Right to Work Duties Are Expanding From 1 October 2026: What Care Providers Need to Know
The Home Office has published a draft revised Code of Practice on Preventing Illegal Working, confirmed to come into force on 1 October 2026 alongside Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025. For care providers who rely on agency staff, subcontracted workers or staffing platforms to fill rotas, this is a meaningful change to how far right to work responsibilities now reach, not just a compliance footnote.
The definition of “employer” is getting much wider
Right now, right to work duties in the UK apply strictly to traditional employer-employee relationships. From 1 October 2026, that definition expands to cover organisations engaging individuals:
- under a contract of employment
- under a worker’s contract
- as an individual sub-contractor
- through a matching service that provides details of service providers to potential clients or customers, which captures agency and gig-economy style arrangements
For care providers, this matters because so much of the sector’s staffing, particularly domiciliary care and cover for absence, runs through exactly these kinds of arrangements. Services that may never have considered themselves an “employer” for right to work purposes could now be brought into scope.
Liability can now reach further up the chain
Under the current regime, a civil penalty for employing someone without the right to work applies where a prescribed right to work check wasn’t carried out. From 1 October 2026, primary responsibility still sits with whichever party has the direct contractual relationship with the worker, but where that party can’t be identified, liability can extend to other organisations in the contractual chain. Penalties can run up to £60,000 per person found working illegally.
In practice, that means providers who outsource staffing to agencies or subcontractors can no longer treat right to work compliance as entirely someone else’s problem. Demonstrating a statutory excuse is likely to depend on having the right contractual provisions in place, proper due diligence on staffing partners, and clear identity verification processes, not just checks on your own direct employees.
What to do before October
With just under three months until commencement, now is a sensible time to:
- Map every route through which your organisation engages staff, including agency workers, subcontractors and any platform-based staffing arrangements
- Review the right to work provisions in your contracts with agencies and staffing partners
- Check your onboarding and record-keeping processes cover the wider set of working relationships now in scope
If you’d like to talk through what this means for your organisation specifically, get in touch with HLTH Compliance.