Who gets taken on to farms: nationalities, trend, when to apply
The seasonal worker visa is the only route most people have on to a British farm. This page shows which countries workers are actually taken from, how many visas are issued, and which months the recruiting happens in.
Who goes
Five countries account for almost the whole scheme. Below is 2025, the last complete year.
| Country | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan | 304 | 4 335 | 7 970 | 9 794 | 12 627 | 10 033 |
| 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan | 556 | 4 228 | 4 099 | 6 264 | 6 299 | 5 569 |
| 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan | 391 | 2 673 | 5 018 | 5 778 | 5 744 | 4 538 |
| 🇹🇯 Tajikistan | 980 | 3 906 | 5 665 | 5 817 | 5 701 | 4 944 |
| 🇺🇦 Ukraine | 19 894 | 7 332 | 2 551 | 706 | 527 | 352 |
| Whole scheme | 29 587 | 34 484 | 32 758 | 35 387 | 38 724 | 31 913 |
* 2026 — first half only, the year is not closed yet
When the recruiting happens
The bars are visas issued by quarter. The scheme does not run all year: people are recruited in winter and early spring, and by summer recruiting is closed.
- first half
- second half
In 2025, 75% of visas fell in the first half of the year. If you are reading this in summer, you are already looking at next season.
How often it is refused
Rarely: 1.5% of decisions across the scheme in 2025 were refusals — that is all nationalities, not only ours.
A low refusal rate does not mean the visa comes by itself. It means the people who reach the application stage have already been selected by an operator: the filtering happens earlier, on the operator side, and never shows up in this statistic.
Home Office, Immigration system statistics, year ending June 2026 · Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.