What applies in a specific country — its routes, its salary threshold, the employers hiring there — is on each country page.
United Kingdom — Register of Licensed Sponsors
The Home Office republishes the full register as a CSV most working days. We discover the current file from the gov.uk Content API rather than hardcoding a URL, so we are never serving a stale snapshot. We keep the A/B licence rating: a B-rating means the licence is on a Home Office action plan, which is a materially riskier bet for a candidate, so we show it rather than flattening it to “sponsor”.
Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial re-use with attribution.
United States — USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub
This gives us approval counts per employer, not just names. A company with 400 approvals in a year and one with a single approval are both technically sponsors; only one is a realistic target. We show you the number. USCIS publishes by federal fiscal year, so this data trails the present — we label the year on every US role instead of implying it is live.
Public-domain work of the United States government.
Netherlands — IND Public Register of Recognised Sponsors
In the Netherlands this is a hard legal gate: only a recognised sponsor may hire a highly skilled migrant, so absence from this register means a company cannot sponsor you however much it wants to. Each entry carries a Chamber of Commerce (KvK) number, which is an exact government-issued identifier — better than any name matching can achieve.
Denmark — SIRI certified companies
Denmark’s Agency for International Recruitment and Integration publishes the companies certified for its Fast-track Scheme, which lets them hire foreign workers on a shortened process. A company on this list has been vetted by the Danish state to recruit internationally. The Pay Limit Scheme, by contrast, needs no certified employer at all — any company can hire if the salary clears the threshold — so Danish roles are scored on both.
Source: nyidanmark.dk
Finland — Migri certified employers
The Finnish Immigration Service certifies employers for its fast-track residence permit process, and publishes the list. As with Denmark, Finland’s specialist route does not require a certified employer, so a Finnish role is scored on the salary threshold and, where it applies, the certification.
Source: migri.fi
Japan — and why we treat it differently
Japan publishes no register of companies permitted to sponsor. Eligibility for the Engineer / Specialist in Humanities and Highly Skilled Professional routes is assessed per applicant, and any solvent employer may act as the sponsor. There is therefore no registry fact to ingest, and any list claiming to be a verified Japanese sponsor list is someone’s guess.
For Japanese roles we score the posting itself — explicit visa-support language, Certificate of Eligibility mentions, English-language requirements — and label the result as posting-derived rather than government-verified.
Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Nordics and the Baltics — no register exists to check
None of these countries licenses employers, because none needs to: any employer may hire a skilled foreign worker if the role itself qualifies. The absence of a register makes these roles easier to get, not harder — so scoring them “no evidence” would be both wrong and the opposite of useful.
The verifiable fact here is the published route and its salary threshold — Spain’s Highly Qualified Professional permit under Ley 14/2013, Portugal’s D3 highly qualified activity visa, the German and Baltic EU Blue Card, and the Nordic pay-limit schemes. We show the threshold, mark it as indicative rather than confirmed where we have not re-checked the current year’s figure, and link to the official source so you can. A posting clearly paying below its country’s threshold is excluded for the same reason a “no sponsorship” posting is: that role cannot carry a visa however much the employer wants to hire you.
Track record, where no licence exists. If an employer holds a live sponsor licence in a country whose register we ingest — the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Denmark or Finland — that is a government-published fact showing the company demonstrably sponsors visas. We count it, name the country, and say plainly that it is not evidence about the country the job is in. It is deliberately worth less than a same-country licence and can never on its own reach our “Likely sponsors” band: willingness to sponsor travels between countries, legal permission does not.
Portugal also runs a Tech Visa scheme, faster than the D3, which does require the employer to be certified by IAPMEI. IAPMEI publishes that list of certified companies, and ingesting it would give Portugal genuine registry-grade evidence — it is on the list of things to add, and until then a Portuguese role is scored on the route and the track record alone.