Two things are squeezing home care staffing at the same time this year, and neither gets discussed with families directly. The overseas care worker visa route closed to new applicants in July 2025. The minimum a carer can legally be paid rose again in April 2026. Both are good reasons for the sector to exist on a more sustainable footing eventually. Right now, they’re a real test of which providers can keep a consistent team together — and that’s the question worth asking before you sign up, not after.
What changed
The Skilled Worker visa route for care workers and senior care workers stopped accepting new overseas applications on 22 July 2025. Anyone already in the UK on that visa can extend their stay or switch employer sponsorship until 22 July 2028, but no agency can recruit a new care worker from abroad through this route any more. For a sector that had leaned heavily on international recruitment to fill a persistent staffing gap, that’s not a small adjustment — it’s the removal of a pipeline a lot of providers were built around.
At the same time, the National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour from April 2026. Sounds straightforward until you look at where the sector was starting from: over half of care workers nationally were being paid below that new rate before the increase landed, meaning hundreds of thousands of roles needed an uplift in a single month. Most homecare providers can’t simply charge more to cover it — a large share of the work is paid through local authority contracts with rates set well in advance, and the sector has been running on margins of one to three percent for years. There isn’t much room to absorb a wage floor rising faster than the fees coming in.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it should
Neither of those facts, on their own, tells you anything about a specific provider. What they tell you is that the sector as a whole is under real pressure on recruitment and retention at exactly the same time, and that pressure shows up in one very practical way for families: whether the person who cares for your relative on Monday is the same person who turns up on Thursday, and still there in three months.
Agencies that were relying on overseas recruitment to plug rota gaps now have to solve that domestically, and agencies with the thinnest margins have the least room to pay competitively while they do it. Neither is automatically a red flag. But it’s exactly the kind of pressure that turns into rota churn if a provider hasn’t planned for it, and rota churn is the thing families notice fastest and complain about most.
What’s worth asking a provider
Turnover is the most direct question, and a provider that can’t answer it plainly is telling you something. Ask how long their current care staff have been with them — the raw headcount matters far less. Ask how they recruit now that overseas sponsorship isn’t an option for new hires — a provider with a genuine local recruitment and training pipeline should be able to describe it specifically, not gesture at it. And ask who’s actually responsible for staff welfare and supervision day to day, because that’s usually the difference between a rota that holds together and one that doesn’t.
How I’m approaching it
I’m building our staffing model around this reality rather than around what used to work before July 2025. Staff welfare, supervision, training, and rostering are my direct responsibility — not shared across several roles, but one person’s job, which is deliberate. Our recruitment and training approach is being built with continuity in mind from the outset, rather than something to fix once problems show up.
If you want to know what to ask any provider about staffing before you commit, or want to hear how we’re approaching it specifically, get in touch.
Tebby, Staff Manager, Daisy Homecare