A right to work check costs £1.79. The bill for running millions of them lands on people the law will not call employees

Start with the prices, because they are published and they are small. A right to work check costs £1.79 through the Home Office online service, £2.44 if somebody carries it out by hand, and £2.82 through a certified identity provider. Those are the central estimates in the Home Office impact assessment of 7 May 2025.

Small numbers, multiplied by a large one. The same assessment expects section 48 to reach a central estimate of 3.75 million additional working arrangements from today, with a range running from 2.5 million to 5 million.

Over ten years the assessment puts the cost to business at £90 million on the central estimate, with a low of £12 million and a high of £337 million. It puts £14 million on households.

That second figure is the one to look at, and it is worth asking what a household is doing in a compliance calculation at all.

The answer is that not everyone in scope is working for a company. Some of them are working for you. If you engage a cleaner, a gardener, a builder or a carer directly rather than through a firm, and the arrangement is one where they do the work personally and you are not simply their client or customer, the duty to check may be yours. The assessment has put a number on that and the number is £14 million.

On the business side, the question is where the £90 million settles. A platform pays for a check. It can absorb the cost, add it to the fee the customer pays, or recover it from the person being checked. The third is the one to watch, because the people being checked are, on the platforms' own account, self employed, and a cost that falls on a self employed person comes out of taxed income in a way an employer's costs do not. This paper reported on 21 September that around one in ten workers is already buying AI tools out of their own pocket for a structurally identical reason: the cost sits with whoever the contract says is running a business.

None of the three delivery platforms publishes what an onboarding check costs it, and none has said whether a courier pays anything towards one. We have asked all three and will print the answers.

A word on what the assessment does not contain. It gives no figure for illegal working prevented and no figure for people deterred, and it states that it was not possible to monetise the benefits of the measure. The net present social value on the central estimate is minus £103 million. A measure can be worth doing for reasons that never appear in a spreadsheet. But when the only quantified column is the cost column, the accurate description is that Britain is spending a known sum to buy something nobody has sized.

One last figure, for anyone who has to comply. The assessment prices familiarisation at £31.82 per business, which it describes as between 35 and 171 minutes of reading.

This is general information about a change in the law, not financial, legal or tax advice.

WHY IT MATTERS HERE

If you pay somebody directly to work in or on your home, and they do that work personally rather than sending whoever is free, you may now be the person responsible for checking they are allowed to work. The government has costed that duty at £14 million across households and has not said how many households it thinks are in it.