About UK Visa Guide

UK Visa Guide is an independent reference on the UK immigration system for people anywhere in the world who are thinking about visiting, studying, working, joining family, settling or becoming British. It exists because the official material is complete but hard to use: the Immigration Rules run to hundreds of pages, GOV.UK is organised around procedures rather than around a person's situation, and the rules change several times a year. This site reorganises that material around the questions people actually ask, keeps it current, and shows its sources.

What we publish

Route guides explain each visa on the same structure — who qualifies, what it costs, how long it lasts, what happens next — so that two routes can be read side by side. Comparisons put the routes people most often weigh against each other on one page, with the figures drawn from the same data as the guides. Nationality pages cover the handful of rules that depend on citizenship or residence history: visitor visa or ETA, the TB test, English evidence, youth mobility and ancestry schemes. Tools calculate government fees and continuous-residence absences from the published rules. The changes timeline records every rule change we track, with its source and effective date.

Sources, in order of authority

Every factual statement on this site is meant to trace to a primary source. In order: the Immigration Rules themselves (the consolidated text and its appendices); each Statement of Changes and its explanatory memorandum, which is where new rules and their commencement dates are announced; the Home Office fee regulations and published fee table; GOV.UK guidance pages and the caseworker guidance used by decision-makers; and the Home Office's quarterly immigration statistics. Commentary from law firms, universities and the press is read for early warning of changes, never used as the basis of a statement without checking the primary source. Each page lists the sources it relies on at the foot.

How pages are checked

Every guide carries two dates. Last verified is the date the page was read against the current Immigration Rules and GOV.UK guidance; Page updated is the date the text last changed. When a Statement of Changes is laid, we read the memorandum, add an entry to the changes timeline for each effective date, and note the coming change on the affected pages as "under current rules … from [date] …". On the effective date the pages are rewritten as current rules and re-verified. Figures that appear in more than one place — fees, salary thresholds, settlement periods — are held once and drawn into guides, comparisons and calculators from the same record, so a fee cannot be updated on one page and forgotten on another. Statements first written from memory are logged and checked off against a primary source before they are relied on; the log is part of the site's build, and pages whose verification date has aged are flagged for review.

What this site is not

This site is not affiliated with the UK government, any law firm, university, recruiter or visa agency, and no advertiser has any say in what is written. Nothing here is legal advice or immigration advice about an individual case. Giving immigration advice in the UK is a regulated activity, and this site does not offer eligibility assessments or route-finder quizzes for that reason: the tools calculate figures from published rules, and the guides describe the rules, but whether a route works for you depends on facts we do not have. For advice on your own application, use an adviser regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority (IAA) or a UK solicitor.

Corrections

If you find a statement that is out of date or wrong, please say so through the contact form, ideally with the GOV.UK page or rule paragraph you are relying on. Corrections are checked against the primary source, applied with a new "Page updated" date, and, where they concern a rule change, recorded on the changes timeline.

Who runs it

UK Visa Guide is independently run and does not name its editors. The site is funded by advertising, which is kept separate from the editorial content described above. For any enquiry, use the contact form.