Visa sponsorship in job ads: the UK says no 15 times in 16. Australia says yes 10 times in 13.

I read every live job ad on teppek that mentions visas or sponsorship in five countries on 3 November 2026, and the same word means almost opposite things depending on where the job is.

If you are planning a move abroad for work, "visa sponsorship" is probably the first thing you search for. If you are hiring, you have probably wondered whether saying anything about it helps or scares people off. Both questions have the same problem: most of what you read about sponsorship is policy, not what employers actually write in their ads this week.

So I asked an AI agent to pull the live postings that mention visas in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, and then I read each one. Here is what live postings say this week.

How I did it

The setup is one line. In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http teppek https://mcp.teppek.com/mcp

Any agent that speaks MCP can do the same. Searching does not need an account.

Then I asked, in plain language:

• "In each of these five countries, find job postings that mention sponsorship, sponsor, sponsored, visa or visas."
• "For each one, does the ad offer sponsorship, rule it out, or ask for a visa the candidate already holds?"
• "Who posted them? Is one employer behind most of the results?"
• "Open the ones with unusual pay and tell me if the number is an hourly rate."

Behind those questions the agent called two tools. search_listings with a country and keywords returns the matching postings and a total count. get_listing opens a single posting so you can read the full record.

The rules I applied:

1. Read every match. 170 ads matched the keywords. 24 were not about work visas at all (a car dealer that "sponsors local teams", a sales job selling event sponsorships, a restaurant whose name starts with "Visa"). I dropped those, which left 146.
2. Compare shares inside a country. The postings are the newest ones in each country, so the absolute numbers are not a census.
3. Count employers. If one employer wrote most of the ads in a group, I say so.
4. Only salaries the employer wrote. Estimated pay was dropped, and anything that turned out to be an hourly rate is shown per hour.

Finding 1: in the UK, visa sponsorship is mentioned to say no

Live job ads that mention visas or sponsorship, by what they say. Each ad was read one by one.

On 3 November 2026, 15 of the 16 live UK job ads that mention visa sponsorship say it is not available.

The wording is consistent: "unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role", "we are unable to offer certificates of sponsorship to any candidates", "UK applicants only, no sponsorship available".

The refusals cover a wide range of work:

• support workers and care team leaders in Worksop, Feltham, Isleworth and Wednesbury
• engineers, a plumber and a mechanical supervisor on facilities and utilities contracts, from Wiltshire to Port Talbot
• a library customer services assistant, a residential night worker and a senior educational psychologist for a county council
• a data engineer in Surrey and a pastoral assistant at a school in Bury St Edmunds

Where the employer wrote the salary, the refusals run from £24k for the pastoral assistant to £59.8k for the educational psychologist. So this is not only entry-level work.

One caution: these 15 ads come from five employers, and three of them (a care provider, a facilities contractor and a county council) wrote 13. Read this as "how UK employers who mention sponsorship tend to phrase it", not as a national rate.

The single UK ad that offered sponsorship was a Dutch-speaking client service role in London, with an €8,000 relocation package on top.

Finding 2: in Australia, the same word mostly means yes

On 3 November 2026, 10 of the 13 live Australian job ads that mention visa sponsorship offer it, and 9 of those 10 are in healthcare.

The offers are for GPs in Cairns, Newcastle and Mount Isa, a senior emergency registrar in Melbourne, an occupational therapist joining a Perth team, a mental health clinician in Bairnsdale, dental assistants in Port Macquarie and podiatrists around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Several name the visa directly ("482 visa sponsorship available"), and one GP role offers permanent residency sponsorship. The one non-health offer was a lead welder for industrial refrigeration work in Brisbane.

The pay the employers wrote is not small: A$55k for a dental assistant, A$120k for the mental health clinician, A$200k for the emergency registrar. The Cairns GP role pays A$250 an hour on weekdays; I opened that one because its yearly figure was exactly 250 × 2080, which is an hourly rate multiplied by a full year.

The three Australian refusals were a sous chef in Brisbane, a finance analyst in Sydney and a practice nurse in Canberra. One detail stood out: the same recruiter offered sponsorship for the regional Victoria mental health role and ruled it out for the Sydney finance role. In these ads, sponsorship follows the job and the place, not the employer.

The 10 offers came from seven different advertisers. The largest, a GP recruiter, posted three.

Finding 3: in New Zealand, the ad usually wants a visa you already have

On 3 November 2026, 65 of the 82 live New Zealand job ads that mention visas ask candidates to hold a valid work or working holiday visa already, and only 15 offer sponsorship.

New Zealand stands out for how often visas come up at all: 82 of 2,103 postings, about 4%, compared with less than 1% in each of the other four countries.

