From 1 October 2026, the UK’s right to work checking regime stops being an “employees only” concern. New rules confirmed by the Home Office extend statutory right to work checks to individual contractors, agency workers, sub-contractors and gig-economy or platform-based workers — anyone supplying labour to your business, whether or not you have a direct contract with them. If your business relies on freelancers, subcontractors, or workers supplied through an agency, this is worth acting on now rather than in September.

The change implements provisions from the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, and it’s landing hardest on sectors that lean on flexible labour: construction, hospitality, courier and delivery work, warehousing, beauty and personal care. But the underlying principle applies far wider — any UK SME that uses freelance developers, contract bookkeepers, agency-supplied warehouse staff, or platform workers is now in scope.

Why “no direct contract” no longer means “not my problem”

The most significant part of this change is where liability sits. Previously, right to work checks were mainly your problem if you employed someone directly. Under the new regime, civil penalty liability moves up the labour supply chain — meaning a business can be exposed even when it has no direct contract with the individual actually doing the work, because a sub-contractor or agency further down the chain got it wrong. Penalties for a first breach can reach £45,000 per illegal worker, and unlike a simple compliance box-tick, this one has real teeth attached.

Practically, that means it’s not enough to trust that “the agency handles this.” If you engage contractors through intermediaries, you need to know — and be able to evidence — that right to work checks are actually happening somewhere in that chain, not just assumed to be happening.

What to check before 1 October

Start with a straightforward audit: list every contractor, freelancer, agency worker and platform-supplied worker currently doing work for your business, and note who is contractually responsible for verifying their right to work. Where that responsibility sits with an agency or intermediary, get written confirmation of their process, not just a verbal assurance — you may need to show that evidence if a penalty case ever arises.

For any contracts and engagement letters that don’t currently reference right to work verification responsibilities, now is the moment to update the wording rather than wait until October and find gaps. Smallprint provides UK legal document templates that can be adapted for exactly this kind of contract update, which is a much cheaper fix than a retrospective one. It’s also worth building a simple record-keeping habit now: dated copies of verification checks, agency confirmations, and any correspondence about compliance responsibilities, kept somewhere they can actually be retrieved months or years later rather than scattered across email threads — the kind of ongoing documentation discipline that becomes valuable well beyond this one deadline.

Statutory codes of practice for employers accompanying the new regulations are being published ahead of the October start date, so it’s worth checking gov.uk directly for the specific verification steps once they’re confirmed, rather than relying solely on secondary summaries.

Don’t forget the renewal cases already in your system

It’s not just new engagements that need attention. If you already have contractors or agency workers with time-limited right to work status — a visa with an expiry date, for instance — you should already have a system for tracking when those need re-checking. The new rules are a good prompt to confirm that system actually works in practice, rather than assuming it does because nobody has flagged a problem yet. A missed renewal on an existing arrangement carries exactly the same penalty exposure as a missed check on a brand new one, and it’s the kind of gap that’s easy to overlook precisely because the relationship already feels “sorted.”

The takeaway

If your business’s labour supply includes anyone who isn’t a direct employee — contractor, freelancer, agency worker, or platform-supplied — treat 1 October 2026 as your deadline too, not just your suppliers’. The businesses that come through this cleanly will be the ones that mapped their labour chain and tightened contract wording in August, not the ones scrambling to explain a gap in October.