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The visa route closed. The vacancies did not.

The care worker vacancy you are filling this month looks like the one you filled last year, and it will be filled by someone already living in the UK who is leaving another employer to take it. Adult social care recruitment in England has moved almost entirely onto domestic moves, and every one of those hires arrives needing a fresh right to work check and a fresh Schedule 3 file.

Adult social care recruitment now runs on domestic moves

Care workers and senior care workers were removed from the Health and Care Worker visa route for new overseas recruits in July 2025.

Skills for Care's size and structure report, published 24 June 2026 and covering England, shows the effect. Health and Care Worker visa recruitment into direct care roles fell from around 10,000 in 2024/25 to around 1,500 in 2025/26.

Over the same twelve months the workforce grew by 22,000 filled posts, taking the total to 1.59 million of 1.69 million posts overall.

The posts are being filled by people already living in the UK and moving from one employer to another. A recruit who transfers from a neighbouring provider still needs a full right to work check and a full Schedule 3 file. Where the new role sits in a different workforce category, a DBS Update Service status check is not available and a new application is needed.

Home care ran a vacancy rate more than twice residential care in 2024/25

The headline vacancy rate for adult social care in England fell to 6.2% in 2025/26, around 96,000 vacant posts, which Skills for Care describes as the lowest rate since 2015/16. Taken alone that reads as a sector under less pressure than for a decade.

The split underneath it is where the operational problem sits. In 2024/25, domiciliary care ran a vacancy rate of 9.7% against 4.4% in residential care. The 9.7% against 4.4% split comes from the 2024/25 edition, which is the most recent service-type breakdown available.

Home care also carries the most insecure engagement: 35% of the domiciliary care workforce was on a zero-hours contract in 2024/25, rising to 42% of care workers in domiciliary care.

Section 48 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 comes into force on 1 October 2026 and extends right to work checking beyond contracts of employment. A zero-hours contract is often itself a contract of employment, and those workers are already in scope for right to work checks. Nothing changes for them on 1 October. An arrangement falls inside the section 14A definition, on the face of the legislation, where it is not a contract of employment, where the individual undertakes the work personally, and where the provider is not a client or customer of a business carried on by that individual. Genuine self-employment is carved out. Domiciliary care is where those arrangements concentrate, so take your own advice on which of yours are caught.

The companion piece in this series, on what changes for bank and agency care staff on 1 October, sets out the scope and the boundaries. Our guide to onboarding agency staff safely covers the checks that sit behind a placement.

In the same job title and the same year, turnover was 42.2% and 14.4%

Skills for Care's state of the sector report, published on 15 October 2025 with 2024/25 data, breaks independent sector care worker turnover down by five positive employment factors: adequate pay, a permanent contract, training, a relevant qualification, and full-time work.

Care workers with none of the five had a turnover rate of 42.2%. Care workers with all five had a turnover rate of 14.4%. That is a spread of nearly 28 percentage points inside the same job title and the same year.

Turnover ran at 30.6% for care workers on zero-hours contracts, 38.0% for those under 25, and 34.0% for those who had been in the role less than a year.

These are associations between employment characteristics and turnover, and they are not evidence of cause. Pay and contract type correlate with employer type and local labour market, and none of that is controlled for.

Read cautiously, all five factors are terms of engagement set by the employer. With around 96,000 vacant posts in 2025/26 and no overseas route into new direct care roles, that is where the variation between a 42.2% and a 14.4% turnover rate is recorded.

A 34.0% turnover rate among care workers with under a year in role puts the risk at the front of the employment relationship.

Two of the five positive factors, training and a relevant qualification, are investment in the person, and a fast onboarding process delivers neither. Pay, contract type and hours are board decisions. None of the five is set by the onboarding process.

What onboarding does set is the first fortnight, and the first fortnight is the new starter's evidence of how the organisation is run. From their side of it, this is what a slow start feels like: an offer accepted three weeks ago, a start date that keeps moving, a third request for the same proof of address because the first two went to different inboxes, and a rota manager who cannot say which Monday they begin. Someone in that position, on no guaranteed hours and with a competitor branch two miles away, has little holding them. A confirmed start date and a working login on day one cost nothing and are the whole of the first impression.

DBS is no longer the main delay in most adult social care hires

The Disclosure and Barring Service published its annual report and accounts for 2025-26 on 16 July 2026. Enhanced checks took an average of 12.4 days. DBS missed its own service standard of 80% of enhanced checks within 14 days, achieving 75%.

The distribution matters more than the average. Around 65% of enhanced checks completed without referral to local police forces, and 98.5% of those finished within 10 days. The long tail sits in the 35% that require police action.

For roughly two-thirds of your hires, then, the criminal record check is back inside ten days. If your own offer-to-first-shift time is materially longer than the check, the remaining time is going on reference chasing, document collection, employment history gaps and internal sign-off, all of it administrative.

410,000 more posts needed by 2040, and no overseas route to them

The same Skills for Care report of 24 June 2026 projects that adult social care in England will need 410,000 additional posts by 2040, a 24% increase on the 1.69 million posts today.

Unless the visa position changes, those posts will be filled from the domestic labour market, in competition with every other employer in it.

How Credentially shortens adult social care onboarding

Credentially is a healthcare onboarding and compliance platform. The part of the problem it addresses is the administrative delay above.

Onboarding workflows are configurable, so a care worker completes identity, right to work, references and employment history in one place. Primary source verification runs automatically, with integrations to DBS and, for nursing staff, the NMC. Each result is held as a verified record carrying its source and date. Expiry dates are then monitored in real time, so the record a registered manager produces for Regulation 19 and Schedule 3 is current on the day it is asked for.

Credentially reduces onboarding from 60 days to as little as five. That covers the steps the platform manages, not end-to-end elapsed time, because an enhanced DBS check runs in parallel on its own timetable and averaged 12.4 days in 2025-26.

Take your last ten care worker starters and measure the days from offer accepted to first shift, then subtract the DBS turnaround. What is left is yours.

If you are working out what your onboarding records need to produce, our CQC inspection preparation checklist for workforce compliance sets out what inspectors ask for.

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