Global Talent, counted

Britain’s Global Talent visa looks almost unrefusable at the finish line, and almost nothing like that at the start. Between April 2020 and April 2023, the six bodies that vet applicants for the route received 17,012 endorsement applications; by the Home Office’s own count, 12,243 of those applicants went on to hold a granted visa, a pass-through rate of 72%, according to the Home Office’s own evaluation of the scheme. The evaluation does not break out how much of that 28% gap belongs to the endorsing bodies’ own refusals versus the later Home Office visa decision. By the time a case reaches a caseworker for that visa decision, refusal has all but disappeared: the Home Office’s published statistics put the Global Talent grant rate at 99.2% across 2024 and 2025, and in the first quarter of 2026 it refused just five of 915 decisions on main applicants. The route has two gates, not one, and most of the filtering appears to happen at the one the public statistics rarely name.

Two gates, not one

Global Talent replaced the old Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent) visa in February 2020 and works in two stages. First, an applicant must be endorsed by one of six bodies — the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Arts Council England, or Tech Nation — depending on field. Only after endorsement can they apply to the Home Office for the visa itself. The Home Office’s own Wave 2 evaluation, covering the scheme’s first three years, counted 17,012 endorsement applications received and 12,243 visas ultimately granted across all six bodies combined: a 72% pass-through rate. The Home Office does not publish that 72% as a decision made by the endorsing bodies alone — the grant total also folds in a small separate route, the Prestigious Prize pathway, that skips endorsement entirely, and the evaluation does not isolate how much of the shortfall sits at endorsement refusal versus the Home Office decision that follows it. The second gate, the Home Office decision, is close to a formality on its own numbers — a 99.2% grant rate in 2024–2025, and 910 grants against five refusals for main applicants in the first quarter of 2026 alone, per Home Office figures reported in trade coverage of that quarter’s release — which makes it likely that most of the 72%/28% split originates at endorsement, though the Home Office’s own figures do not prove that split directly.

Who says yes depends on who’s asking

Aggregate figures hide sharp differences between the six endorsing bodies, and between applicant nationalities within at least one of them. The rates below are not perfectly like for like: the Home Office’s all-bodies figure tracks applications through to an eventual visa grant, while the academic-body and Arts Council England figures, drawn from secondary reporting, describe the endorsing bodies’ own endorsement decisions specifically — each is simply the most granular figure available for its group.

The spread inside Tech Nation’s digital-technology remit is the starkest single data point available: candidates from Singapore cleared endorsement at more than 70%, while candidates from Sri Lanka cleared it at around 20%, over the same 2019–2023 window. The published figures do not decompose why — field mix, employer backing, and the strength of the supporting evidence bundle all plausibly vary by market, and the data does not isolate nationality as a cause on its own. What the numbers do establish is that “endorsed” is not a uniform bar; it moves by tens of percentage points depending on which applicant pool is being measured.

The route is holding up while UK work migration is not

Global Talent’s volumes are small next to the Skilled Worker route, but they have proven comparatively resilient. In the first quarter of 2026, 871 people applied as main applicants, against 892 in the same quarter of 2025 — a 2.4% dip. Grants moved the other way: 910 main-applicant visas issued in Q1 2026 versus 894 a year earlier, with refusals falling from six to five. Including the 535 dependant applications and 545 dependant grants recorded in the quarter, the route processed 1,406 applications and issued 1,455 visas in total, a gap that reflects cases lodged in an earlier quarter being decided in this one, not a change in the underlying rules.

This is a data brief, not immigration advice. Endorsement criteria, evidence requirements, and processing routes change; anyone assessing eligibility for the Global Talent visa should consult current Home Office guidance or a qualified immigration adviser.

Methodology

Sources

Home Office, “Global Talent Visa Evaluation: Wave 2 report” (GOV.UK, published 28 March 2024), covering endorsement applications and grants across all six endorsing bodies, April 2020–April 2023 (17,012 applications; 12,243 granted) — gov.uk. Reiss Edwards immigration blog, “UK Global Talent Visa Success Rate” (accessed July 2026), citing Home Office immigration statistics for the 99.2% decision-stage rate (2024–2025), UKRI’s Global Mobility Evidence Report 2024 for the academic-body endorsement figures (15,000+ endorsements, ~89%, as of January 2025), Arts Council England data for the 2,622-application, 76% figure (2011–2023), and Tech Nation’s Global Talent Visa Report 2024 for the Singapore/Sri Lanka endorsement-rate comparison (2019–2023) — reissedwards.co.uk. TheHRDirector, “Global Talent Visa defying UK immigration slowdown as US uncertainty fueling demand” (2026), reporting Home Office quarterly entry-clearance figures for Q1 2026 and Q1 2025 (main applicants, grants, refusals, dependants) — thehrdirector.com. Davidson Morris immigration law firm, “Global Talent Visa UK 2026” (accessed July 2026), for the February 2020 launch date and predecessor route — davidsonmorris.com.

Scope limits

The Wave 2 report’s 17,012/12,243 figures measure endorsement applications received against final visas eventually granted — not a decision made by the endorsing bodies alone. The report does not publish a separate endorsement-only approval or refusal rate, and the 12,243 figure also folds in the small Prestigious Prize pathway, which bypasses endorsement entirely. The 72% headline should therefore be read as an application-to-grant pass-through rate, not a pure endorsement-gate decision rate — unlike the academic-body (~89%) and Arts Council England (76%) figures below, which describe the endorsing bodies’ own decisions specifically. The Wave 2 evaluation’s window covers the scheme’s first three years only (to April 2023); no equivalent all-bodies endorsement or grant total has been published by the Home Office for 2023–2026, so this brief cannot show a clean year-by-year trend and instead pairs the 2020–2023 window with the most recent available quarterly decision-stage snapshot (Q1 2026). The Arts Council England figure (2,622 applications, 76%, 2011–2023) spans both the current Global Talent route and its 2011–2020 predecessor, Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent); it is not Global Talent-only. The academic-body, Arts Council England, and Tech Nation figures are drawn from secondary reporting that cites Home Office and endorsing-body sources rather than from primary Home Office data tables reviewed directly for this brief; the underlying UKRI and Tech Nation reports were not independently retrieved in this pass. The Tech Nation nationality comparison covers digital-technology endorsements only and should not be read across to the other five endorsing bodies or generalised to visa outcomes as a whole.

Updates

This brief will be revised as new data is published. Corrections are handled under our corrections policy.