Right to work subcontractors: the self-employed you bring in can now count as your hire

The self-employed plasterer you bring in for a customer’s job can now count, for Right to Work purposes, as someone you employ. The Home Office’s Employer’s guide to right to work checks, in force from 1 October 2026, covers individual subcontractors and people on worker’s contracts, not just staff on your payroll.

The guide puts the check before the person starts, so right to work subcontractors checks are now part of taking them on. Being self-employed doesn’t take your plasterer out of it: what counts is whose contract the customer signed. That makes it one more thing to sort before a new pair of hands starts, along with the rest of your hiring and workforce planning.

Right to work checks follow the contract, not the payroll

In the guide’s terms, an individual subcontractor is someone who contracts with you to do the work, where the contract with the customer is yours and not theirs. You win the kitchen refit, you bring in a self-employed plasterer, and the plasterer has no contract with the customer: that’s the arrangement the guide describes.

This is only about Right to Work. The guide limits its wider definition of “employer” to the Right to Work Scheme, so it doesn’t settle whether you’re a contractor or subcontractor under CIS, and it doesn’t change the CIS deductions you make on subcontractor payments.

The other change is for labour you get through another business. If you hold a contract with a customer and contract with another employer to provide the workers for it, the guide says civil penalty liability can reach you, even though the workers’ contracts are with that employer. Arrangements that let a worker send a substitute in their place are on the same list. The logic is familiar from CIS penalties for a connected party’s non-compliance, under a different regime: you can answer for someone else in your chain.

Small Business UK reports two exclusions: work done outside the UK, and people running an independent business in their own name or through their own company who contract directly with customers. Those come from the report, so don’t stretch them to every self-employed trade you use.

Your defence is the check or the contract terms

Do the Home Office’s prescribed checks before someone starts and you have what the guide calls a “statutory excuse”: a defence against paying a civil penalty. The excuse protects you if a penalty comes; it isn’t permission to use someone who isn’t allowed to do the work.

Down a labour supply chain, the guide ties your defence to prescribed requirements for the contractual arrangements.

Small Business UK lists what those contracts should include: the supplier does the checks on its own people, nobody subcontracts further without written permission from the business at the top of the chain, the supplier’s compliance can be audited, and the supplier cooperates if the Home Office investigates illegal working. Those conditions come from the report, so treat them as a starting point rather than a full checklist.

The fine figures come from Small Business UK

Small Business UK says businesses in breach “will get” a £45,000 fine, or £60,000 for repeat offences. The Home Office guide puts it more carefully: an employer “may be liable” for a civil penalty, and a check done as prescribed is a defence against paying it. Small Business UK also quotes Naomi Goldshtein, a partner at Fragomen, saying serious cases may lead to criminal prosecution, with up to five years in prison and an unlimited fine.

For subcontractors already working with you, Small Business UK doesn’t set out a transition period or say whether existing engagements need a fresh check.

So before the next self-employed hand starts on a job where the customer’s contract is yours, check their right to work the way you would for staff. Where another business supplies the labour, read the supply contract too: the guide ties your defence to it.