UK Global Business Mobility (GBM) Visa Explained

A quick but important note before anything else: this is the first time this site has covered temporary intra-company or business-transfer UK immigration. Every other UK route covered here so far has either been a points-based or settlement-track work route — Skilled Worker, Global Talent, Innovator Founder, High Potential Individual, Scale-up, and Health and Care Worker — or a non-work route such as the Graduate Route, Youth Mobility Scheme, the Ancestry visa, or the family/spouse financial requirement. Global Business Mobility (GBM) sits apart from both of those groups: it is sponsored work immigration, but deliberately temporary in design, and independent sources are consistent that none of its five sub-routes lead directly to Indefinite Leave to Remain. The salary figures in this article were not confirmed by a direct gov.uk fetch, which was not reachable while researching this piece — they come from multiple independent immigration-law sources cross-checked against each other, and should be reconfirmed on gov.uk before being quoted to a client.

For a consultancy that has mostly advised on points-based or settlement-track UK cases, GBM is worth understanding as its own category rather than a variant of Skilled Worker. The eligibility mechanics, the sponsor obligations, and — critically — the end state a client can expect are all structurally different, and treating a GBM case like a Skilled Worker case with a different label risks giving a client the wrong expectations about where their UK stay is actually heading.

What Global Business Mobility is, and what it replaced

Global Business Mobility is generally described, across current guidance and every independent source checked for this article, as an umbrella immigration category rather than a single visa. It groups five separately named, separately sponsored routes that each let an overseas business bring specific categories of staff into the UK on a temporary basis. Multiple independent sources consistently report that GBM opened to new applicants on 11 April 2022, the same date the previous Intra-Company Transfer (ICT) route closed to new applicants, with the Senior or Specialist Worker route generally described as its closest successor. Anyone who already held leave under the old ICT categories was generally reported as able to continue under transitional arrangements, or to switch into the equivalent GBM route — the current position on any remaining legacy cases should be confirmed directly against gov.uk rather than assumed from this summary.

The five routes, one at a time

Senior or Specialist Worker is generally reported as the route for an established overseas business transferring an existing senior manager or specialist employee into a linked UK entity — the direct successor to the old Intra-Company Transfer route, and the GBM route most consultancies are likely to encounter most often. The worker generally needs to have already worked for a linked overseas entity for a minimum period, commonly reported as twelve months, before the transfer.

Graduate Trainee is generally reported as narrower and more structured: it covers an employee on a recognised graduate training programme with an overseas business, moving temporarily into a UK role as part of that programme, generally subject to its own reported cap on the number of Graduate Trainee places a given sponsor can use in a year and a shorter maximum stay than Senior or Specialist Worker.

UK Expansion Worker is generally reported as built for the opposite situation from Senior or Specialist Worker — it is for a senior employee coming to set up a new UK branch or subsidiary of an overseas business that has not yet started trading in the UK, rather than transferring into an already-established UK entity.

Service Supplier is generally reported as covering two overlapping groups: an employee of an overseas contractual service supplier, or a self-employed independent professional based outside the UK, each coming to deliver a contracted service that falls under a relevant UK international trade agreement. Independent sources consistently describe this route as working differently from the other four, without a fixed minimum salary threshold, since eligibility is generally built around the underlying service contract rather than an employment salary.

Secondment Worker is generally reported as covering an employee seconded to the UK by their overseas employer to work on a high-value contract between that employer and a UK sponsor, with eligibility generally turning on the reported value of the underlying contract rather than a personal salary figure — sources commonly describe a high minimum contract value, in the tens of millions of pounds, though the exact current figure and its structure should be confirmed on gov.uk before being relied on.

Salary and contract-value thresholds: hedge every figure here

This is the section where confidence should be lowest and verification highest. Multiple independent immigration-law and relocation sources, cross-checked against each other, consistently report that the general GBM salary thresholds increased effective from 22 July 2025 — the same date the general Skilled Worker threshold changed, discussed in our companion piece on the Skilled Worker salary threshold. For the Senior or Specialist Worker and UK Expansion Worker routes, sources consistently report a minimum of £52,500 per year, or the going rate for the sponsored occupation, whichever is higher, up from an earlier figure reported closer to £48,500. For Graduate Trainee, sources report a materially lower figure around £27,300 per year, or 70% of the going rate, whichever is higher. Service Supplier is reported as carrying no fixed minimum salary at all, and Secondment Worker eligibility is reported as resting on contract value rather than personal salary. None of these figures were independently confirmed against a direct gov.uk fetch during research for this article, and every one of them has already been revised at least once in the last year or so — treat them as reported estimates due for reconfirmation, not as fixed numbers safe to quote to a client without checking.

Why none of these routes lead to settlement

Independent sources are consistent that Global Business Mobility routes are temporary by design, and that time spent on any of the five routes generally does not, by itself, count toward the continuous residence normally required for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR). Several sources additionally describe an overall cap on cumulative time across the GBM and legacy Intra-Company routes combined, commonly reported as five years within any six-year rolling period. This is a genuinely different structure from the points-based and settlement-track routes already covered on this site — our UK ILR settlement explainer covers the continuous-residence test that routes like Skilled Worker are generally built to feed into, and a GBM worker who wants that outcome generally needs to separately qualify for, and switch into, a different visa category rather than assuming GBM leads there on its own.

Sponsorship and the overseas-employment link

GBM routes are generally reported as requiring the UK entity to hold a sponsor licence covering the specific route being used, in much the same structural sense our companion piece on the Skilled Worker sponsor licence describes for that route — the employer holds the licence, not the individual worker. Several GBM routes go a step further and require a demonstrated link to an overseas business, with the worker generally needing to have already been employed by that linked overseas entity for a minimum period before the UK assignment begins. That prior overseas-employment requirement is a meaningful eligibility gate that a standard Skilled Worker case does not generally carry, and it is worth confirming early, since a client who has not yet reached the required period of overseas service may simply not be eligible yet, regardless of salary.

What this means for advising a client considering GBM

Because GBM covers five routes with different eligibility mechanisms rather than one route with one test, the first practical question is generally which of the five actually fits the client's situation — an existing UK entity transferring in a specialist looks nothing like an overseas business setting up its first UK branch, even though both might get described loosely as "the company visa." Once the right route is identified, the settlement question deserves its own conversation: a client expecting GBM to lead toward permanent UK residence, the way a Skilled Worker case generally can, needs to understand early that it generally does not, so that any longer-term plan is built around a deliberate route switch rather than an assumption. Our UK visa consultant software page covers how VisaBOS helps a consultancy track sponsored UK cases — including route-specific eligibility and sponsor detail — on one connected system, though it is a case-management tool and not a source of immigration law, so it does not replace confirming current requirements with gov.uk or a registered immigration adviser.

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