Insights
Methodology
Where the figures come from, how often they change, and what they do not say.
Sources
| Source | Publisher | What it is used for | Refresh |
|---|---|---|---|
| Register of licensed sponsors: workers | Home Office | Which organisations hold a sponsor licence, which routes it covers and its rating. Every count of sponsors on these pages comes from here. | Read on a schedule; the register itself is published roughly twice a week. |
| Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Occupations | Home Office | Whether an occupation is eligible for the Skilled Worker route and the going rate it carries. | Stored by effective date. New rules are inserted, never written over an old one. |
| Immigration Salary List and Temporary Shortage List | Home Office | The two shortage lists, their conditions, the nations each entry covers and its expiry date. | Stored by effective date, as above. |
| SOC 2020 | Office for National Statistics | The occupation codes, their titles, the work each covers and the entry routes into it. | Static between ONS revisions. |
| Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) | Office for National Statistics | UK and regional pay percentiles by occupation. The comparison figure in every salary article, and the basis of every estimate. | Annual, published about ten months after the survey period. |
| Companies House | Companies House | The company behind a sponsor name, and the SIC codes that give it a sector. | Matched per sponsor and rechecked periodically. |
| Employer applicant tracking boards | Employers, via Greenhouse, Ashby, Workday, Lever, Teamtailor, SmartRecruiters and Personio | Adverts read from employers' own careers pages. | Daily. |
| NHS Jobs, Reed and Adzuna | NHS Business Services Authority, Reed, Adzuna | Adverts read from three feeds. Each job page names the feed it came from and links to that feed's own application form. | Daily. |
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. No advert is taken from LinkedIn, Indeed or Glassdoor.
How often the figures change
Adverts are fetched nightly. Each article recomputes its figures at most once every 24 hours and states the time it last did so at the top of the page. Between recomputations the page serves the figures it last computed, so two readers on the same day see the same numbers and can quote them to each other.
The reference tables move on their own clocks. Going rates and eligibility change when the Immigration Rules change. The earnings survey is annual. The sponsor register is republished by the Home Office roughly twice a week.
Figures move in both directions. A count of open vacancies falls when adverts close, and the articles are a picture of one day rather than a trend.
What “estimated” means
Most UK adverts state a salary. Where one does not, this site shows an estimate rather than a blank, and labels it as an estimate everywhere it appears.
An estimate is built from the published earnings distribution for the occupation and the region — the same ASHE percentiles shown on the occupation page — adjusted for the seniority the job title indicates. It is never the employer’s figure, is never presented as one, and is never used to say a job would meet a salary threshold.
In the insight articles an estimate is not a stated salary. Any figure described as advertised or stated counts only adverts that give a number themselves.
What the figures exclude
An advert is counted when it is open and is not a fold-in of another advert already held. Closed adverts and duplicates are excluded from every count.
Occupation coding runs on adverts as they arrive and has not reached every advert on the site. Any figure grouped by occupation is a sample of that occupation, and each article prints the coded share so a reader can judge it.
Sector means the advertising organisation’s principal registered activity at Companies House, which describes the company, not the job. Sector figures cover only adverts matched to an organisation on the sponsor register.
Northern Ireland has no row in the regional earnings table used here, so adverts there resolve to the national figure rather than to a region.
Every share is printed with the count it is drawn from. Where a sample is smaller than five, the figure is left blank rather than rounded into something the sample cannot support.
Corrections and reuse
Corrections are welcome and are the fastest way to fix a wrong sponsor match or a mis-coded advert. The about page carries the address.
These figures may be quoted with attribution to Applyfit and the date shown on the article. Each article carries its canonical address in a “Cite this” line.
Information from public records, not immigration advice.