or switched to the care route before the May 2025 Immigration White Paper can keep a five-year pathway if they meet salary (£25,000 annually), sponsorship, and employment requirements. Strengthened eligibility conditions, including a requirement for higher levels of English, such as B2, also apply, subject to exemptions. Those working in the care sector on a health and care work visa after the White Paper (an estimated 6,000 care workers) will normally be on a ten-year pathway to settlement.
For those employed in the care sector before the White Paper announcement but who do not meet the conditions after five years (an estimated quarter of the relevant cohort), the offer is another five-year care visa. They will remain restricted to care work and have no recourse to public funds. Support in finding another employer and additional time following a sponsor licence revocation are welcome. Nevertheless, these concessions leave some workers facing prolonged insecurity because employers failed to provide the promised employment conditions. Describing this as a “second chance” places responsibility on workers whose opportunities for access to stable work and earnings may have been undermined. Furthermore, according to Skills for Care (2026), 44% of care workers in domiciliary care in England are on zero-hour contracts, and without stable employment conditions, care workers on a “second chance” will have to navigate the extended five-year visa route in a highly fragmented and insecure labour market.
What the research reveals
Research makes clear why treating this as a failure of individual contribution is troubling. UNISON’s (2025) survey of over 3,000 migrant workers documents underpayment and employers’ use of immigration-related threats, alongside racism at work. A worker denied sufficient hours cannot simply choose to earn more. Extending their route to settlement risks turning the consequences of exploitation into an additional disadvantage, while leaving the state’s responsibility for licensing sponsors unaddressed.
Research shows that immigration controls and the sponsorship model of the Health and Care Worker visa partly produce this vulnerability, which restricts care workers’ capacity to leave employment and challenge exploitative working conditions. Meanwhile, evidence on government-funded rematching schemes reveals substantial barriers to securing replacement sponsors. Therefore, more time alone cannot resolve these problems.
The emphasis on earnings also reproduces a troubling hierarchy of contribution. Centre for Care research has shown that care’s low pay reflects its institutional organisation, persistent funding pressures, and dependence on a highly gendered and racialised workforce. Making immigration security depend on pay risks carrying care labour market inequalities into settlement decisions, and putting already at-risk people in more precarious positions. Recognition should extend beyond a concession determined by arrival date.
The consequences reach into workers’ own caring relationships. Migration and welfare institutions shape families’ capacity to sustain care across borders. Longer periods of temporary status can prolong uncertainty over family futures. The concessions in the Earned Settlement response regarding family settlement and interruptions to earnings due to caring responsibilities are welcome, but secure residence remains crucial to workers’ ability to plan their lives.
Meaningful change
The retreat from the original proposals matters. Its adequacy should be judged by whether those most exposed to exploitation can benefit. Workers need protection from losing progress towards settlement due to sponsor abuse, alongside effective enforcement and properly funded improvements in care sector employment. A government that recognises the contribution of migrant care workers should provide the security needed to sustain both their work and their own caring lives.
About the authors
Majella is a qualitative researcher working at the intersection of migration, family and care studies, including a focus on life-course dynamics. She researches with groups traditionally seen as ‘marginalised’ / ‘excluded’ / ‘disadvantaged’, including older people with a migrant background, young migrants and asylum seekers and migrant care workers.
Dr. Amna Sarwer is a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests lie at the intersections of migration, time, care work, and precarious labour in neoliberal economies. Her work examines how racialised and gendered forms of labour are organised through temporal regimes, embodied precarity, and unequal distributions of care, with a particular focus on migrant workers. She draws on feminist, critical race, and interdisciplinary social theory to explore how everyday experiences of work and care are shaped by broader political and economic structures.
Millie’s PhD project is provisionally titled “Who cares for those who care? A feminist approach to migrant workers’ experiences of care in the UK”. She plans to use gender and race as categories of analysis for understanding the experiences of migrant care workers and their families in the face of recent policy changes that limit migrants’ rights to bring dependents to join them in the UK. She aims to consider systems of support and mutual care that may exist between care workers and their social networks beyond the workplace.