Most of those ads are seasonal work: 37 of the 65 are farm, orchard and vineyard jobs, such as dairy farm assistants in Southland, kiwifruit thinning in the Bay of Plenty and vineyard work around Auckland. The typical line is "must have a valid working holiday visa", sometimes with the reverse rule spelled out ("seasonal work visas not accepted"). One advertiser wrote 13 of those 65 ads, all with the same phone number. Without them, 52 ads remain, in more than 40 different ad texts.

Of the 15 offers, 10 came from one dental recruiter (dentists, a periodontist and an orthodontist from Gore to Wellington). The other five were a different kind of offer: housekeepers, carpenters, plasterers and meat process workers, where sponsorship is "possible" or offered "for the right candidate".

Finding 4: the US says no, and Canada's offers are for jobs in the US

On 3 November 2026, 13 of the 15 live US job ads that mention visas rule out sponsorship, and every Canadian ad that offered a visa was for a nursing job in the United States.

In the US, six of the 13 refusals came from one media company hiring producers, meteorologists and journalists, all with the same sentence about working "without employment-based immigration sponsorship, now or in the future". The other seven came from seven different firms, mostly in tech and finance ("No H-1B sponsorship", "no sponsorship, no OPT"). The one exception welcomed candidates who need an H-1B transfer for a 12-month developer contract in New York.

Canada is the surprise. 15 Canadian ads offered visa sponsorship, posted in Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto. All 15 came from one healthcare staffing firm, and all 15 were recruiting Canadian nurses to work in US hospitals on TN or EB3 visas. I opened one to confirm: "Interested in becoming a United States Registered Nurse?" For jobs in Canada itself, I found no sponsorship offers and five ads saying no.

What it means

For job seekers:

• In the UK and US, an ad that mentions sponsorship is far more likely to be ruling it out. If the ad says nothing, do not assume a yes; ask early.
• In Australia, the offers sit in healthcare and in regional towns. If you are a clinician, the regional ads are where the word "sponsorship" means yes.
• In New Zealand, check which visa an ad accepts before you apply. A lot of seasonal work wants a working holiday visa and says other visa types will not be considered.
• If an ad in one country offers a visa for another, read it twice. In Canada this week, every offer was for the US.

For employers:

• Very few ads mention sponsorship at all: under 1 in 100 in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US. If you do sponsor, saying it in the first lines of the ad makes it stand out.
• If you do not sponsor, the UK refusals show the clear way to say it: one sentence, early, with what you need instead ("a current, unrestricted right to work").

Try it yourself

Connect the endpoint above and ask your own version: "Which nursing ads in Australia mention sponsorship this week?" or "Show me jobs around Cairns." You can also browse areas on the map, for example jobs around Cairns or Gore, Southland. Search works without an account. With the user's permission (OAuth), an agent can also message the people behind a listing or post one; the setup is described at https://www.teppek.com/auth.md.

If you would rather not set anything up, tell me a role and a country in the comments and I will check what this week's ads say about visas for it.

Methodology

• Date: live postings on teppek, pulled 3 November 2026.
• Countries: United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada.
• Search: job postings matching any of "sponsorship", "sponsor", "sponsored", "visa", "visas" in the ad text. 170 matches; 24 not about work visas removed; 146 analysed.
• Per country (relevant ads / all postings that day): UK 16 / 2,658; Australia 13 / 3,720; New Zealand 82 / 2,103; US 15 / 4,556; Canada 20 / 4,137.
• Classification: each ad read and labelled as offers sponsorship, rules it out, or asks for an existing visa.
• Employers: counted in every group; where one employer wrote a large part of a group, the text says so.
• Salaries: employer-stated only; hourly rates identified (yearly figure divisible by 2080) and shown per hour. US ads had estimated pay only, so no US pay is quoted.
• Limits: small samples; the search covers the opening part of each ad, so a sponsorship line near the end of a long ad is not counted, and the rates are a floor. Ads that use only a visa code (for example "482" or "AEWV") without the words above are missed. One day of data; this is not a trend.

How to cite

Source: teppek live listings, pulled 3 November 2026 (https://www.teppek.com)

Frequently asked questions

Do UK job ads offer visa sponsorship?
Rarely, in the ads we read. On 3 November 2026, 15 of the 16 live UK ads on teppek that mention visa sponsorship said it was not available; most of those came from three employers.

Which jobs in Australia offer visa sponsorship?
Mostly healthcare. 9 of the 10 Australian ads offering sponsorship on 3 November 2026 were for GPs, an emergency registrar, allied health and dental roles, many in regional towns such as Cairns, Mount Isa and Bairnsdale.

What do New Zealand job ads say about visas?
Most ask for a visa you already hold. 65 of the 82 New Zealand ads that mentioned visas on 3 November 2026 required a valid work or working holiday visa; 37 of those were farm, orchard and vineyard jobs.

Originally published at teppek Insights, with the full data note.