Right to Work checks change on 1st October: Are you audit-ready or exposed?
From Thursday 1st October 2026, Right to Work checks expand to cover more working arrangements and more of your supply chain, for relevant engagements starting on or after that date.
With penalties of up to £60,000 per illegal worker, organisations need to show that every required check has been done correctly, and that the evidence is ready when asked for it.
What changes to Right to Work checks on 1st October?
Until now, Right to Work checks have mainly focused on employees.
From 1st October 2026, the rules extend to more working arrangements, including people engaged:
- Under a worker's contract
- As individual subcontractors
- Through certain online matching services
The new rules can also extend civil penalty liability further along certain contractual chains, including some arrangements involving substitution.
Right to Work compliance now means looking beyond your own payroll.
Why compliance fails.
A Right to Work check gets missed. A document gets accepted without the right evidence. A worker's permission expires. A substitute turns up without the right checks.
By the time someone spots the gap, the risk is already in your business. And when workers come from different agencies, across different services, keeping track gets harder.
- Who's been checked?
- Who actually carried out the check?
- When was it checked?
- Is their permission still valid?
- Can you prove it?
- Which documents need to be reviewed?
If you're managing compliance across multiple services on manual spreadsheets and different systems, there's no single, clear view. Records are scattered, and piecing together the evidence is hard to verify and easy to miss.
Every worker, every time.
From 1st October, more people fall within the Right to Work scheme. Processes need to work across your whole workforce. Employees. Workers. Individual subcontractors. Agency-supplied workers.
You need a consistent way to check identity, verify the right to work and keep the evidence.
One platform. Complete visibility.
Care Hires brings agency staffing and workforce compliance together in one place. See who’s been checked, who did the check, what's still valid and what needs attention.
Right to Work sits alongside the other checks your workers need. Verified against the Home Office, with status tracked for all sponsored workers. Care Hires gives you full visibility of the documents you need to review for workers' right to work. Giving you one clear view of Right to Work compliance.
100% compliance. 0% left to chance.
We vet: Every worker. Every document. Every agency.
We monitor: Expiries, changes, patterns, all in real-time.
We maintain: Records stored centrally, ready for inspection.
We decide: When something needs a human decision, a human makes it.
More visibility. More control.
Speak to the Care Hires team today to check if your Right to Work process is audit-ready for the new changes.
Get audit-ready.