The AI Talent Britain Fought to Hire May Be Recalculating Its Future

By Sunny Sandhu, Senior Immigration Associate, AY&J Solicitors

The cause is a proposed overhaul the government calls earned settlement, announced in a November 2025 White Paper and consulted on until February 2026. It would move the UK away from settlement based on time served toward a model based on contribution. The headline change is blunt: the standard qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain would double from five years to ten for most routes, and rise to fifteen for Skilled Workers in roles below degree level.

The scale behind the reform explains its urgency. The Home Office’s own central estimate is that around 1.6 million people would settle in the UK between 2026 and 2030 under current rules, peaking at roughly 450,000 in a single year in 2028. It is that projected wave, driven largely by the record immigration of 2022 to 2024, that ministers say they want to slow. Independent analysis suggests more than 300,000 children already in the country could be left waiting longer as a result.

Two points cut through the noise. First, none of this is law yet: as of autumn 2026 the five-year route remains fully in force, no Statement of Changes has been laid before Parliament, and implementation is only targeted. Second, and more uncomfortably for employers, the government has confirmed the changes are intended to be retrospective. They would reach people already in the UK on a path to settlement, not only future arrivals. An engineer who arrived in 2022 expecting to apply in 2027 could find that timeline stretched, through no choice of their own.

That reference to pay is not incidental. The same proposal that creates the problem contains a lever to manage it. Earned settlement is designed to let higher earners buy the wait back: under the proposals, sustained income above 50,270 pounds could cut the qualifying period by up to five years, and income above 125,140 pounds by up to seven, potentially returning a worker to a five, or even three, year path. There is a quieter piece of good news for the sector too: the harshest fifteen-year baseline targets roles below degree level, and most AI, engineering and data science positions sit above it, placing them in the ten-year band with the clearest route to earning it down.

A further change catches technical teams in particular. The consultation proposes abolishing the standalone ten-year long residence route, which lets people settle by accumulating a decade of continuous lawful residence across different visa categories. That matters disproportionately in tech, where careers often zig-zag from a student visa to the graduate route to Skilled Worker sponsorship. Workers quietly relying on that accumulated time to settle could lose it, and many will not realise until they check.

“Retention and immigration have quietly become the same conversation,” Dubal added. “For a company whose entire advantage is its people, the settlement rules are no longer an HR footnote. They are part of whether the talent stays.”

The AI talent race is usually framed as a contest of salaries, equity and interesting problems. Increasingly it is also a contest of certainty. The rules have not changed yet. The anxiety already has. The firms still holding their engineers when the first catches up with the second will be the ones that saw it coming, understood exactly who it touched, and could tell their people something steadier than the headlines.

The proposals described here are subject to consultation and are not yet law; the five-year settlement route remains in force as of publication. This article is general information, not legal advice.