What an EOR-sponsored work visa costs, and how long it takes

The government filing fee is almost never the number that matters. On a three-year sponsored hire in the UK, statutory costs run to about £8,409 per employee, and 84% of that is two levies that buy no processing at all. Meanwhile Germany's mandatory employer cost for the same hire is zero, and Singapore's is S$330. If a provider quotes you one round number for "visa costs", that spread is what it is hiding.

Every figure below is a fixed, published amount from a named authority, checked against that authority's own page in September 2026. That matters for the question buyers actually ask us, which is not "what does a visa cost" but "how do I know this fee is real and not marked up". A fee that is fixed, published and receipted is auditable. That is the whole test, and the end of this page sets out how to apply it.

The UK, worked through

A medium or large sponsor bringing one person in on a three-year Skilled Worker visa from outside the UK pays:

Certificate of Sponsorship £525. One per sponsored worker.

Immigration Skills Charge £3,960. That is £1,320 for the first 12 months plus £660 for each further six months. A small or charitable sponsor pays £480 and £240 instead.

Skilled Worker visa fee £819 for up to three years, applying from outside the UK. It is £1,618 above three years, and lower again if the occupation is on the Immigration Salary List.

Immigration Health Surcharge £3,105. £1,035 per year, per person, paid up front for the whole period. Every dependant pays it too.

That is £8,409, and the Skills Charge plus the Health Surcharge account for £7,065 of it. Neither buys any processing. Neither can lawfully be recovered from the worker: Home Office guidance prohibits passing on the licence and sponsorship fees and warns that doing so risks licence revocation.

Separately there is the sponsor licence itself, £1,682 for a medium or large sponsor. It is one-off and entity-level, amortised across every worker that entity sponsors. Watch for it appearing as a per-hire line, because it should not.

The same hire elsewhere

Germany: zero mandatory employer cost. The category D national visa is €75 and the residence permit or EU Blue Card is €100, and the worker is the legal debtor for both. There is an optional employer-initiated fast track at €411, which is never refunded even if the authority declines, with no appeal.

Singapore: S$330. An Employment Pass is S$105 to apply and S$225 to issue. An S Pass is S$105 and S$100, but carries a recurring employer levy of S$650 per month per holder, harmonised from 1 September 2025. That levy dwarfs the filing fees and is the number to plan around.

Netherlands: €423 for the highly skilled migrant permit, or the EU Blue Card, with family members at €254 each. Before you can file at all, the employer needs recognition as a sponsor: €5,080, or €2,539 for companies with 50 or fewer employees. That is also one-off and entity-level.

The UAE and India cannot be pinned to a single figure, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The UAE MOHRE work permit runs from AED 250 to AED 3,450, driven by the employer's own MOHRE company classification, with ICP entry-permit charges of AED 100 each for application, issuance and the smart-service fee. Dubai applications go through GDRFA on a different schedule. India sets Employment Visa fees by reciprocity, per nationality, so there is genuinely no universal amount. On the official Kuala Lumpur schedule effective 1 April 2026 it is MYR 477 up to six months, MYR 794 to a year, and MYR 1,191 for one to five years. A statutory welfare charge and an outsourced service-centre charge sit on top. FRRO registration itself is free.

How long it takes, and two claims that are not true

UK: most sponsor licence applications are dealt with in under eight weeks. Paid priority options are published separately: £750 for a licence decision in ten working days, £500 for a five-day visa decision, £1,000 for next working day.

Singapore: Employment Pass and S Pass applications are processed, or an update given, within ten business days. No paid expedited route is published.

Netherlands: the legal decision period is 90 days. You will often be told two weeks for a recognised sponsor. That is contradicted by the immigration service's own published decision periods, and we could not source it anywhere official. Plan on the legal period.

India: "7 to 10 business days" has no official source. It circulates widely. No service standard for Employment Visa processing appears on the ministry or Bureau of Immigration pages. Treat any commitment on it as the provider's, not the government's.

Germany publishes no single national standard outside the accelerated procedure. The UAE's only verified timing is ICP's two-day service completion for the entry permit; MOHRE's own service pages were unreachable, so we cannot state a work-permit time.

How to tell a real pass-through from a marked-up one

Ask for the authority's own reference, not a line on their invoice. Every real fee leaves an artefact: a Certificate of Sponsorship has a number from the Sponsor Management System, the Health Surcharge has its own reference, the Dutch service sends a payment letter before you pay, ICP and MOHRE transactions carry transaction numbers. A genuine pass-through can produce that on request. A number that exists only on a provider invoice cannot.

Check the figure to the pound. These are fixed statutory amounts, not estimates. Rounding is where margin hides. No government charges £600 for a Certificate of Sponsorship or an even £1,000 for "immigration cost". Ask for the exact published amount and watch what happens to the total.

Make them split every line into three columns: government fee to a named authority, third-party disbursement such as translation or a medical test or a courier, and their own service fee. A provider that will not separate those is charging you for the ambiguity.

Force the arithmetic for your actual visa length. If the quote does not change when you move from three years to five, it was not built from government fees. Five years of UK sponsorship carries £6,600 of Skills Charge and £5,175 of Health Surcharge for one person, before any visa fee.

Ask which sponsor band they applied. An employer of record is normally a medium or large sponsor, so the large-sponsor rate is the correct one to pass through. A quote using the small-sponsor rate is not a bargain, it is wrong.

Ask which fee schedule, and which date. "Our system" is a failed answer. These move on known dates: the UK Skills Charge rose about 32% on 16 December 2025, India raises every fee each 1 January, Singapore harmonised the S Pass levy on 1 September 2025, and a new Home Office fee table takes effect 8 October 2026. A provider that can name the schedule is reading the same public page you can.

How Teamed helps with this specific decision

This is the hidden global employment tax in its clearest form. The fees above are public, fixed and receipted. Nothing stops anyone publishing them. They stay murky because a bundled immigration line is easier to mark up than an itemised one, and because a buyer who cannot see the components cannot challenge the total.

So we publish them, including the parts where the honest answer is a range with its driver named rather than a confident number, and including the two timelines the industry repeats that we could not source. A range you can interrogate is worth more than a figure you cannot.

What that means in practice on a Teamed invoice: immigration costs appear as what they are, against the authority that received them, with the reference available. Currency conversion carries no markup and no spread, which matters here more than elsewhere, because these fees are paid in local currency and a margin taken on the conversion is invisible inside an already-unfamiliar number. Most providers take 1.5% to 3% inside the exchange rate, where it never shows as a charge at all.

And the boundary, stated plainly rather than implied. Immigration support varies by country. In some markets, the UAE among them, Teamed handles parts of the visa and insurance process. In others, including the United Kingdom, Teamed does not sponsor work visas at all: it does not hold a UK sponsor licence and cannot issue a Certificate of Sponsorship, and no employer of record can lend a licence it does not hold. Any provider telling you otherwise is worth a second question.

That is the same argument as the fee transparency above, applied to scope. A provider that tells you what it does not do is easier to plan around than one that implies it does everything, and the cost of discovering the boundary late is not a fee. It is a start date that slips.

On the part that genuinely varies, the permit route for a specific role and nationality, Teamed assigns real HR and legal experts within 24 hours. Scope is the right first question, not price.