Hiring and Sponsoring Charitable organisation managers and directors (SOC Code 1135)

SOC Code 1135 covers senior managers and directors who lead a charity or voluntary organisation — setting strategy, overseeing funding and governance, and managing the organisation as a whole. It's a senior occupation code, and sponsorship needs to reflect genuine leadership responsibility rather than a general management job title.

‍

Which charity-sector roles don't belong under 1135

‍

Not every senior-sounding role in a charity fits this code. A head of fundraising, a finance director, or a services manager running a single programme typically sits under a different, more specific SOC code that reflects their functional specialism rather than whole-organisation leadership. 1135 is reserved for the person, or small team of people, with overall accountability for the charity's direction — usually a chief executive, executive director, or equivalent — not every job title that happens to include the word director. Charities sometimes use director titles generously across a senior team as a reward or status marker, which is exactly the pattern Home Office caseworkers are trained to look past. If the actual duties are functional rather than whole-organisation, a different code, and a different salary benchmark, is likely to be the correct one, and choosing 1135 to access a lower going rate elsewhere is a compliance risk, not a shortcut.

‍

Overlap with key personnel roles

‍

In a small or medium-sized charity, the person being sponsored under 1135 is often also one of the individuals who needs to hold a Level 1 User or other key personnel role on the sponsor licence itself. These are two separate things — sponsoring someone as an employee under Skilled Worker, and appointing them as a named key person responsible for the licence — and both need to be got right. Our guide to Level 1 users and key personnel requirements explains who can hold which role and the restrictions that apply.

‍

Genuine director-level duties, evidenced properly

‍

Caseworkers look for evidence that the role really carries strategic and governance responsibility — board reporting, budget authority, oversight of programmes or fundraising — rather than day-to-day charity administration dressed up with a director title. Keeping board minutes, organisational charts and a clear job description on file supports that case if it's ever challenged, and doing so through organised document storage beats trying to reconstruct the paper trail after the fact. One frequent audit finding is an operations or programme manager whose contract has been retitled director shortly before a sponsorship application, with no accompanying change to board reporting lines or budget sign-off authority — a caseworker can ask for board minutes showing when the role was created and what it reports on. A credible file usually shows the post existed, or was formally approved by the board, before recruitment started, rather than paperwork produced retrospectively to fit the visa application.

‍

Trustees, volunteers and the genuine vacancy test

‍

Because charities run on a mix of paid staff, trustees and volunteers, the genuine vacancy test — confirming the role is a real, needed position rather than one created mainly to support a visa application — deserves particular care here. A charity that has managed for years with an unpaid, volunteer-led leadership structure and then creates a new, salaried 1135 post shortly before sponsoring someone should expect that timeline to be scrutinised. A paper trail of the governance decision — the trustee board minutes approving the new post, the rationale for it, and the recruitment process that followed — supports the case far better than a job description on its own. That's a different question from a trustee sitting alongside a sponsored executive: as the FAQ below covers, a trustee role is normally unpaid, so the sponsored post has to be a genuinely separate, remunerated employment relationship, not a reclassification of an existing voluntary position.

‍

Salary in a sector that often pays less than the general threshold

‍

Charity sector salaries can sit below what similar management roles command elsewhere, which makes it worth checking the going rate for 1135 carefully against the general salary threshold before assuming a figure is acceptable — see our going rates guide. Sponsor duties around salary, genuineness and reporting changes are set out across the Home Office's sponsorship guidance collection for employers. Charities also lean more heavily than most sectors on benefits in kind — subsidised accommodation, pension contributions above the statutory minimum, or a car allowance — and it's worth knowing that most of these do not count towards the salary figure used for the going rate or general threshold comparison; only guaranteed basic gross pay generally qualifies. Part-time and job-share arrangements at leadership level, which some charities use deliberately to make senior roles more accessible, also need the salary pro-rated correctly against the full-time going rate rather than compared to it directly.

‍

Keeping the licence compliant once the person is in post

‍

Sponsorship duties don't end once the certificate of sponsorship is used. Charities restructure, merge with other organisations, or lose a major funder more often than most commercial sponsors, and any of these can change the sponsored role's duties, reporting line or funding source in ways that must be reported to the Home Office within the required timescale. Missing a reporting deadline because a small charity's HR function sits with one part-time administrator is a common and avoidable failure point — building renewal and reporting deadlines into automated alerts reduces reliance on one person's memory. It's also worth running a periodic mock audit against the licence, since a compliance visit doesn't wait for the organisation to feel ready, and the governance evidence that supports a 1135 role is usually exactly what a caseworker checks first.

‍

FAQs

‍

Can a trustee also be the sponsored worker under 1135?

‍

It depends on the governance structure — a trustee role is typically unpaid and voluntary, so combining it with a paid, sponsored executive director post needs careful separation of the two functions.

‍

Does a small charity need different evidence than a large one?

‍

The evidence expected is proportionate to the organisation, but the underlying test is the same: the sponsored role has to be a genuine, properly resourced management position, not a title assigned to make the case for sponsorship.

‍

What happens if the charity merges or restructures after sponsorship begins?

‍

The sponsor licence and the sponsored role both need reassessing — a merger can change the legal employer, the reporting structure, or even whether the original SOC code still fits the new post, and any material change needs reporting to the Home Office rather than being addressed only internally.

‍

Can the role be funded by a single restricted grant rather than core income?

‍

Funding source doesn't affect eligibility on its own, but a role wholly dependent on a short-term or restricted grant can raise questions about whether the position is genuinely permanent and properly resourced, so it helps to be able to show how the role continues if that specific funding ends.