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SOC 6213 covers air travel assistants — cabin crew and airline ground-service staff who handle boarding, safety briefings, in-flight service and disembarkation. Whether a given vacancy can actually be sponsored depends on the role's duties and salary matching the current Skilled Worker requirements for this code.
Not every job that sounds like 'cabin crew' clears the bar. The Skilled Worker route requires roles to sit at the right skill level and meet the applicable going rate for the SOC code, and airlines should check the current entry against the eligible occupations and codes list before assigning a Certificate of Sponsorship, since thresholds and eligibility are reviewed periodically rather than fixed indefinitely.
Rostered pay and the salary floor
Cabin crew are often paid a mix of basic salary, flight pay and allowances. Sponsors need to be able to show the guaranteed, contracted gross salary meets the relevant threshold — allowances that depend on hours actually flown generally cannot be counted toward the salary floor in the same way as fixed basic pay. Getting this wrong is a common reason Certificates of Sponsorship get queried or refused.
The same caution applies to per diem payments, hotel allowances on layovers, and productivity bonuses tied to sectors flown — these are typically excluded from the guaranteed salary calculation because they vary month to month and aren't contractually certain. Airlines that build their published cabin crew pay scales around a low basic-plus-flight-pay structure, which is common in the industry, may find that the basic alone sits below the going rate even though total average earnings look comfortably above it. It's worth running the sponsorship salary check against the contracted basic before an offer goes out, not after the Certificate of Sponsorship has already been assigned.
Ground service roles and cabin crew are not interchangeable
SOC 6213 is broad enough to capture some airport-based passenger service roles alongside in-flight cabin crew, but the duties, working pattern and evidence base for each differ. Ground-based staff — check-in, boarding gate and passenger assistance roles — work from a fixed airport location with conventional shift patterns, while cabin crew duties are defined by flight rosters, minimum rest periods and base airport assignment under CAA flight time limitation rules. A Certificate of Sponsorship should describe which of these the person actually does; a generic 'air travel assistant' description that could describe either role is weaker evidence if a caseworker or compliance officer asks for detail on day-to-day duties.
Right to work checks for crew based in the UK
Where crew are based at a UK airport, standard right to work verification still applies before the first day of work, using share codes or the correct document route as set out in the right to work checking guide. Airlines juggling large rosters and shift patterns benefit from tracking check dates and licence expiry alongside crew rostering rather than as a separate manual process.
Crew who are based overseas but occasionally operate flights that land in the UK — a short layover, a turnaround service, or a route that touches a UK airport without the individual being UK-based — don't need to be sponsored under a UK licence at all, since sponsorship attaches to roles based and worked in the UK, not to flights that happen to pass through UK airspace or airports. The distinction that matters is home base, not flight routing.
Getting the SOC code right
Because 6213 spans a range of seniority — from junior cabin crew to pursers with supervisory duties — sponsors should make sure the job description assigned on the Certificate of Sponsorship genuinely reflects the duties performed, not a generic template description. Under sponsor duties guidance, employers must be able to evidence that the role and pay match what was recorded at the point of sponsorship, and mismatches are a known trigger for a Home Office compliance visit. See the sponsor duties guidance for the full record-keeping expectation.
Reporting when a crew member's base or hours change
Aviation rosters change more often than most sponsored roles: a crew member might move home base, drop from full-time to part-time flying hours, or transfer from a short-haul to a long-haul fleet with a different pay structure. Any of these can be a reportable change under the sponsor's duties, since the Certificate of Sponsorship records a specific role, base and salary rather than a general 'cabin crew' status. Airlines with large crew bases and frequent internal transfers are better served by building base and fleet changes into the same tracking process used for licence renewals and right to work checks — see smart alerts and reminders — than by relying on individual line managers to flag changes manually.
Recruiting cabin crew at scale
Airlines often recruit cabin crew in large intakes ahead of seasonal peaks, which puts pressure on genuine vacancy evidence at volume — recruitment records, assessment day outcomes and offer letters need to exist for each hire, not just for the cohort as a whole. Where a bulk recruitment campaign mixes settled and sponsored workers on the same intake, the paperwork trail for the sponsored portion still needs to stand on its own if it's ever reviewed.
FAQs
Can cabin crew based outside the UK be sponsored under a UK sponsor licence? Generally no — Skilled Worker sponsorship is for roles actually based and worked in the UK; crew permanently based overseas fall outside the route even if employed by a UK-registered airline.
Does the going rate change for part-year or seasonal cabin crew contracts? The going rate is calculated on a full-time equivalent basis, so seasonal or reduced-hours contracts must still meet the pro-rated threshold rather than a discounted seasonal rate.
What happens if a sponsored crew member is grounded for medical or safety reasons? A period off flying duties for CAA medical certification issues doesn't in itself end sponsorship, but if it extends into an unpaid absence or a change to contracted hours, that's the kind of change a sponsor is expected to report rather than wait out.
Does moving a sponsored crew member to a different home base within the UK need reporting? Yes — a change of base can affect the applicable going rate and the accuracy of the role recorded on the Certificate of Sponsorship, so it should be reviewed and reported rather than treated as a routine internal transfer.
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