Global Mobility Briefing: July 2026

If you’re responsible for getting people across borders compliantly, you’ll know the challenge isn’t a shortage of information. It’s the time it takes to separate the changes that genuinely affect your business from the ones that don’t.

That’s what our Global Mobility Briefing is for. Every month, we bring together some of the most critical regulatory developments in immigration, business travel and global mobility, then go a step further and explain what they mean for you. We reveal where the risks sit, which teams need to act, and what good compliance looks like under the new rules.

Think of it as a monthly briefing from a colleague who’s saved you heaps of time by already reading the fine print.

Without further ado, here’s what’s changed this month, and what you can do about it.

UK Right to Work: The Rules Are Widening Beyond Employees

From 1 October 2026, UK Right to Work checks will apply to a much wider pool than direct employees, including individual subcontractors, casual/zero-hours workers, and people sourced through gig-economy platforms.

Why this matters: Many of these arrangements have never been through a formal Right to Work check. If your business engages contractors, agency staff or platform-based workers, you may have gaps in your compliance today that could become live risk on 1st October. 

For organisations with a lean HR function or a heavy reliance on flexible labour, this is likely to be one of the more consequential UK compliance changes of the year, not because the rules themselves are complex, but because they impact parts of the business that have never had to think about immigration compliance before.

Legal Requirement

• Right to Work checks must be extended to cover worker contracts, individual subcontractors and certain platform-based arrangements from 1 October 2026.
• Civil penalties for illegal working apply where checks are missed.
• Checks must be applied consistently across comparable roles to avoid discrimination risk.

Recommended supply-chain control (not a legal requirement, but strongly advised)

Our analysis: The real risk is that responsibility for non-employee labour is often fragmented between HR, procurement, operations and third-party suppliers. Many organisations may not even have a complete record of who is working within their business, let alone who checked their status.

This fragmentation isn’t a compliance failure in itself. This is simply how most businesses have grown; HR owns the employee lifecycle; Procurement owns supplier contracts; Operations manages the people actually doing the work day to day. 

Each function has historically had good reason to assume Right to Work sits with someone else because, until now, it largely did. From 1st October, that assumption no longer holds.

The businesses that will struggle are not the ones with the most complex supply chains, they’re the ones who treat this as a policy update to circulate rather than a data problem to solve. A memo telling managers to “start checking contractors” is insufficient. Without a central record of who is engaged, on what basis, and by whom, organisations will find themselves relying on suppliers’ word rather than their own evidence – and this is precisely the gap the new regime is designed to close.

There’s also a sequencing risk worth naming. Many organisations will start with their largest or most visible supplier relationships (i.e. agency staff, major subcontractors) and assume smaller or informal arrangements can wait. In practice, it’s often the smaller, less-visible arrangements (a sole contractor engaged directly by an operations manager, a platform worker brought in for a short-term project) that fall through the cracks entirely, precisely because no single function owns them.

Getting ahead of this doesn’t require a compliance programme. It requires three things done properly: a genuine map of who is working across the business and under what arrangement; a clear, written decision on who is responsible for each category of check; and a central place to record that it’s been done. Organisations that have this in place by September will find 1 October uneventful. Those that don’t will be doing this exercise reactively, under time pressure, with a regulator watching.

Talk to us about a workforce and supplier mapping exercise. We’ll help you find the gaps before the regulator does.

UK Immigration Rules Change: 3rd August 2026

A new Statement of Changes (HC 259) takes effect on 3rd August, giving employers very little runway to react. Most of the Statement consolidates existing provisions, but three changes are substantive enough to take note of now.

The Electronic Travel Authorisation change is the one most likely to catch employers off guard. Travel desks and mobility teams have generally treated a suspended sentence as materially different from time served and, in most immigration contexts, that distinction still holds. From 3rd August, it doesn’t for ETA purposes: a suspended sentence of 12 months or more is enough to trigger refusal or cancellation. Anyone relying on an ETA for UK travel who has disclosed a relevant criminal history needs to be identified and reviewed before they book, not after they’re stopped at the border.

The immigration bail change is genuinely helpful, but easy to over-analyse. It removes one specific, automatic bar to approval for applicants who separately qualify under the Exception for Overstayers. It does not mean every sponsored worker on bail is now safe to proceed, and eligibility still needs to be assessed route by route.

The Graduate-route change is narrower in scope but worth a quick check: any employee on the Graduate route with a UK-born child has, for the first time, a clear route to bring that child’s status into line with their own.

Our analysis: With such a short window before commencement, the priority isn’t building a long-term process. The priority is a fast, targeted sweep this week to flag anyone affected by these three changes, so individual advice can be given before 3rd August rather than after something goes wrong.

Send us any cases involving criminal history, immigration bail, or Graduate-route employees with UK-born children. We’ll help you stay compliant.

Global Round-Up: What Changed in July

A quick scan of other jurisdictions where the rules moved this month:

🇦🇺 Australia: Skilled visa income thresholds and visa fees increased from 1 July.

🇿🇦 South Africa: Online traveller declarations now required before entry/exit, from 1 July.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia: 30% Saudization enforcement began for engineering roles; work permit grace period extended.

🇶🇦 Qatar: Labour Law amendments introduce a framework for freelance and part-time work.

🇨🇾 Cyprus: New medical documentation required for immigration permits from 1st September.

🇦🇲 Armenia: Digital residence permit system launching 1st November.

If you have people or operations in any of these markets, get in touch for a jurisdiction-specific compliance check.

From the Centuro Blog: The H-1B Lottery Just Changed

Both H-1B caps for FY2027 are now full and, for the first time, the lottery was wage-weighted. Consequently, senior roles got up to four entries where entry-level roles got one. Registrations dropped nearly 40% year-on-year, and there’s no second lottery this cycle, leaving a roughly ten-month gap before the next cap season opens.

If you have OPT employees facing a work authorisation deadline, or senior hires you can’t place through the standard route, our full article covers the alternatives,  including L-1, O-1 and treaty visas, plus nearshoring options via Canada, the UK and EOR arrangements.

Read the full article: The H-1B Lottery Just Changed: Here’s What Global Mobility Teams Need to Do Now

Alice Garnett

Alice Garnett

Alice is a London-based journalist, podcast producer, host, and marketer with 5+ years of experience working for cutting edge tech startups that strive to harness the power of technology for good.

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