From October 2026, right to work checks expand beyond employees. Whether you need to check a freelancer depends on how you engage them - especially if they are delivering work for your client.
From 1 October 2026, often yes if you are using them as a subcontractor to deliver work for a client. Not always if you hire a genuinely self-employed freelancer directly for your own business.
Until now, right to work checks in the UK were mainly an employer-and-employee thing. From 1 October 2026, the Home Office scheme expands to cover more working arrangements - including many freelancers engaged as workers, individual sub-contractors, or through online matching platforms.
Whether you need to do a check depends less on whether someone calls themselves a freelancer, and more on how the work is structured. Sole trader or limited company does not, by itself, take someone out of scope.
Civil penalties can reach £45,000 per person for a first breach, and £60,000 for a repeat offence within three years - and those figures are not scaled down for small businesses.
Here is how the three most common situations break down.
Likely yes - especially if they are helping you deliver client work.
If you bring someone in to support a project for your client, you are often acting as the middle of a chain. Under the expanded rules, engaging an individual sub-contractor can mean you need to confirm their right to work before they start.
That applies even if you are a solo freelancer with no employees. A £45k starting penalty is not something most freelancers could absorb, so if you regularly collaborate or subcontract, build a simple check-before-start process and think about how you store passport or identity documents securely.
If the other person is genuinely working for you as an independent business on a pure service contract for your own affairs (not as labour in a client delivery chain), the position can be different - but subcontracting on client work is the scenario to treat as in scope.
Yes - this is squarely in scope.
This is the classic agency / studio / production model: your client hires you, and you hire a freelancer to help deliver. You are the organisation contracting the individual as part of delivering work to a third party, so you are generally required to carry out a right to work check before they start.
Calling them a "contractor" or putting them on a freelance agreement does not remove the duty if the arrangement is an individual sub-contractor relationship in practice.
If you use a talent platform instead of contracting the freelancer directly, the platform may also have duties - but you should not assume you can fully outsource compliance and forget about it, especially where you sit in a supply chain.
Often no - if they are genuinely self-employed and contracting with you for a service.
Genuinely self-employed people who run their own business and contract with you directly for the supply of a service - a traditional business-to-business arrangement - remain outside the Right to Work Scheme. In that case, a check is not necessarily required under these rules.
But the label is not conclusive. If the reality looks more like a worker's contract or personal labour arrangement - rather than buying a service from someone operating an independent business - they may still fall in scope. Borderline cases can feel similar to employment-status or IR35 questions: personal service, substitution, commercial risk, and how integrated they are into your work all matter.
If in doubt, get advice for your specific arrangement rather than assuming "freelance invoice" equals "no check needed".
For more context on how this change landed, and what it means for freelancers and hirers more broadly, see our noodle on Right to Work checks extending to freelancers.
Our free weekly newsletter nudges on the things you need to know, with resources, guides and tools for freelancers.
