The three things you are actually paying for
A UK visa application has three separate costs, and they are paid to two different places. Confusing them is the single most common budgeting mistake we see.
The application fee goes to the Home Office and is set by route. It differs depending on whether you apply from inside or outside the UK, and for some routes the in-country fee is the higher of the two.
The Immigration Health Surcharge also goes to the Home Office. It is charged per person, per year of the visa granted, and it is paid up front as part of the application rather than spread across the visa. It is currently £1,035 a year for most adult applicants, with a reduced rate for students and under-18s. If the visa is granted for three years, you pay three years of surcharge before you travel.
Our fee is a separate thing entirely and is paid to us, not the Home Office. It covers the legal work: assessing eligibility, preparing the application and the evidence, and dealing with the Home Office. It is published on our immigration pages, quoted in writing before you instruct us, and it is not included in anything this calculator shows you.
Why the surcharge is usually the biggest number
People budget for the fee and are surprised by the surcharge, because the surcharge scales in two directions at once. It multiplies by the number of years and by the number of people.
Take a Skilled Worker applying from overseas with a partner and two children, for a three-year visa. Four people, three years each, is twelve chargeable years of surcharge. At the current adult rate that is over £12,000 in surcharge alone — several times the application fees for the same family.
That is not a reason not to apply. It is a reason to know the figure at the start rather than three weeks in, and to know it before you make commitments that depend on it. If the total is a problem, there are real decisions to make about the length of visa applied for and the order in which family members come, and those decisions are much easier to make early.
Where the calculator will be roughly right, and where it will not
The calculator is a budgeting tool. It is deliberately built to be honest about its own limits rather than to produce a confident-looking number.
It will be close for a straightforward application on one of the six main routes at the standard fee, with the standard surcharge rate.
It will be wrong, and sometimes substantially wrong, if any of the following apply: you qualify for a surcharge discount or exemption; you are applying on a route with a shortage or discounted fee; your visa is granted for a different length than the one you selected; there are separate biometric, appointment centre or document courier charges in your country; or you use a service the Home Office prices separately, such as a super priority appointment on a route where it is not offered at the standard rate.
It also does not include translation, document legalisation, English test or tuberculosis test costs, all of which are real and none of which are set by the Home Office.
The figures are checked periodically against GOV.UK and were last confirmed in August 2026. Home Office fees change several times a year. Before you pay anything, confirm the current figure on GOV.UK — the calculator links to the fee table on every screen.
What we can tell you that a calculator cannot
A calculator can add up published charges. It cannot tell you whether you are applying on the right route, and that is where the money is genuinely won or lost.
We regularly see people who are about to pay several thousand pounds for an application that will be refused on a point they could have fixed beforehand — a financial requirement met on the wrong evidence, a sponsor whose certificate does not match the role, a gap in a residence history that needed explaining rather than hiding. A refusal costs the fee, most of the surcharge is refunded but the application fee is not, and it puts a refusal on the immigration record that has to be declared on every application afterwards.
It also cuts the other way. Sometimes the answer is that a cheaper or shorter route gets you to the same place, or that waiting three months makes an application straightforward that would be marginal today.
That is the conversation worth having before you pay anything, and it is what our own fee buys.
What happens to the money if the application is refused
This is asked constantly and answered badly online, so plainly: the application fee is not refunded if your application is refused. The Home Office charges it for considering the application, not for granting it.
The Immigration Health Surcharge is different. It is refunded if the application is refused, withdrawn before a decision, or granted for a shorter period than you paid for. Refunds are processed by the Home Office automatically in most cases, but they are not instant and they do not always happen without chasing.
Priority and super priority service fees are refunded only in narrow circumstances — broadly, where the Home Office fails to meet the service standard you paid for, not where you simply do not like the decision.
None of this is a reason to treat a fee as a deposit on a likely grant. It is a reason to be confident about the application before you submit it.
Our fees, and where to find them
We publish our immigration fees because the SRA Transparency Rules require it and because it is the right way to run a firm. They are set out in full on our immigration pages, with what is included and what is not.
Two things to be clear about, because other sites are not. Our published fees are for our legal work only. They do not include the Home Office application fee, the Immigration Health Surcharge, biometric enrolment charges or any priority service — those are what this calculator estimates, and they are paid to the Home Office, not to us.
And immigration work is never done on a No Win No Fee basis. Conditional fee agreements are not permitted for immigration matters. Any firm offering one for a visa application is offering something it should not. Our immigration work is fixed fee, agreed in writing before you instruct us.