ILR UK Eligibility Calculator

Applicants must not spend more than 180 days outside the UK in any 12-month period during the qualifying time.

HR teams managing expatriates should track absences carefully—our calculator flags potential risks to help avoid application rejections.

The calculator reads the visa route you select and applies the Home Office qualifying period for that route — 5 years for Skilled Worker, UK Ancestry, and Representative of an Overseas Business; 3 years for Global Talent and Innovator Founder; 10 years for the long residence route. It then layers in any "stackable" time from previous qualifying visas, excludes non-qualifying periods (e.g. Student visa time, unless the PhD exemption applies), and applies the expected earned-settlement credits (that were expected to come into force from April 2026 but got delayed), if the salary or English/volunteering inputs unlock them. The output is a specific earliest-application date, not a range.

Yes — the calculator uses the rolling 12-month window the Home Office uses on caseworker decisions, not the older calendar-year method some online tools still apply. Every absence you enter is tested against every possible 365-day window across the qualifying period, so a breach in month 14 will still be flagged in month 22 if it falls inside the same rolling year. For the 5-year routes, it also tracks the 540-day cumulative absence ceiling. If your records are messy, our team rebuilds absence logs from passport stamps and travel data as part of the ILR managed service.

Both. Select the long residence route at the visa input step and the calculator switches to the 10-year continuous-residence test, including the stricter break rules (no single absence over 184 days, no gaps in valid leave including 3C leave coverage). For mixed-visa histories — for example, Student → Skilled Worker → dependant — the long residence path is usually the correct one to run, and the calculator will flag if a previous switch reset the clock.

Under earned settlement rules (that were expected to come into force from April 2026 but got delayed), your employee's qualifying period can drop from the 10-year baseline to 5 years (£50,270+) or 3 years (£125,140+), and the income tier you select feeds directly into that reduction. Employer size separately affects the Immigration Skills Charge in the cost output, but it doesn't change the eligibility date. If the result feels too good to be true, double-check the salary input — fast-track tiers must be sustained across the qualifying period, not just hit in the final year.

Yes. Once the calculation completes, you can export a one-page PDF summary covering the qualifying route applied, earliest application date, absence compliance status, total Home Office fees (currently £3,226 per applicant plus IHS and test costs), and any flagged risks — formatted for circulation to Finance, Legal, or the employee directly. We'll ask for a work email so we can send a copy to your inbox and follow up if you want a full eligibility audit on the case.