On a Skilled Worker visa when a performance improvement plan ends in dismissal

Does a performance improvement plan affect my visa?

No. Being put on a performance improvement plan is not an immigration event. Your permission is tied to your sponsorship, and sponsorship does not end because a plan started.

What changes your position is the employment ending. Even then the change is not automatic: your sponsor reports it, and the Home Office decides what to do. Two acts, by two different organisations, with a gap between them.

This page is for the sponsored routes — Skilled Worker and its neighbours. If you are here on the Graduate route or on Global Talent, a plan carries no immigration consequence for you at all. If you are a dependant, your permission is tied to the main applicant rather than to your own employer, so your own plan is not the question; theirs might be. This page does not answer that.

Your employer has ten working days to report

A sponsor must report a change in a sponsored worker's circumstances no later than ten working days after the event, and stopping sponsorship of a worker, for any reason, is on the list. The report carries your last known address, telephone number and personal email addresses.

There is a second trigger worth knowing before any dismissal. More than ten consecutive working days of unauthorised absence must be reported whether or not the sponsor intends to keep sponsoring you. Going quiet for longer than a fortnight is therefore reportable on its own — the British counterpart to the French ghosting trap, arriving through immigration rather than through benefits.

And what gets reported is used. The sponsor guidance tells employers plainly that information about non-attendance or non-compliance may be used to cancel permission or to take enforcement action. The report is not paperwork.

What the Home Office's own guidance says about sixty days

The ground that reaches a dismissed sponsored worker is SUI 33.1 of the Immigration Rules, under the heading Worker does not start work or ceases their employment. If you have read about "paragraph 9.27.1", that is the same ground under its old number: Part Suitability replaced Part 9 on 11 November 2025, so anything written before that date cites a numbering that no longer exists.

Permission may be cancelled on that ground. May is doing real work — the guidance separates the grounds where a caseworker must cancel from those where they decide, and this is in the second set.

Where someone on a points-based route has ceased work, the caseworker guidance says the caseworker must consider cancelling permission to sixty days, unless immediate cancellation is appropriate or a different date is.

Two things follow that most summaries leave out.

The sixty days run from the decision you receive, not from your last day at work. It is a new expiry date set when the decision reaches you, and a caseworker may only set it if you will still have more than sixty days of permission left on that date. So the gap between your last day and the letter is not spent out of your sixty.

It is capped by your visa's own expiry. Cancellation can never push permission past the date it was already due to end. A visa with seven weeks left gives you seven weeks, however the rest of it runs.

Immediate cancellation is aimed at a different person

The guidance's own example of non-compliance serious enough to cancel on the spot is a sponsored worker dismissed for gross misconduct, grave enough that they should not be given sixty days to find another sponsor.

A dismissal at the end of a performance plan is not that, and the distinction is the Home Office's rather than this guide's. Where the reason is outside your control, or it is not clear that you broke any condition of your permission, sixty days is what the guidance calls normally appropriate.

This is also why the capability-and-not-conduct distinction is worth more to a visa holder than to anyone else in this guide. The label on your exit is not only about your reference and your benefit. It is read by a caseworker deciding how long you have.

One question that decides the size of the number

Alongside the sixty days, the same guidance sets a different outcome for the case where the job is ending early: there the caseworker is to cancel to the job's new end date, plus whatever wrap-up period the original grant allowed. For a sponsored worker that tail is days rather than two months.

Those two outcomes map onto the same paragraph's own limbs — an ending confirmed before the date on the certificate of sponsorship, and having ceased to work for the sponsor — and a dismissal can be described either way depending on when your employer reports it. The guidance works its wrap-up example through for students and not for workers, and does not say which limb governs a dismissal.

So sixty days is what a caseworker is directed to consider, not what you are certain to get. Treat it as the planning figure and not as a promise, and do not wait for the letter to find out which one you are in.

What to do while the plan is still running

None of this is a reason to assume the plan ends badly. It is a reason to make the immigration half of a bad ending cheaper, which costs nothing if the ending is good.

• Know your visa's own expiry date. It is the cap on everything above, and it is the one number here that is already fixed.
• Start looking now. Job searching during a plan has what you can say and to whom. A new Certificate of Sponsorship takes an employer time to issue, and that time runs inside your window rather than before it.
• Keep the dates. The day you were told, the day employment formally ends, the day any decision arrives. Two of those three are the ones a later application turns on.
• Ask when the report will be made. It is a reasonable question about a duty your employer already has, and the answer tells you roughly when the decision is coming.

What an exit negotiation can move, and what it cannot

A later termination date is worth more to you than it is to most readers of this guide, because your permission is tied to the employment and not to the payment. Money paid after the employment has ended does not extend your sponsorship.

The asks that cost an employer little: a precise and later last day, written confirmation of it, and clarity on when the sponsorship report will be made. What to ask for in a severance conversation has the British shape of it.

Immigration advice is worth paying for here

Fairhanded is not a law firm and is not an immigration adviser. This page tells you where the rules sit and what the Home Office's own guidance directs — it cannot tell you which limb your case falls under, and that is the part with the largest range in it.

If an ending is being discussed, take it to a regulated immigration adviser or a solicitor early, while the dates are still movable. That is cheaper than doing it afterwards, and afterwards is when most people do it.