Right to Work

How to check a Right to Work share code correctly

An online Right to Work check requires the worker's share code and date of birth, must be completed through the Home Office View and Prove service, and must be evidenced with a retained copy of the official response.

A Right to Work check either gives you a statutory excuse or it does not. There is no partial credit. An employer who carried out a check in good faith, using the wrong route or without keeping the right evidence, is in the same position as one who never checked at all.

This guide covers how the online share code check works, what evidence it produces, and where employers most often lose the excuse they thought they had.

How does a Right to Work share code check work?

You need the worker's share code and their date of birth, and the check must be completed through the Home Office online service — not by looking at anything the worker shows you.

The steps are:

1. The worker generates a share code through the official Home Office service and gives it to you, along with their date of birth.
2. You enter both into the employer-facing View and Prove service.
3. The service returns a profile page confirming the person's right to work, including any conditions or time limits.
4. You satisfy yourself that the photograph on that profile is the person presenting for work — in person, or over a live video call.
5. You retain the official profile page, securely and dated.

Step four is the one skipped most often, and step five is the one done wrongly most often.

Does a screenshot of a share code give me a statutory excuse?

Only if it is the official profile page produced by the Home Office service, retained securely and dated. A copy of the share code itself, or a photograph of the worker's own phone screen, is not sufficient.

This is worth being blunt about, because it is the most common evidential failure we see described. The share code is an input to the check. It is not evidence that a check happened. If your file contains a nine-character code and a note saying "checked", you have a record of an intention rather than a statutory excuse.

What you need on file is the response the Home Office service gave you, showing the person's status and the date you obtained it.

When can you still check physical documents?

It depends on the person's status. Holders of eVisas must be checked online, while some individuals can still be checked against prescribed documents.

The routes available are:

| Route | When it applies | |---|---| | Online check via share code | Where the person's status is held digitally, including eVisa holders | | Manual document check | Where the person holds prescribed physical documents that can still be relied on | | Employer Checking Service | Where status cannot be evidenced online or by document | | British or Irish citizen | Continuous right to work established through nationality | | EU Settlement Scheme status | Settled or pre-settled status, checked online |

Choosing the wrong route is not a technicality. Accepting a physical document from someone whose status must be checked online means you hold no statutory excuse, however carefully you filed the copy. If you are not certain which route applies, resolve that before the person starts work rather than afterwards.

When do you need the Employer Checking Service?

Use the Employer Checking Service where the person cannot evidence their status online or through prescribed documents — most commonly while an application, appeal or administrative review is outstanding.

The service returns a Positive Verification Notice, and that notice is what provides the statutory excuse. It is time-limited, so the date matters: a Positive Verification Notice establishes the excuse for a defined period, after which a further check is required.

Retain the notice itself, not a note that one was obtained.

Do you need to repeat a Right to Work check?

A follow-up check is required where the person's permission to work is time-limited. Where the original check established a continuous right to work, no scheduled follow-up is needed under current guidance.

That gives you two categories of worker, and they need different handling:

• Continuous right to work — established through nationality, settled status, or indefinite permission. Checked once, before employment begins.
• Time-limited right to work — the excuse lasts until the permission expires, and a further check is needed before that date.

The compliance risk sits entirely in the second category, because the obligation arrives months or years after the original check, when the person who did it has usually moved on. If you want to work out whether a specific worker needs a follow-up and when, the Right to Work recheck calculator applies the rules to their circumstances.

How does this interact with sponsor duties?

For sponsored workers, Right to Work sits inside your wider sponsor obligations, and a failure here reaches further than a civil penalty.

Two distinct duties overlap:

1. The Right to Work duty, which applies to every employer and every employee, and which protects against a civil penalty for illegal working.
2. The sponsor duty to hold the evidence required by Appendix D and to report relevant changes.

A sponsored worker whose permission expires without a follow-up check creates exposure under both. That is why Right to Work evidence should be filed against the compliance requirement it satisfies, with the check route, date, outcome and any follow-up date recorded together — rather than a document scan sitting in a personnel folder.

The practical failure points

Most lost statutory excuses come from a short list:

• Checking after the start date. The check has to be completed before employment begins.
• Retaining the share code instead of the official response.
• Skipping the identity step — not confirming the photograph matches the person.
• Using a manual document check for someone whose status must be verified online.
• No follow-up diary entry for time-limited permission.
• No undated records, making it impossible to show the check preceded employment.
• Inconsistent practice across sites, where each location does it slightly differently.

How Sponsoro handles Right to Work

Sponsoro routes each check based on the worker's circumstances, so the team is guided to the correct route rather than guessing, and records the route, date, outcome, evidence and any follow-up requirement as a single connected record.

Where permission is time-limited, the follow-up date is tracked and surfaced before it arrives — not discovered during an audit. And because the evidence is filed against the duty it supports, it appears in the right place in your Appendix D completeness position and in any audit pack you export.

See how Right to Work compliance works in Sponsoro, check a specific worker with the free recheck calculator, or read how Sponsoro covers every sponsor licence duty.